In the middle of the night, his slumber was disturbed by a peculiar noise. He sat up, and the profound silence which prevailed enabled him to recognise a breathing whose savage energy could not belong to a human being. A terrible fear, increased by the dark, the silence, and the bewilderment of the first waking moments, froze his heart. Indeed, he already felt the painful contraction of his hair, when, by dint of straining his eyes, he perceived in the darkness two faint amber lights. At first he attributed those lights to the reflection of his own eyes; but soon, the brilliancy of the night assisting him little by little to distinguish the objects in the cavern, he discovered a huge beast lying within two yards of him. Was it a lion? Was it a tiger? Was it a crocodile? The Provençal had not enough education to know to what species his companion belonged; but his terror was the more violent in that his ignorance led him to imagine all sorts of calamities at once. He endured the fiendish tortures of listening, of noticing the irregularities of that breathing, without losing a sound, and without daring to make the slightest motion. An odour as pungent as that given forth by foxes, but more penetrating, more weighty, so to speak, filled the cave; and when the Provençal had smelled it, his terror reached its height, for he could no longer doubt the nature of the terrible companion whose royal den he had appropriated for a camp. Soon the reflection of the moon, which was sinking rapidly towards the horizon, lighted up the den, and little by little illuminated the spotted skin of a panther. The lion of Egypt was asleep, curled up like a huge dog in peaceable possession of a luxuriant kennel at the door of a palace; its eyes, which had opened for a moment, had closed again. Its head was turned towards the Frenchman. A thousand conflicting thoughts passed through the mind of the panther's prisoner; at first, he thought of killing her with his carbine; but he saw that there was not room enough between himself and the beast for him to take aim; the end of the barrel would have reached beyond the panther. And suppose she should wake? That supposition kept him perfectly still. As he listened to his heart beat in the silence, he cursed the too violent pulsations caused by the rushing of his blood, fearing lest they should disturb that slumber which enabled him to devise some plan of escape. Twice he put his hand to his scimitar, with the idea of cutting off his enemy's head; but the difficulty of cutting through the close-haired skin made him abandon the bold project. "If I missed, it would be sure death," he thought. He preferred the chances of a fight, and determined to wait for daylight. And the day was not long in coming. Then the Frenchman was able to examine the beast; its muzzle was stained with blood.