As It
Was, He Must Have Swerved Off In His Spring,
Probably Blinded By The Flash And Frightened By
The Noise Of The Double Report Which Was
Increased A Hundredfold By The Reverberation Of
The Hollow Iron Roof Of The Truck.
Had we not
been very much on the alert, he would
undoubtedly have got one of us, and we
Realised that we
had had a very lucky and very narrow escape.
The next morning we found Brock's bullet
embedded in the sand close to a footprint; it
could not have missed the lion by more than
an inch or two. Mine was nowhere to be found.
Thus ended my first direct encounter with one
of the man-eaters.
CHAPTER IV
THE BUILDING OF THE TSAVO BRIDGE
During all this troublesome period the
construction of the railway had been going steadily
forward, and the first important piece of work
which I had commenced on arrival was
completed. This was the widening of a rock cutting
through which the railway ran just before it,
reached the river. In the hurry of pushing on
the laying of the line, just enough of the rock
had originally been cut away to allow room for an
engine to pass, and consequently any material
which happened to, project outside the wagons
or trucks caught on the jagged faces of the
cutting. I myself saw the door of a guard's van,
which had been left ajar, smashed to atoms in
this way; and accordingly I put a gang of
rock-drillers to work at once and soon had ample
room made for all traffic to pass unimpeded.
While this was going on, another gang of men
were laying the foundations of a girder bridge
which was to span a gully between this cutting and
Tsavo Station.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 32 of 247
Words from 8929 to 9228
of 68125
