22 WILD ANIMALS. 



when camped in a patch of brush, or lying at a shooting-hole or 

 the edge of some lonely pool or river, thus heard a troop of 

 lions roar in my immediate vicinity, so close indeed sometimes 

 that I could hear the hiss of their breath after each purr, and 

 though it is now the fashion to deprecate the courage of the 

 lion, the power of his voice, and everything else concerning him, 

 yet it is a fact that, under such circumstances, several of them 

 roaring in unison will make the whole air in their immediate 

 vicinity vibrate and tremble, and I know of nothing in Nature 

 more awe-inspiring, or on a dark night more calculated to 

 make a man feel nervous." Upon this subject it is difficult to 

 resist giving the oft-quoted and graphic description of Grordon 

 Gumming : " One of the most striking things connected with 

 the lion is his voice, which is extremely grand and peculiarly 

 striking. It consists at times of a low deep moaning, repeated 

 five or six times, ending in faintly audible sighs ; at other times 

 he startles the forest with loud, deep -toned, solemn roars repeated 

 five or six times in quick succession, each increasing in loudness 

 to the third or fourth, when his voice dies away in five or six low 

 muffled sounds very much resembling distant thunder. . . . 

 On no occasion are their voices to be heard in such perfection 

 or so intensely powerful as when two or three troops of strange 

 lions approach a fountain to drink at the same time. "When this 

 occurs every member of each troop sounds a bold roar of defiance 

 at "the opposite parties; and when one roars all roar together, 

 and each seems to vie with his comrade in the intensity and power 

 of his voice. The power and grandeur of these nocturnal concerts 

 is inconceivably striking and pleasing to a hunter's ear." 



The lion appears to be long lived, but there seems to be some 

 uncertainty about the average age they attain ; some say twenty 

 to thirty years, others thirty to forty in their wild state ; in cap- 

 tivity, however, they have been known to live much longer than 

 this. The famous lion " Pompey," which died in the Tower 

 menagerie in 1760, had been a prisoner there for seventy years ; 

 and another one that died there at a much later date, was said to 

 be sixty-three years old. 



Delagorgue, the French traveller, makes some curfous assertions 



