C. G. Schillings, phot.
CRESTED CRANES IN FLIGHT.
C. G. Schillings, phot.
IN A WONDERFULLY SHORT TIME VULTURES AND MARABOUS FLY DOWN FROM AN EXTREME HEIGHT IN THE AIR TO FALL UPON ANY DEAD ANIMAL.
A strange feeling comes over me. I think of all the beautiful spots of our old world. They have all been taken possession of under carefully devised arrangements and methods, well protected by the eye of the law, and often only occasionally open to access, and then on condition of payment. But the beauty I am contemplating has now been hopelessly abandoned to intruders, who have neither knowledge nor taste nor sense, and who are at this moment so barbarously destroying it.
But these thoughts must give way to others that are more pleasant and consoling. How wonderful to be able to revel in this wilderness, to feel in oneself the influence of all these splendours, notwithstanding all dangers and all difficulties, however great! Everything around us undulates and shimmers, bathed in a dazzling sea of light. Gradually the colouring of plain and hills, the dome of the sky and the whole surrounding landscape, changes to duller and less definite tints. The sun-illumined air rises in waves from the earth, and the various strata of it form an ever-changing chaos of reflected light. Over all there is deep peace. A spell that accords with the mood of the moment seems to stream down from the dome of the sky over this solitude, lying so far from the noisy activity of the world.
All that I here behold has been going on since those far times, directed by natural law, in ever-recurring succession. But to-day for the first time a member of the complex society of civilisation takes delight in this mountain rising amidst all this primeval beauty.
Who could possibly set down this poetry upon paper—the poetry of the velt and its wild inhabitants, the moods of East African Nyíka? The master of colouring has not yet arisen who could give us a picture of these mighty gatherings of wild herds, and of these deserts that seem overcrowded with animal forms, that yet live so peacefully together, nor can the master of the pen, though he may have been able by his words to conjure up some idea of them in the mind.