Samba, as he had shown more than once, and notably in the recent incident of the serval, had no lack of courage; but he had never before been at such close quarters with a crocodile, the most terrible of all the natural enemies of man in the regions of the Congo. And as he sat and watched the glassy stare of the hideous reptile now wriggling inch by inch towards him, he felt a strange helplessness, a kind of fascination that seemed to chill and paralyse his power of movement as of thought. He had retreated as far as he dared. His weight had caused some of the slenderer and more elastic branches to bend towards the water; he had even imagined that, as he tested them, the pressure threatened to make the tree revolve. What his fate would be if the whirling of the trunk on its axis brought him into the river he well knew. The crocodile would slip as nimbly as an eel after him; and, entangled in the foliage, which to his armoured enemy would offer no obstacle, he would fall an easy prey.
The crocodile wriggled on, till it came to the place where the first branch forked from the trunk. Scarcely more than its own length now separated it from Samba. Apparently it had come as near as it cared to venture; not being a climber, the feat of crawling up the tapering branch on which Samba was perched was not one to its taste. It lay still, with jaws agape, its eyes half-closed in a kind of wicked leer.
Samba tried to look away from the hideous beast, but in vain; he found his gaze drawn back uncontrollably. He felt even more subject to the fascination now that the crocodile's movements had ceased. The conviction was growing upon him that sooner or later he would slide down the branch and fall dreamily into the open jaws. He was fast becoming hypnotized.
But he was roused from this dangerous trancelike state by a sudden roll of the tree. Perched high as he was, the motion caused him to swing through an arc of several yards and brought him perilously near the water. The danger quickened his faculties: he clung on with a tighter grip, bethinking himself to look whether his fishing spear, which he had stuck into the bark, was still safe. He was relieved to find that it was undisturbed. The tree righted itself, and a gleam of hope lightened Samba's mind when he saw that the crocodile was in the water. Though, stretched on the trunk, the beast had felt the roll less than Samba above, it had a less tenacious grip and less ability to adapt itself; and first the tail, then the rest of its body had slid off. It was violently struggling to regain its position, its jaw resting on the trunk, its forepaws furiously beating the water.