42 ANIMAL LIFE IN AFRICA 



line. A number of the bolder spirits armed themselves 

 and set forth ; but, on arriving at the place, found nothing 

 but a father, mother and baby warthog quietly feeding. 

 Another new hand was once riding from Komati Poort 

 to one of the neighbouring stations. He became be- 

 nighted, and described how he was so set about by lions 

 that he was obliged to climb to the top of one of the 

 old disused blockhouses and spend the night there, 

 while the savage beasts raged about near the foot. Strange 

 to say, the horse, which was tied up to a tree near by, 

 was not only uninjured, but was so unobservant as appar- 

 ently not to have noticed any sign of danger. 



Warthogs and water buck cows especially seem to 

 have the power of imposing upon the imagination of the 

 novice in the Transvaal low veld, and I have known 

 the grunting of an impala ram and even the booming 

 of a ground hornbill send white men up trees with great 

 rapidity. When the Selati Railway was being recon- 

 structed in 1909, the men on the first construction train 

 saw the large troops of impala which are generally to 

 be found about the line near Sabi Bridge. Nothing 

 would make them believe that these animals, which, 

 of course, they saw at some distance, were not lions, and 

 they evidently were thoroughly convinced that their 

 safety was due solely to the fact of being on the train. 

 It is a remarkable thing that in the course of the hundreds, 

 probably thousands, of times members of the Game 

 Reserve staff travelled up and down the Selati line be- 

 tween 1902 and 1909, lions were not seen on more than 

 three or four occasions jby day, and yet I can hardly 

 recall a single instance of a stranger arriving by the 

 same route at Sabi Bridge whose passage, according 

 to his own account, had not been disputed by one or 

 more of the animals. Verily, fancy has the power of 



