X 
JOURNEY TO WEB BE SHA B ELEH RIVER 
257 
wounds, and I syringed them carefully with carbolic lotion. 
The wounded man, like a true Somali, never even murmured 
during this treatment. At last I was able to let him sit up, 
clean and almost smiling, all the holes in his body neatly plugged 
with pieces of lint soaked in carbolic oil ; I gave his relations 
medicine for twenty days’ use, and a new tobe for bandaging, 
as well as a lecture on further treatment. 
The story of the occurrence, which the natives told me, was 
interesting. This man, with twenty other men and boys, had 
been asleep, two nights before, in a camel-karia a few miles 
away. The camel-karias are merely thorn-fences round the 
camels, and there are no huts, the men sleeping on the inside of 
the fence in the open air. At about five in the morning, just 
before dawn, a lion sprang into the zeriba and seized this man, 
his companions making off, and the camels stampeding into the 
darkness. The man’s own account of what occurred was as 
follows. He struck at the lion frantically with his hands, and 
the brute let him go, retiring to a little distance to watch. The 
lion came on again, taking him up a second time and carrying 
him a few yards to the edge of the fence. Again the man 
struck out at the lion and he let go. A third time he took him 
up, and again the man, who was nearly exhausted, drove him 
off ; and the lion, either frightened away by the dawn of day or 
impressed by the spirit shown by his victim, sneaked off. The 
man remembered no more till his friends returned some time 
afterwards, expecting to find only a few bones ; and they carried 
him to the home karia and threw him into a hut to die, the 
thought of giving him food or washing the blood and dust from 
him never occurring to them ; and there he had lain for thirty 
hours. I never heard whether he recovered, but having seen- 
instances of wonderful recoveries among Som&lis, I am inclined to 
think he had a very good chance. 
On the evening of the same day I made another short march, 
and arrived at a place where a leopard had just killed a goat 
while the flocks were returning from pasture to a karia. We 
hastily constructed a shelter, and I sat two yards from one of 
my own goats I had tied up as a bait, with the wind blowing in 
my face, and the two hunters at my side with spare rifles. There 
was a faint moon, and at about nine o’clock a leopard charged 
and killed the goat. I sat quietly till the hubbub had subsided, 
and then, as the leopard lay on the goat sucking its blood, with 
its back to me and its tail twitching close to my feet, I fired for 
s 
