The finely powdered silt made a soft bed, and I slept well, but I awoke to find the rain coming down in sheets, and everything we had soaking wet. The willows were useless as shelter, and the silt soon became a peculiarly slimy and tenacious mud. Daylight came and still it poured; our saddles were like wet brown paper, and we decided to wait where we were till the weather changed. To pass the time, we again exploded a big charge of dynamite as near to the “Ki-man” rock as we could throw it, but no “Groot Slang” appeared. Utterly bored, and already longing for the sun we had grumbled at for months, we sent the “boy” for the horses, resolving to trek, rain or no rain, when suddenly a big troop of baboons appeared on the top of a precipitous kopje above us, and commenced turning the stones over for the scorpions on which they often feed. Almost immediately came a terrific outburst of grunts, barks, yells, and screams, and we saw them flying in all directions, leaving one of the younger ones in the clutch of a fine big leopard. It shook its prey for a moment like a cat shakes a rat, and with a bound disappeared behind a rock near the summit of the peak. Poulley grabbed the gun. “I’m going up to get him,” he said, jamming in the cartridges. “He’s more likely to get you,” I warned him, but he was too wet and wild to take any notice of me, and of course I could not let him go alone. So in the pouring rain we two abject idiots started climbing up an almost vertical precipice, the rocks slippery and treacherous with the wet, and giving the most precarious foothold in the best of places. Poulley was ahead with the combination gun; I followed with my heavy Webley revolver. How we got up I hardly know; every time my leader dislodged a stone it had to come my way, and once or twice big ones weighing a hundredweight missed me by inches. I would have given a good deal to turn back, but on he kept till he reached the spot where the leopard had taken his prey. What would have happened had it still been there I am at a loss to say, for we could not have used our weapons without imminent risk of shooting each other, to say nothing of falling several hundred feet. Luckily, however, he had gone, and I, at any rate, was profoundly thankful.