Page:Under the Sun.djvu/226

202 shows both man and elephant how royally he can defend his jungle realm against them.

His voice, it has been contended, is not regal. To dispute this one has only to go to any menagerie, where, though the lion’s roar may be the loudest, the tiger’s is not less terrific. Nor when he is heard roaming abroad in the jungles in the night can anything be imagined more terribly weird or unnatural than his utterances.

He has found, perhaps, that a pack of wild dogs — voiceless hunters of the forest — are crossing his path; and his angry protest, delivered in rapid, startling coughs, is certainty among the most terrifying sounds of Nature, while nothing can surpass the utter desolation that seems to possess the night when the tiger passes along the jungle to his lair, with his long-drawn, whining yawn. The lion’s roar is, of course, unapproachable in its grandeur, but the tiger compresses into a cough and a yawn such an infinity of cruelty and rage, such unfathomable depths of fierce wild-beast nature as cannot be matched in forest languages.

Man-eating tigers and, even more, man-eating tigresses have always commanded among human beings a certain awful respect. Nor is this to be wondered at in India, when each year’s returns tell us that about a thousand persons perish annually by these brutes. When, therefore, to the word “tiger” — itself a synonym in every language, civilized or savage, for stealthy, cruel, strong-limbed ferocity — is prefixed the aggravating epithet of “man-eating,” the imagination prepares itself for the worst, and the great carnivore stalks past, in the mind’s eyes, a very compendium of horrors, bearing about with it on its striped hide a Newgate Calendar