244 THE MAN-EATERS OF TSAVO CHAP. 
manage a day off quite easily. So we made the 
usual preparations for a day’s absence from camp— 
filled our water-bottles with tea, put a loaf of bread 
and a tin of sardines in our haversacks, looked care- 
fully to our rifles and ammunition, and warned the 
“boys” who were to accompany us as beaters to be 
ready before dawn. I decided to make a very 
early start, as I knew that the most likely place for 
lions lay some distance away, and I wanted to get 
there if possible by daybreak. We should thus 
have a better chance of catching one of the lords 
of the plain as he returned from his_ nightly 
depredations to the kindly shelter of the tall grass 
and rushes which fringed the banks of the river. 
We therefore retired to rest early, and just as I was 
dozing off to sleep, one of my Indian servants, 
Roshan Khan, put his head through the slit at my 
tent door and asked leave to accompany the “‘ Sahibs” 
in the morning so that he might see what shzkar 
(hunting) was like. This request I sleepily granted, 
thinking that it could make little difference whether 
he came with us or stayed behind in camp. As 
things turned out, however, it made all the differ- 
ence in the world, for if he had not accompanied 
us, my shzekar would in all probability have ended 
disastrously next day. He was a very dusky- 
coloured young Pathan about twenty years of age, 
lithe and active, and honest and pleasant-looking, 
“eid hers” 
