THE LIONS THAT STOPPED THE RAILWAY.
SPEAKING in the House of Lords of the progress of the Uganda Railway, Lord Salisbury mentioned that among the unexpected difficulties encountered were a pair of man-eating lions, which stopped the works for three weeks, before they were shot. As some five thousand men were at work on the line, their intimidation by two lions seems almost incredible. Yet it is a fact that so dreadful was the pressure exercised by the constant attacks of this pair of man-destroying wild beasts, and so cumulative the fear caused among the Indian labourers by the sight and sound of their comrades being dragged off and devoured, that hundreds of these industrious workmen, trained on similar duties under the service of the Government of India, abandoned their employment and pay, and crying out that they agreed to work for wages, not to be food for lions or devils, rushed to the line as the trains for the coast were approaching, and flinging themselves across the metals, gave the engine-drivers the choice, either of passing over their bodies, or of stopping to take them up and carry them back to Mombasa. Many of these men were not timid Hindoos, but sturdy Sikhs. Yet the circumstances were so unique, and the scenes witnessed from week to week so bloody and appalling, that their panic and desperation are no matter for sur- prise. Lord Salisbury understated the facts. Though the works were stopped for three weeks, the lions' campaign lasted, with intervals of quiet when one or other had been wounded, from March till the end of December. In this time they killed and ate twenty-eight Indians, and it is believed at least twice this number of natives, Swahilis and the like; besides wounding and attacking others. They attacked white engineers, doctors, soldiers, and military officers, armed Abyssinian askaris, sepoys, burtnialte, coolies, and porters. Some they clawed, some they devoured, some they carried off and left sticking in thorn fences, because they could not drag them through. At first they were con- tented to take one man between them. Before the end of their career they would take a man apiece on the same night, sometimes from the same hut or camp-fire. The plain, unvarnished tale of this "prehistoric revival" of the position originally held rty man in the struggle for existence against ravenous beasts is set out at considerable length and detail in the Field of February 17th and February 24th by Mr. J. H. Patterson, one of the engineers of the line, who, after months of effort and personal risk, succeeded in breaking the spell, and killing both the lions, which the natives had come to regard as ;:evils," that is, as equivalent to were-wolves, and geide.d hy the kcal demons.
The parallel to the ztory of the lions which stopped the rebuilding of Samaria must occur to every one, and if the Samaritans had quarter as good cause for their fears as had the railway coolies, their wish to propitiate the local deities is easily understood. If the whole body of lion anec dote, from the days of the Assyrian Kings till the last year of the nineteenth century, were collated and brought together, it would not equal in tragedy or atrocity, in savageness or in sheer insolent contempt for man, armed or unarmed, white or black, the story of these two beasts. The scene of their exploits was only one hundred and thirty miles from the coast, in the valley of a cool and swift stream, the Tsavoi River. Filled by the melting of the snows on Kilimanjaro, bordered with palms and ferns, and at a further distance by a dense and impassable jungle of thorns, its banks became suddenly the camping ground of thousands of hard- working Indian railwaymen, who slept in camps scattered up and down the line for some eight miles. Into these camps the lions came, thrusting their gigantic heads under the flaps of the tents, or walking in at the doors of the huts. Their first victim was a Sikh jemadar, taken from a tent shared by a dozen other workmen, the next a coolie. Then they raided the camps regularly until the local length of rail was finished, and the bulk oti' the men moved up country out of the lions' beat. But some hundreds were left behind, to build bridges and do permanent work. It was then that the lions' reign of terror began, which ended in the complete stoppage of an Imperial enterprise supplied with every mechanism and appliance of civilisation, from traction engines to armed troops.
Perhaps the strongest evidence of the pressure to which these beasts subjected the dominant biped man is that they forced him to become arboreal. If the setting of blood and bones were not so ghastly, the scene would provoke a smile. After hundreds had fled some three hundred still remained, for whom the engineer, worn out by want of sleep himself, and by constant tracking of the lions by day and sitting up by moonlight, endeavoured to find safe quarters by night, when they might be seen "perched on the top of water-tanks, roofs, and bridge-girders. Every good-sized tree in camp had as many beds lashed to it as its branches would bear. So many men got up a tree once when a camp was attacked that it came down, the men falling close to the lions. Strange to say, they did not heed them, but then they were busy devouring a man they had just seized."
