open startled eyes and find himself sitting bolt upright on his creaking bed, roused by the long reverberation of a lion's roar. Before Mr. Powys is done with that astounding welcome, the reader himself is ready to yell with the excitement of it.
Doubtless the invalid's nerves were a little "jumpy" at first, overwrought and subject to "uncanny" suggestion. You and I might be startled by a lion's roar or rendered uneasy under "the flat equatorial moon" by the moaning of hyenas "as they slunk along the darkened banks of forest streams nosing for death with heavy, obtuse jowls." But who that was not a sick man would have been troubled at the tropical noontide by a sudden awareness that he was "being looked at, that from behind the trellis or from behind the bloom of a mammoth nasturtium, a haggard and very old chameleon was peering at me, intelligently, cynically." Who but a sick man would have been troubled by the excited eyes of rabbits—eyes "black as ivy berries"—eyes peering from a fissure of a rock as if in query as to what purpose "could have brought this pale, deliberate gorilla to invade their lofty isolated retreats."
But Mr. Powys's nerves steadied down as he went about his wholesome human business of managing black labor and tarring, dosing and castrating 2,000 cattle and 14,000 sheep, so that his brother, the former manager, might with an easy conscience be off to fight the Germans. The invalid's nerves, in the course of five years of farming, so far approached normality that he was able to slaughter and butcher a bullock, knock down a black boy, shoot a caged leopard, fight fire, trap lions, get a sulky native witch doctor out of a hut by touching a match to it, and, I should say, carry most parts of the white man's burden among subject
