CHANGE OF SCENERY 
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climbed into trees, declaring that the lion was eating me. 
Each time he roared they said, ‘ There goes the white man’s 
head,’ then, ‘ there goes his liver,’ and so on until my anatomy 
hardly sufficed for their extravagant outpourings. Even my 
companions thought something serious had happened, for all 
they could make out was the first shot, then a long interval of 
roaring with apparently no sign of life from me, while they, too 
far off to come to my assistance, gloomily looked their worst 
fears into each other’s eyes, until finally the sound of my three 
shots relieved them from the suspense they had endured. 
Near Liny anti, Jan showed us the place where he had a 
great elephant hunt. He told us that he with his boys managed 
to drive a large herd of elephants into the floating and tangled 
masses of reeds, where they got stuck in the mud. He killed 
nine before they freed themselves from the tangled reeds and 
swam over the river to the other side. He got all those killed but 
one whose tusks were so heavy that their weight dragged the 
elephant’s head deep down in the water and mud, leaving only his 
back protruding. Do what they would, they could not right the 
elephant’s position so as to get at the tusks, for the water was 
deep there and the reeds sunk under the weight of the boys, as 
they tried to raise the elephant. He was therefore obliged to 
leave the magnificent tusks behind. 
The configuration of the Chobe banks here is a regular chain 
of sandy hills, some one hundred and eighty feet high—appear¬ 
ing quite mountainous to us after our protracted march in the 
flat country, with valleys in between, forming short creeks up 
which the Chobe river sends offshoots of water that keep the 
reedy swampy vegetation lining the valleys alive. The general 
direction travelled was north-north-west. While ahead of the 
troop, some of us found that the new bearers had struck 
off away from the river, probably to cut off the creeks, so we 
hurried across to take up their track and found them waiting 
for us about seven and a half miles ahead under a large tree 
close to a reedy creek formed by a loop of running water from 