The fearful shrieks of the victims rang in their ears night after night, till no one knew whose turn would come next. Sound men lay and listened to the cracking of bones and the tearing of limbs within fifty yards of the place where they were, and sick men in hospital expired from sheer terror as they listened to the monsters quarrelling over their feast. Twenty shots were fired in the dark at the sound of the lions eating a man, and they finished him to the last bone. They would spring over the highest thorn "home," pick up a man and trot round with him looking for the best way out, as a cat carries a rat. Every one will ask, why were these men not armed The answer is that the ordinary coolie does not know the use of arms, but that, even when the lions were fired at, unless actually hit, they cared nothing. Unlike nearly all wild beasts, they feared neither fire, nor firearms, nor lamps, nor white men. One sprang on an officer's back, tore off his knapsack, and then carried off and ate a soldier who was following him. They prowled round and round white men in machans (sheltered by the dark), trying to stalk them. One was caught in an ingenious trap, made of two cages of steel rails, in one of which were three sepoys armed with Martinis. The lions had become so used to walking into huts that the trap itself was an extra inducement to be bold, and they looked on the sepoys as bait. The sepoys lost their heads as the lion bounced about, and blazed off in every direction but the right one, though they could have touched the imprisoned beast with their rifles. At last one bullet hit the catch of the door and released the lion. Another was shot in the back with slugs. A week later it tried to stalk Mr. Patterson, who was sitting in a tree, and after stalking him like a Boer sharp- shonter from bush to bush till within twenty yards, was wounded, and next day was killed. The other had been shot by Mr. Patterson shortly before, after the pair had marched round and round him for two boars as he sat up over a kill they had made. It was a huge maneless lion 9 ft. 8 in. long and 3 ft. 9 in. high. Its last meal had been an African native. The other was 9 ft. Gin, long, and 3 ft. 11 in. high. Both beasts killed men solely for food, though the country round swarmed with every description of game dear
to lions. Only when the men had run away, or taken to trees, or slept in iron huts, did they kill goats or donkeys. They ate every portion of the men's bodies except the top of the skull and sometimes the hands. It is said that in the island of Singapore tigers have actually assembled and multi- plied in order to eat the Chinese coolies now employed on the plantations. But the records of the East do not supply an instance in which six thousand men and a Government organisation were baffled and defied by two man-eaters.
To what a distance the whole story carries us back, and how impossible it becomes to account for the survival of primitive man against this kind of foe ! For fire—which has hitherto been regarded as his main safeguard against the carnivora—these cared nothing. It is curious that the Tsavos lions were not killed by poison, for strychnine is easily used and with effect. Poison may have been used early in the history of man, f6r its powers are employed with strange skill by the men in the tropical forest, both in America and West Central Africa. But there is no evidence that the old inhabitants of Europe, or of Assyria, or Asia Minor ever killed lions or wolves by this means. They looked to the King or chief, or some champion, to kill these monsters for them. It was not the sport but the duty of Kings, and was in itself a title to be a ruler of men. Theseus, who cleared the roads of beasts and robbers ; Hercules, the lion-killer; St. George, the dragon-slayer, and all the rest of their class owed to this their everlasting fame. From the story of the Tsavos River we can appreciate their services to man even at this distance of time. When the jungle twinkled with hundreds of lamps, as the shout went on from camp to camp that the first lion was dead, as the hurrying crowds fell prostrate in the midnight forest, laying their heads on his feet, and the Africans danced savage and ceremonial dances of thanksgiving, Mr. Patterson must have realised in no oemmon way what it was to have been a hero and deliverer in the days when man was not yet undisputed lord of the 2reation, and might pass at any moment tinder the savage dominion of the beasts.
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