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The Cairo Zoo 131
he adopted as he sat on one leg, though he was really looking
into the little cemented pool in his den, which was only
about two inches deep, to see if any fish had suddenly come
into the water. Even he was not so antediluvian-looking as
the Baleniceps Rex, the Whale-headed King in the garden of
the palace at Khartum.
A bird which interested me very much was the francolin,
which looks something like a small guinea-fowl. It is the
Shah of Persia's favourite game-bird, and it would have
required all the influence of Russia to prevent the last Shah
but one, Musaffer-ed-Din, from executing any person who was
rash enough to kill one. It did not seem to me much of a
zoological specimen to get excited about in a country to
which lions and tigers occasionally stray.
I never knew any lions and tigers and leopards on such
good terms as these were with their keepers. The big lion
came to the rails to be scratched the moment his Nubian
came near him ; the Nubian got into his cage with him and
lay down and pretended to be asleep with a hand outstretched.
The lion was very angry ; he wished to play, and insisted on
the Nubian waking. Whereupon he became all leonine
smiles. He obviously loved his keeper. Even the leopards
were most friendly. The keeper went into a cage with a
large leopard and punched him like gentlemen of the fancy
punch a bull dog. The leopard thought it awful fun, but it
seemed an odd way of getting to a leopard's heart.
Evidently from the pride with which the keeper of that
section conducted us to the reptile house, the most popular
feature of the Zoo with most people was seeing the chameleons
shoot out their disgusting tongues at flies. They had com-
paratively few reptiles for a land in which there must be a
good many ; the most interesting being the gecko, a kind of
lizard which looks like its own skeleton, and Cleopatra's asp,
the tiny cerastes, or horned viper, never more than a foot or
two long, though it is tolerably fat and flat. It is the same
pinky, gold colour as the desert sand itself and its horns look
more like glorified eyebrows than anything else, but it is a
wicked little beast. We were glad to escape from that