chap. vi. LEOPARDS. 299 



top of the Bombo Mountains. Close by where it had left 

 the goat, which, as on the former occasion, it had taken 

 from the village where I was, was one of the little tiny 

 watch-huts, just sufficiently large for a person to sit com 

 fortably down in, and raised on stakes about four feet 

 above the ground, in which the native girls sit when the 

 crops are ripening, and drive off the baboons, monkeys, 

 and birds, which would otherwise eat up the entire yield. 

 It was late in the year at the time, and harvest was over, 

 so that I was able to take undisturbed possession of the 

 hut, which, however, acting upon the advice of a hunter 

 who belonged to the village, I did not do till after dark. 

 The moon was pouring down a flood of light as this hunter 

 conducted me by intricate paths, sometimes through the 

 forest, and at others through the maize-fields, to the hut, 

 and left me there. The field on the edge of which I stood 

 was merely a clearing in the forest on the side of a steep 

 slope, over which great trunks of trees lay scattered, their 

 charred outlines half concealed by creepers ; while here 

 and there some giant, which had resisted the imperfect 

 tools of the natives, stood erect, but naked and bare, its 

 base blackened with fire and its branches lopped off. The 

 foreground showed white in the moonlight with the dry 

 stalks and leaves of maize which covered it, causing the 

 forest above to seem the more sombre and dark by con- 

 trast. Below only the spray of the trees could be seen, 

 with a silvery gleam on them almost like hoar-frost, while 

 thousands of feet lower down there was a dim greyness, 

 without shape, which I knew to be the moon shining far 

 down on the plains below, on the tops of innumerable 

 acacias and other flat-topped thorns. 



