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Updated: May 6, 2025
The Kruman ball ended in a battle royal. The results were muzzles swollen and puffed out like those of mandrills, and black eyes that is to say, blood-red orbits where the skin had been abraded by fist and stick.
Defence would be idle there was no other mode of escape than to endeavour to get away from the ground. But how? to climb up into the tree would not avail us, though it had saved us from the lion. These mandrills could climb better than we; they would soon overtake us, and tear us to pieces among the branches. We next thought of running out into the open ground, and escaping by flight.
The floor of the lagoon was most interesting; the prodigality of nature in the countless number of low forms of life, their great variety, their beauty, and their ugliness, and, appealing to me especially, the humor of nature in the tricks she played with color and shape, her score of clowns of the sea equaling her funny fellows ashore, the macaws, the mandrills, the dachshunds, and the burros.
So long, therefore, as we could prevent the mandrills from tearing them to pieces, we should be safe enough. For more than an hour we were kept at constant work, shoving our weapons backward and forward like a pair of sawyers. At length, however, the assaults of the enemy outside, became feebler, and more desultory.
We had strengthened our barricade by materials obtained from the third malefactor and so far felt safe enough; but we now began to have fears of another enemy one that was as terrible in its attack, and as powerful to destroy, as either the mandrills, or the strong lion himself.
Now, however, Ben was determined, that at least one of them should pay the forfeit; and I saw him pushing the ramrod into the gun just as we had done when loading for the lion. In a few seconds he had got ready; and then stepping forward till he stood near the line of the threatening mandrills, he pointed the piece at one of the largest and fired.
These are more of a quadruped form than any yet mentioned; and, both in a moral and physical sense, they are certainly the ugliest of animals. The hideous Drills and Mandrills, so well-known in our menageries, belong to this genus; as also the Chacma, or great dog-monkey of the Cape. There are, in all, seven or eight species of baboons, and most of them inhabit Africa.
We had heard of the implacable disposition which not only the mandrills, but other baboon-monkeys exhibit when they have been assailed by an enemy; we had heard that their resentment once kindled, cannot be again allayed until the object of it either becomes their victim, or else escapes altogether beyond their reach.
We saw, moreover, that these baboons were of the largest, and most dangerous kind for there are several different species of baboons in Africa. These were the hideous "mandrills," as we could tell by their great swollen cheeks, of purple and scarlet colour, that shone conspicuously under the light of our fire.
In this belief had we continued for some time, sitting side by side in a state of extreme dejection. Neither of us said a word. We had nothing to say no counsel to offer to each other. We had several times talked over the possibility of fighting our way through the host of mandrills, and escaping by swiftness of foot.
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