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Page 30.

Chapter 3. Beach with Lions

A pride of Barbary lions—six magnificent, tawny cats, the last of their kind on Earth—appeared on a West African beach one late afternoon in 1942. They were the last few survivors of their kind, whom the chaos and opportunities of war had flushed out of the hinterlands of the Atlas and Chouf Mountains. They were the biggest, most beautiful subspecies of lions, hunted to the verge of extinction even in ancient Roman times. They had killed and been killed for centuries in Roman arenas around the Mediterranean. In the Colosseum they had been the fabled eaters of Christians. Of all lions, they had the fullest, darkest, thickest manes, which covered not only their necks but also the forward part of the torso, and reached deep down along their bellies. They had distinctive angular faces and large amber eyes that lent them heightened nobility even among lions. It was thought the last of these Barbary lions had been shot in the 1920s. Were anyone on this deserted West African beach today, he would not know it to see these six.

The lions strode at their own confident, unhurried pace, looking about for lunch, trouble, or whatever aroused their interest. Being cats, they communicated with one another by subtle body language—like closing the eyes to signal assurance, pleasure in one another’s company, contentment that things were as they should be. The late afternoon air was alive with buzzing insects, and the lions flicked their tails in testy zigzags as they blinked at each other.

The sandy coast stretched 2,000 miles south from Gibraltar, around the marshy bend of Abidjan in Ghana, to the tropical jungles of equatorial Africa. In the east, over the rips and tears of the rocky Sahel, black night rose out of Trab el-Hajra, the ‘Country of Stone.’ In the west, the sky was still as blue as the ocean rolling underneath it. High in the powder-blue sky, a full moon presented its own ghostly cameo of deserts and mists. On the beach, where the lions paraded on their evening hunt, a fine haze rolled in, and the sand smelled of dying mussels and drying kelp—the tide was ebbing. Huge breakers crashed and groaned on forlorn hooks and sweeps while gulls wheeled, cawing. The tawny squiggle of sand was the same color as the slowly padding lions—beach and lions were made for each other eons ago. This world was theirs, though they were the last few of their kind.

New predators had arrived, and these new predators were at war with each other. Off on the South Atlantic, explosions were audible. Flashes of light tore through the red and orange sunset on the ocean horizon, but the lions barely took notice—only sniffing briefly with a widening of the nostrils, a challenging growl, a glance from cold golden eyes, to question whether those low boxing thunders meant rain was coming. But there was no rain smell, just a tinge of burning oil smoke carrying more odors of the new predators who now ruled the earth. Sometimes, faint screams of their dying warriors echoed across the sea. The cats did not blink for them.