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Updated: May 2, 2025
But it was that very native who saved our ratel's life, all the same; for his gymnastic display during the few seconds that followed was so energetic that the pink pyjamas and a revolver, that represented the white hunter fresh from sleep, had no chance at all of doing any damage except to the dancing native which they nearly did; and the dogs, once more piling themselves on to the ratel, broke his hold, and the whole fight rolled and raged away into the darkness and the thorn-scrub, out of sight.
Accordingly they set out again, having the Dead Sea on their right, and travelled for the half of a league through the thorn-scrub that grows in this desert.
She rolled over and regained her feet in a flash, to find herself facing a dark beast, with a huge, bushy, white tail, held up straight like a pleased cat's but this was a sign of warning, not pleasure that shone ghostily in the gloom of the mysterious, dread thorn-scrub. And the face of the beast was the face of a black and grinning devil, and its eyes shone red.
In open country a safari can be permitted to straggle over miles, for always it can keep in touch by sight; but in this thorn-scrub desert, that looks all alike, a man fifty yards out of sight is fifty yards lost. We would march fifteen or twenty minutes, then sit down to wait until the rearmost men had straggled in, perhaps a half hour later.
And that is about all, I think unless you would like to know that their mother, the king's consort, who had been working grimly along on their trail since dusk, slid swiftly down the bank in that crisis, a fiery-eyed, long, gliding shape, and plunging into the watery inferno utterly recklessly, brought out, one by one, dripping, shivering, and by the scruff of the neck, first the king's son, then the king's daughter, and stopped not till she had placed them high up the bank, safe among the thorn-scrub, where they crouched together, side by side, listening to the cataclysmal threshings of the blind devil down in the black waters below there; and their father, the king, came up pad-pad-pad-pad behind them, to thunder out defiance at all the world above their sturdy, broad, intelligent heads, and purr his joy at their return.
"Yaaa-ya-ya-ya-ya!" he howled, with his nose pointed to the brazen sun, and melted away among the accursed thorn-scrub with a look about him that said, as plainly as words, "And that's what comes of hunting in daylight." The jackal, after a long skirmish and a drink, retired homewards towards sunset, when suddenly, from a tuft of grass ahead of him, a shadow shot and vanished.
I think he really enjoyed that; but it was a restrained joy. The whip descended deliberately, without excitement. The man's devotion in unusual circumstances was beyond praise. Danger or excitement incite a sort of loyalty in any good man; but humdrum, disagreeable difficulty is a different matter. One day we marched over a country of thorn-scrub desert.
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