Suddenly, a few paces in front of him, something black and gigantic materialised.  He shut up... the thing crouched, sniffed the ground, leapt up, turned and ran off at a gallop... then it came back and stopped short.  It was a lion!  There could be no doubt.  Now one could see quite clearly the four short legs, the formidable forequarters and two huge eyes gleaming in the darkness....  Aim!...  Fire!...  Pan!...  Pan!....  Tartarin backed away, drawing his hunting knife

Following Tartarin’s shot there was a terrible outcry, “I’ve got him!” Cried the good Tarasconais and prepared himself to receive a possible attack, but the creature had had enough and it fled at top speed, bellowing....  He, however, did not budge:  he was waiting for the female... as happened in all his books.  Unfortunately the female failed to turn up, and after two or three hours of waiting Tartarin became tired.  The ground was damp, the night was growing cool, there was a nip in the breeze from the sea...  “Perhaps I should have a nap while I wait for daylight” he said to himself, and to provide some shelter he had recourse to the bivouac tent.  A difficulty now arose, the bivouac tent was of such an ingenious design that he was quite unable to erect it.  He struggled and sweated for a long time, but there was no way in which he could get the thing up, so at last he threw it on the ground and lay on top of it, cursing it in Provencal.

Ta!...  Ta!...  Ta!...  Tarata!  “Ques aco?” said Tartarin, waking up with a start.  It was the trumpets of the Chasseurs d’Afrique sounding reveille in the barracks at Mustapha.  The lion killer rubbed his eyes in amazement.  He who had believed that he was in the middle of a desert... do you know where he was?...  In a field full of artichokes, between a cauliflower and a swede... his Sahara was a vegetable patch.

Nearby, on the pretty green coast of upper Mustapha, white Algerian villas gleamed in the dawn light, one might have been among the suburban houses in the outskirts of Marseille.  The bourgeois appearance of the sleeping countryside greatly astonished Tartarin and put him in a bad humour.  “These people are crazy”, he said to himself, “To plant their artichokes in an area infested by lions.  For I was not dreaming, there are lions here and there is the proof”.

The proof was a trail of blood which the fleeing beast had left behind it.  Following this blood-spoor, with watchful eye and revolver in hand, the valiant Tarasconais went from artichoke to artichoke until he arrived at a small field of oats....  In a patch of flattened grain was a pool of blood and in the middle of the pool, lying on its side with a large wound to its head, was... what?... a lion?...  No Parbleu!...  A donkey!  One of the tiny donkeys so common in Algeria, which there are called “Bourriquots”.

Chapter 17.