Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/126

114 honour,' I told him; 'I am only a poor sailor-man of Monnikendam, a poor ship's captain of Ceylon, a poor trader of Goa; I am a rough, honest fellow, and you must take me for what I am.' So they took Père Olifus for what he was,—a good fellow who gave himself no airs.

"That night I was faithful to my professions, and took things as they came, finding no fault either with bottle or bed. They had made me tell my adventures, which were listened to with the greatest attention; only unfortunately they started a ridiculous idea in my host's head, namely to marry me a fifth time.

"But I declared I had definitely decided it was my wisest course never again to intrust my happiness to a woman; the beautiful Nahi-Nava-Nahina, the lovely Donna Inez and the charming Amaru had disgusted me with the whole species.

"'Pooh!' my correspondent replied, 'You have not seen our Chinese beauties at Bedondo yet; when you have, you will tell me a different tale.'

"The result was, I went to bed with thoughts of matrimony running in my head, and dreamt I was wedding a Chinese widow, who had so tiny, tiny, tiny a foot I could not believe she was a widow at all.

CHAPTER XVII

A SPORTING ADVENTURE

T five o'clock in the morning I was awakened by the barking of dogs and the sound of horns. I thought I was still at The Hague on a hunting morning, when King William is starting for the chase in the park of Loo. Far from it; I was four thousand leagues away, more or less, on the banks of Lake Laguna and we were going shooting in the mountains of the Philippines. The game we were going to pursue Avas the stag, the wild boar and the buffiilo; the game that might perhaps pursue us was the tiger, the crocodile and the ibitin.

"As to the tiger, I had been duly warned, if I put up whether a single peacock or a flock of them I must look out for tigers, which are never far away. For the crocodile, whenever I went near the lake, I must beware of tree trunks lying on the banks. These are almost always crocodiles, which sleep with one eye open, and snap off an arm or leg, as you pass near them.

"The ibitin is another matter. It is a reptile thirty feet long, first cousn of the boa-constrictor, which twines itself round trees like a great creeper and hangs there motionless; then suddenly, when least expected, it drops on stag, wild boar or buffalo, crushes its victim against a tree, breaking its bones, and macerating its flesh, and ends by swallowing it whole. It will attack a man when it gets the chance, and will make its dinner with equal avidity on Tagal, Chinaman or European.

"The means of defence are quite simple; the great thing is to know how to use them. You must carry in your belt a hunting knife as keen as a razor. The ibitin is not poisonous, what it does is to stifle you and crush you to death; so you slip between yourself and one of the serpent's coils enfolding your body, the weapon in question, and slash, with a sideways slice you cut the creature in two. At the moment of starting, my host put in my belt a magnificent hunting-knife, with which he had already, he told me, despatched two or three ibitins. As for poisonous snakes, as there are no remedies against their bites, it was mere waste of time to look for any.

"Two months before this date, Monsieur de La Géronnière had lost a charming native girl of sixteen or eighteen, who he supposed had been carried off and devoured by a tiger, a crocodile or a serpent. Poor Shimindra had gone out one fine evening and never come back, and spite of all the efforts made to find her, she had never been heard of again.

"I am bound to admit that when my host told me of all the dangers we should run in the course of our day's sport, I began to think it was a strange way of enjoying oneself. We rode to the spot where the shooting was to begin; there we dismounted and proceeded to penetrate the woods.

"The first game I put up was a fine flight of peacocks. I marked carefully the place, and making a wide detour, had the satisfaction of not disturbing the tiger whose presence was denoted by the birds.