So I was slung in a blanket on a tent-pole, and we started, I swearing like a pirate every time a boy stumbled and jolted me.

(There is something in the nature of a burn that makes bad language feel like singing hymns.) Our troubles were not all over, for we passed through a country where buck were fairly plentiful, and that meant lions.

They did no damage, but they kept us awake; and one night near the first village we came to, where our porters all quartered themselves with the villagers for sake of the change from their crowded tents, the fires that we made went out, and five lions (we counted their foot-prints afterward) came and sniffed around the pegs of the tent in which Fred and I lay, we lying still and shamming dead.

To have lifted a rifle in the darkness and tried to shoot would have been suicide.
Then there were trees we passed among--baobabs, whose youngest tendrils swung to and fro in the evening breeze like snakes head-downward.

And taking advantage of that natural provision, twenty-foot pythons swung among them, in coloring and marking aping the habit of the tree.