C. G. Schillings, phot.
GIRAFFE GAZELLE (LITHOCRANIUS WALLERI, Brooke) STANDING IN ITS CHARACTERISTIC ATTITUDE BEFORE TAKING TO FLIGHT.
For minutes at a time the cry of the francolin rings out clearly round about my post; then again it is silent. My eyes can indeed see animals of many kinds, and my sight ranges with restless efforts over the far distance; but so far I have looked in vain for a form that is frequent and familiar enough in this wilderness—the towering figure of the “Twigga.”
Where can the giraffes be hiding to-day? Why have they not come out to the still freshly green acacias in the far-stretching hollow to my left, where I have already marked their presence for whole days at a time?
And yet they are there, only I had failed to distinguish them. At last I can make out their strange forms, as they graze there among the acacias, and they stand out sharply under the oblique rays of the sun.
What poetry there is in the movements of all the various organisms that our eyes behold! Every variety of gait, from the heavy, swinging, and nevertheless rapid march of the pachyderms to the graceful speed of a pretty gazelle, speaks in a language of its own to him who has become familiar with the peculiar movements of this animal world. Just as at the outset the strange appearance of an animal one sees for the first time makes a surprisingly strong impression on one, so too does the great difference in the gait of the various species. But they were all soon familiar to me. So now at the sight of the giraffes I feel a pleasure and delight in their quaint coming and going, their heads appearing and disappearing, there below me in the midst of the green bowers of mimosa leaves, high over which my view ranges. What laws must be at work here too, by whose operation I am compelled to feel all this to be so beautiful, so harmonious, so splendid! I grasp the meaning of the words: “Therefore I believe that life will first open its eyes in that world of which Goethe said: ‘There is still the life of life, and this is only form.’”[32]
What a splendid sight there is from my lofty look-out! the whole of this mighty spectacle displays itself almost without a sound that I can hear. Only a few voices of birds, but no cry of any other animal reaches my ears. But as the breeze rises more and more towards evening, there begins in my immediate neighbourhood a strange and beautiful concert, that is already familiar to me. And now, as the wind blows more and more strongly through the perforated gall-nuts that hang on every tree above us, there resounds through the desert silence a strange melody, a strange language of musical notes that only the sound of the Æolian harp can to some degree represent.
These nut-galls on the acacias are bored quite through, and in many cases become the dwelling-places of small ants. If one disturbs them by tapping on the outside of their strange habitation,[33] they come swarming out to fight with the disturber of their peace! It is not so often that their strange ways and doings concern a human being, but it comes to pass to-day. The watchful observer takes delight not only in the sound of these strange musical instruments, but also in the thought that they give shelter to a little world of their own, a peculiarly organised little state made up of living beings, just as the wide endless wilderness below them is a state with the various larger wild animals for its inhabitants.
