The Desert World

by Arthur Mangin

I shall avail myself, therefore, of the liberty allowed to every writer who does not design a purely didactical work, by not unnecessarily troubling myself whether the animals whose organization or characteristics attract our notice, particularly affect a low or elevated locality, the shady wood or open plain, the pestilential swamp or the river-watered valley, and by permitting myself, except in the case of some evident and constant partiality, to place them where the most eminent observers assure us they are really, if not exclusively, met with.

On this account, the plains, more or less densely wooded and broken up, which occupy the greater portion of the African Continent, will readily furnish us with the opportunity of studying the majority of animals indigenous to that continent, and, in general, to the entire Tropical zone of the Old World. In fact, nearly all the genera of Mammals, Birds, and Reptiles, are there represented by their most characteristic types. Clothed with a luxuriant vegetation; watered by periodical rains and numerous streams; intersected by thick masses of forests, groves, and thickets; relieved from monotonous uniformity by mountain and ravine, by marshes and lakes of vast extent,—these fields ever exhibit that aspect of busy life under which we love to represent to ourselves the earth when she first emerged from the boiling seas of Chaos, when the forces which had seethed within her bowels for so many thousands of centuries had been tranquillized by the Divine will, and she was despatched on her mysterious course to be the theatre of man’s glorious destiny.

During the daytime silence and solitude prevail over the open plains. It is the hour when most animals seek, under the foliage of the trees, among the tall rank grasses, in the bosom of the waters or under the surface of the earth, a shelter against the swift burning arrows of the sun, and repose immovable in their different lairs. But when the great orb of day sinks towards the horizon, all Nature seems to awake. More imperious needs succeed to those of rest and slumber; hunger and thirst stimulate the most sluggish into exertion. Then the reptile begins to stir in the mud where he lay embedded; the herbivora return to their fresh pastures, and move towards the rivers and ponds in whose waters they may slake their thirst; the carnaria take the same road; they know that in the open plain they will find victims for their murderous jaws. The Desert is astir with strange sounds and mysterious voices; the air re-echoes the thousand discordant cries which ring from the mountains and the rocks; black shadows pass, re-pass, and flit to and fro, in every direction; terror, rage, agony, voracity, all these instincts obtain expression in the dreadful concert; it is the orgie of the appetites, the grand “Witches’ Sabbath” of Nature, whose furious animation slackens towards the middle of the night, until, at sunrise, the lively accents and joyous melodies of the birds, and the peaceful pastimes of the other animals of the day, succeed to the lamentations and sinister invocations of the prowlers of the darkness.

In the foremost rank of the great animals to which the fauna of Asia and Africa owes its superiority, I have named the huge Pachyderms,[123] those mighty colossi which may be regarded as the analogues, in the terrestrial creation, of the Cetacean giants of the marine creation. The Pachyderms formed in Cuvier’s system a sufficiently natural order, which modern systematists have dismembered, and, as I believe, a little arbitrarily. This order comprised, besides the elephants, the hippopotami, the rhinoceroses, and the tapirs, all the Porcidæ family, and even the Solidungulates, such as the horse and ass. In the present work I shall adopt Cuvier’s division. The elephant is the denizen of the forests where, in a succeeding chapter, we shall encounter both him and the rhinoceros. But the hippopotamus belongs incontestably to the fauna of the plain. His name (from the Greek) signifies “River Horse.” And, indeed, he lives in the rivers, the pools, the deep marshes; his manners are essentially amphibious. He dives and swims with a surprising ease and agility, considering the enormous bulk of his body, and the shortness of his heavy, unwieldy legs. He is able to remain a long time under water. His colour is a brownish-black, and his proportions, ten to twelve feet in length, and eight to ten in height. His head is immensely large; the mouth cavernous in its prodigious width; the teeth immensely strong, the incisors and canines of the lower jaw being long, and curved forwards; these canines or tusks sometimes measure more than two feet in length, and weigh upwards of six pounds each. Those in the upper jaw are much smaller, and the front teeth are of a moderate size. The broad thick lips are beset with scattered tufts of short bristles; the small quick eyes are placed very near the top of the head; the small ears are slightly pointed, and lined with short thick hair. His food mainly consists of the coarse herbage that flourishes on the banks of lakes and rivers; but Milne Edwards speaks of three or four of them standing knee-deep in the water, forming an irregular line, and pouncing upon the fish brought within their reach by the rapid currents. At night time they abandon their watery haunts to prowl among the sugar-cane plantations, the fields of millet and rice, which they devour with eagerness. Their march is so impetuous, that they break down every barrier; nothing can resist them.

The hippopotamus is spread over all eastern and southern Africa; is found in Nubia, Ethiopia, Abyssinia; at the Cape, the Senegal and the Congo. Both the settlers and the natives of these countries hunt them with ardour for the sake of the ivory they yield, nor is their flesh despised by a keen appetite and vigorous stomach. Sometimes they excavate, in the animal’s ordinary route, a tolerably deep pit, beset with sharp pointed poles, and concealed by a covering of leafy branches: sometimes, in the shade of the evening, they lie in ambuscade among the bushes, and aim at his huge bulk the deadly bullet, as he comes up from the water, labouring and bellowing. It is necessary to aim well at his head; for the rest of his body is almost as invulnerable as that of Achilles.

Here is a lively picture from Sir Samuel Baker’s valuable volumes, in which the hippopotamus is a foremost figure.

“We were towing through high reeds,” he says,[124] “the men invisible, and the rope mowing over the high tops of the grass, when the noise disturbed a hippopotamus from his slumber, and he was immediately perceived close to the boat. He was about half-grown, and in an instant about twenty men jumped into the water in search of him, thinking him a mere baby; but as he suddenly appeared, and was about three times as large as they had expected, they were not very eager to close. However the reis pluckily led the way, and seized him by the hind leg, when the crowd of men rushed in, and we had a grand tussle. Ropes were thrown from the vessel, and nooses were quickly slipped over his head; but he had the best of the struggle, and was dragging the people into the open river; I was therefore obliged to end the sport by putting a ball through his head. He was scored all over by the tusks of some other hippopotamus that had been bullying him.”

After conquering your enemy, kill him and eat him: such is the maxim of savage life. It was carried out by Sir Samuel Baker and his men, much to the satisfaction of the conquerors. “A new dish!” exclaims our traveller; “there is no longer mock-turtle soup; real turtle is mock hippopotamus. I tried boiling the fat, flesh, and skin together, the result being that the skin assumes the appearance of the green fat of the turtle, but is far superior. A piece of the head thus boiled, and then soused in vinegar, with chopped onions, cayenne pepper, and salt, throws brawn completely in the shade.”