In Wildest Africa, Vol. 1

by C. G. Schillings

On the lonely uninhabited western slopes of the highest giant mountain of the German possessions, Mount Kilimanjaro, certain forest fruits flourish in profusion. There is heard on every side a strong, sweet-sounding dove-note, like that of our ringdove. A handsome large species of wood-pigeon (Columba aquatrix, Tem.) has gathered in hundreds of thousands. The rustle of their wings, as they rise or come down in great flocks,mingles with their beautiful calls and cries; the ear can hear nothing else. Voice, form, and movement so strongly remind one of our own ringdoves that one feels carried away to far-off, familiar scenes, and the illusion is helped by the character of the Kilimanjaro landscape, which in certain of the higher regions has less of a tropical than of a northern aspect. How strange it is; the cry of this bird all at once transports the traveller to his own land! Truly there is a magic in sound. With the poorest appliances, the slightest equipment, the creative fancy can in a moment build a bridge to the Fatherland. The call of this beautiful dove sounding here on every side, its love-inspired circling high in air above the tops of the giants of the primeval forest, surrounds it with a dream-picture, and makes me suddenly breathe the air of the beech woods. I am in the northern woods in springtime; cool and fragrant the northern air blows round me. But ah! thousands of miles of land and sea divide me from all that, and cool reflective reason counts only on the possibility, not the certainty, of my ever seeing my native land again.

And yet this beautiful picture has a strengthening and consoling influence. It drives away the trouble of home-sickness—a dismal thing!

I can hear many other voices besides these in the primeval forest. But those that impress themselves in the most completely enduring way on the memory are the strange cry of the tree-hyrax, the peculiar note of the hornbills, that calling of the doves, the remarkable chorus of song of the ‘Mbega monkeys, strange beyond all description, and the trumpeting of the lord of the primeval forest, the elephant.

Another tone-picture—an early morning at a drinking-place in the desert. One could feel the cold in the night, but the quick coming warmth of the equatorial sun’s rays has soon roused the animal world to active life. There is the cry and call of the francolins on all sides. But the chief part in this early concert is taken by the thousands of turtle-doves, flying from all directions to the water. Everywhere a murmuring and cooing, that the Masai are able to re-echo so incomparably in the name of the turtle-dove in their language—“‘Ndurgulyu.” As an accompaniment to this, there is the rustling and wing-clapping of all the feathered visitors at the water. Towards evening, the air in the neighbourhood of a much-visited drinking-place is literally filled with these beautiful and swift-winged birds. The rustling and beating of their wings in rapid flight makes in itself a concert. I not unfrequently came upon places that bore the name of the “Doves’ water,” or the “Doves’ resting-place.” All the various voices of the many species of doves that find a home in the Nyíka resound again in the traveller’s ears for years after. Whether it be the strange voice of the parrot-pigeon, that ushers in the concert with a hollow “Kruh-kruh” and follows it up with some remarkable notes, or the melancholy cry of the little steel-spotted pigeon that comes to us from the thickets, or the strong, loud-sounding love-notes of the already-mentioned Columba aquatrix, Tem., so like our ringdove, or, above all, the familiar sweet voices of the many small kinds of turtle-doves—all these sounds, the rustling and fluttering and beating of wings, the living, moving picture presented by all these beautiful birds, belong inseparably to the essence and being of the Nyíka. When the turtle-doves greet the morning with their soft cooing, their call is answered from afar by strange guttural tones borne swiftly through the air, sounding, like “Gle-glé-lágak-glé-ága-ága,” from the velt-fowl hurrying like themselves to the water. Brehm, in his Leben der Vögel, has already raised a poetical monument to them made up of beautiful lines. But I could not picture to myself the morning concert of the bird world in the Nyíka without the strange cry of the sand-fowl and the cooing of the doves, and the peculiar sound of the beating wings of the velt-fowl as they rise in scattered flight from their resting-places,—a sound that impresses itself strongly and distinctly on the ear, more than that of any other bird I know, as the “Kláck-kláck-kláck” of the rising woodcock strikes the ear of the sportsman in Germany.

The wonderful flight of the velt-fowl, their calls and cries, their hurry and bustle, afforded me ever new interest. It always seemed to me as though the wide wilderness here sent out its lovingly guarded favourite children as envoys, with the mission of making it known that even now, in this dull, barren time, life has not died out even in the most remote deserts. So I see and hear them once more in fancy, beautiful, timid, and full of the joy of life. It is thus their countless millions enliven the wastes of Africa, as well as the endless tundra marshes of Asia.

Deep, long-drawn-out notes, like those of musical glasses, ring in my ears. The brooding noonday heat is round me. The sun is in the zenith, and hardly another sound is to be heard all around. The wilderness lies before me in the hot glowing sunlight as if dead. My weary bearers have given themselves up to a dozing sleep, at the place where I have at last halted, after a march of many hours with a few companions.

Before me is a miniature mountain-world lighted up by the dazzling sunbeams. There is a mass of precipitous rocks, so characteristic of the Masai-Nyíka district, that stretches away into the distance. The Candelabra Euphorbias spread out their strange forms against the light, in grotesque clumps, and seem to me to make themselves one with the rocks, whose inorganic character and nature appear to be repeated in their characteristic forms.

From out of the midst of this stony wilderness these remarkable notes come sounding in my ears. They seem to be mysterious voices of rock and stone. The eye searching expectantly for the singer that is uttering this bell-like melodious music can discover nothing. And yet the notes come from the throat of a bird. It is once more some hornbills that are making their song of love and wooing resound in this wilderness. I have been able to listen to them for hours, losing myself in dreams, and I cannot say why I seemed to identify precisely these bird-voices with the voice of the African Sphinx, that legendary Sphinx which has sung already to so many, and lured many back again for ever. Thus may the songs and voices of the old sanctuaries of Northern Africa once have been. Again and again, when I heard it, I had to think of those men who, with burning longing in their hearts, went forth into the Dark Continent to wrest from it the secrets of its fauna, but had to pay for the undertaking with their lives.

A burning glow of sunshine, a dazzling light in overwhelming abundance over all the desert waste of rock—and amidst it, again and again, that deep, ghostly, metallic note, that directly impresses the traveller as though it were the language of the wilderness, peculiarly its own. But how can I describe all this in words?

And at a moment like this, as if to heighten the effect, over there the voice of the mightiest bird that the earth bears in this our day sounds forth. I hear in the distance the ringing cry of a hen-ostrich, and I listen to it with attention strained to the highest point.