Then there is the insect world! Those flower-covered bushes have attracted a multitude of great droning beetles. They hasten to them in heavy flight. On the ground a host of scarabæus beetles are busy with their special work. The ceaseless sharp chirps of the cicadas sing their continual song. Through all its variations there goes on this hum and buzz of the millions and millions of the lower creation. And joined with it there ring out the thousands and thousands of songs of the birds; the powerful voices of the great mammals bellow over plain and bushland, through swamps and primeval forests, over dale and hill. The concert of the feathered songsters is suddenly silent, as, it may be, the harsh cry of the leopard resounds, or the mighty, dull, rumbling roar of the king of the desert thunders over the earth; or the trumpet-like cry of the elephant vibrates through the woods; or harsh war-cries from human lips, battle-songs of primitive men, are heard—but heedless of it all, even at these moments, day and night resound the weak voices of all the myriads of lesser creatures of the animal world. But he who penetrates into this wilderness must have receptive senses to understand the full beauty of it all. For him this harmony exists wherever the primitive animal world lives its life.
ON THE WEST SIDE OF KILIMANJARO I FOUND A BROOK, CALLED BY THE MASAI “MOLOGH.” ABOUT TEN MILES FROM THE WESTERN ‘NJIRI SWAMPS IN THE DRY SEASON IT SUDDENLY DISAPPEARS AMONG THE STONES AND REACHES THE SWAMPS BY AN UNDERGROUND CHANNEL.
Glorious and grand, too, is the language of Nature when she herself raises her primeval voice, associated with no sound of life that we can perceive. Thus it is in the hours of storm by night, when on the plain, or in the primeval forest, or on the hill slopes, the thunder roars round the little camp, and the crackling lightning comes down in zig-zags. Then the rumbling thunder, the rushing downpour of the water-floods, the roar of the storm-wind, speak with an impressiveness that is beyond all description. Then in their hour of death the giants of the primeval forest, the mighty, venerable trees, suddenly themselves find a voice that strikes loudly on the ear: they groan in the embrace of the wind, and under its fury crash thundering to the ground. Then, when the earth and the rocks under our feet seem to shake, when the powers of Nature are let loose in all their might, when weak little man in his small tent, alone in the midst of all this violence, listens to the sounds, alone and abandoned like the sailor on a frail plank in the midst of a raging ocean, then it is that the wilderness sings its greatest, noblest, most wonderful song.
The traveller may yet return to the African wilderness and hear once more the voices of the smaller denizens of the wild. The chirping of cicadas will lull him to rest, or the buzzing of the mosquitoes forbid it. Their chirping and buzzing will bear witness that these waves of life roll on untroubled and uninjured by the incoming of civilisation. But the greater voices will become rarer and rarer. Soon the trumpeting of the elephant, the roar of the lion, the bellow of the hippopotamus will be heard no longer.
But to-day one can still hear all these sounds which I have described, and which our most remote ancestors listened to all day and all night in the ages when there still lived in Europe a fauna very similar to that which we find dying out in East Africa. By day and night they go forth in trees and thickets, by swamp and reed-bed. The song of birds is accompanied by the monotonous deafening chorus of the bullfrogs. Even in the traveller’s tent the crickets chirp, and the night-jar buzzes and buzzes past it, and tells and whispers of the nightly life and movement of the animal world, in its monotonous mysterious song.
A jackal holds a conversation with the evening star. In the dark night the deep bass of the hyena is heard; and then it laughs aloud, in a weird, shrill, shrieking treble. This laugh, seldom uttered, but when heard making one’s heart shudder, is not a thing to forget; on feverish nights it plagues one still in memory. No one need jest about it who has not himself heard it. He who has heard it understands how the Arabs take the hyenas to be wicked men living under a spell.
Now at last the lion raises his commanding voice, and one thing only is wanting to the whole nocturnal spell—the noisy trampling of timid and harassed droves of zebras and other herds of wild things. But if the ground of the velt, hardened by the burning sun, rings once more to the thundering hoof-beats of the zebras, the eye fails in the darkness, and only our ears perceive by their numberless sounds the waves of life that are surging around us; and then indeed the listener comes to full consciousness of how rich the animal-language of the Nyíka still is.... Nowhere else in the world of to-day do all the voices of the wild resound more impressively, and for him who listens to this language there is no escape from that mysterious spell—the Spell of the Elelescho!
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Cf. Reichenow, Die Vögel Afrikas.