Recent intrusions for railways, sport, discovery, and war into Central and East Africa have opened up new lion countries, and confirmed, in the most striking manner, the stories of the power, the prowess, and the dreadful destructiveness to man and beast of this king of the Carnivora. At present it is found in Persia, on the same rivers where Nimrod and the Assyrian kings made its pursuit their royal sport; in Gujerat, where it is nearly extinct, though in General Price's work on Indian game written before the middle of the last century it is stated that a cavalry officer killed eighty lions in three years; and in Africa, from Algeria to the Bechuana country. It is especially common in Somaliland, where the modern lion-hunter mainly seeks his sport. On the Uganda Railway, from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, lions are very numerous and dangerous. In Rhodesia and the Northern Transvaal they have killed hunters, railway officials, and even our soldiers near Komati Poort. It has been found that whole tracts of country are still often deserted by their inhabitants from fear of lions, and that the accounts of their ravages contained in the Old Testament, telling how Samaria was almost deserted a second time from this cause, might be paralleled to-day.
[Illustration: _Photo by York & Son_] [_Notting Hill._
The pose of the animal here shows attention, but not anger or fear.]
When, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, Europeans first settled at the Cape of Good Hope, the lion's roar was probably to be heard almost nightly on the slopes of Table Mountain, since a quaint entry in the Diary of Van Riebeck, the first Dutch governor of the Cape, runs thus: "This night the lions roared as if they would take the fort by storm"--the said fort being situated on the site of the city now known as Cape Town.
At that date there can be little doubt that, excepting in the waterless deserts and the dense equatorial forests, lions roamed over the whole of the vast continent of Africa from Cape Agulhas to the very shore of the Mediterranean Sea; nor was their range very seriously curtailed until the spread of European settlements in North and South Africa, and the acquisition of firearms by the aboriginal inhabitants of many parts of the country, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, steadily denuded large areas of all wild game.