I did not then suspect that it would take me nearly a year to be absolutely certain that this sound was uttered by an extremely shy and restless kind of cuckoo!
This sound of the African night always made the strongest impression upon me, and remains indelibly in my memory. All that one heard from near at hand, or from the distance miles away, had its origin not in man’s voice or in human activity of any kind, but most come from birds and beasts to a great extent unknown to us. One had to interpret, to conjecture, to build up theories. Often one struck upon the correct solution. But often enough, too, the interpretation one accepted proved to be false, and then one’s anxiety to find out the true solution, aroused anew, was doubly keen. The first time I heard it, I had no difficulty in interpreting for myself the cry of the monkeys harassed in the night by leopards, a screaming of a kind one cannot easily forget, plainly expressing the greatest terror. The first time one heard the neighing of the herds of zebras it was much more difficult to recognise the sound, and the gobbling cry of the ostrich had at first a still stranger effect. But as soon as I had heard the voice of the zebras a few times, it was clear to me that the extinct quagga of South Africa must have derived its name from its cry. If one puts the accent on the second syllable, and pronounces the g softly and deep in the throat, one has, as one repeats it, a wonderful reproduction of the cry of the zebra as I heard it myself.[41]
What a pity that all this cannot be put on permanent record by some such apparatus as a gigantic phonograph! But unfortunately we are still a long way from such a possibility.
No one will be surprised at my keeping specially in mind that endlessly melancholy cry of the cuckoo in the darkness. How lonely and empty our German woodlands would seem without the cuckoo and the cuckoo cry! As a matter of fact the African primeval forest never hears the same cry that has become so clear to ourselves. Our cuckoo, migrating in a few days all the way from the north to the equator, flies in restless haste through wood and plain, but he is silent. His cry is heard only in our country at home. But in the East Africa district of Pori, amongst many other cries those of two species of cuckoo are heard in rivalry. These are the sickle cuckoo—the “Tipi-tipi” of the Swahili—a reddish-brown fellow that flutters in heavy flight everywhere about the bush, the reedy bogs and hill-slopes; and the solitary cuckoo (Cuculus solitarius, Step.), about whose cry I was for a long time mistaken. The unceasing, low cry of the former, the sickle cuckoo, if it is heard even a few times, can never again be forgotten. It sounds like—“Dut-dút—dududu—dut-dút.” One hears it by day and also in the darkest night, contrasting strongly with the sharply defined, clear note of our European cuckoo, though the latter listens in silence to the cry of his cousins all through the winter under the equator. This cry seems to me, with its low, dull, softly prolonged tones—so different from the louder cry of its northern relative—to be quite in keeping with its mysterious tropical home. For the sickle cuckoo knows all its deepest mysteries, and no bird ranges so unweariedly through the densest thickets and over the most inaccessible regions. In the most hidden, solitary, and unknown spots[42] it would come fluttering up from the ground at my feet, often startling me. It seemed to me as if the bird wanted to call my attention to newly discovered mysteries, as its “Dut-dút—dududu—dut-dút” came sounding to me, now here, now there, low, soft and melodious, by day under the brooding noonday heat, and just the same in the midnight hours.
At night, too, he is seconded, as I have already mentioned, by his more timid cousin, with an ever repeated “Kí-kü-kü—kí-kü-kü,” that resounds monotonously in the distance.
There is a strange charm in continually hearing these voices again and again, without knowing the little singers; and a triumph at last in making out which they are.
“During a sleepless night,” said Richard Wagner, “I once went out upon the balcony of my window on the Grand Canal at Venice. As if in a deep dream the legend-haunted city of the lagoons lay spread out before me under the darkness. Out of the soundless silence there came the loud call of a gondolier waking up just then on his boat ... then from the farthest distance the same call answered back along the dark canal; I recognised the old, melancholy, melodious sounds, doubtless as old as the canals of Venice and their people. After a solemn pause the far-sounding dialogue at last began, and it seemed to me to melt into harmony, till the notes heard close at hand and coming more softly from afar died away as sleep came back to me again.”
Who could describe in such noble words the impression made upon our minds by the spell of the sounds and songs of the nocturnal wildness, and all its strange and beautiful music? All that at first is strange there, and even alarming, comes gradually to be something one loves intimately. Shall I ever be able to listen to it all again? Who knows? Let me try then to make some record of what I have so often heard, and in these few sentences attempt to give some faint echo of these once familiar voices.
We are in the midst of the great forest. Giant podocarpus and juniper trunks rise up towards the sky. It is cool and shady all around us here; we breathe a moist, and not unfrequently a musty air. The sunlight plays only upon the tops of these giants of the primeval woods, and can but scantily illumine the almost bare ground below them, sending here and there shimmering, dancing rays of light amongst the tree-trunks. High overhead the giants arch their branches, interlacing them in a vast living roof of green. Only where clearings make a break in the mass of trees, a sea of light floods all the ground—a flood of light so strong that our eyes, accustomed to the obscurity, the mysterious semi-darkness of the forest, are dazzled, and there comes to our minds involuntarily recollections of old Bible pictures, in which such floods of light are shown streaming down from heaven to earth. A confusion of trees, creepers and undergrowth, with amidst it uprooted tree-trunks lying mouldering away; the earth black, and often marshy; no road or way far and wide, but only here and there the tracks and beaten paths made by the elephants and rhinoceroses that have roamed the old forest since primeval times.
