82 SAFARI 



their thirst must have been audible for a mile in the 

 still night. 



I went back to sleep again ; but Osa can never sleep 

 while in a blind. She is always too excited and 

 curious about what is going to happen next. She 

 wakened me again about 4 a.m. when a herd of 

 elephants came to water from behind us and caught 

 our scent before they had their drink. They snorted 

 and trumpeted for half an hour in expressing their 

 annoyance. But in the end they went away without 

 touching the water. 



Another night we spent together at a waterhole 

 we had named "Old Lady." That time we had a 

 good scare from a leopard that became too curious, 

 but finally got rid of the fellow without using our 

 guns. 



Near the edge of the forest and the foot of the 

 slope that gave way to the great desert below our 

 lake, was another waterhole that was particularly 

 fascinating. It was really more than one waterhole, 

 rather a chain of pools, fed by leakage from the big 

 lake, which probabl}^ has many outlet passages 

 running underground. 



One day in a great mimosa tree by the largest 

 pool, the head of the chain, we built a blind, and 

 here we spent the whole of four nights to see what we 

 could see. The first night, the rain came down in 

 buckets; our tarpaulin covering on the roof slipped 



