The jungle folk of Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

But, we will return to the camp-fire in the forest, and the dim and dusky company seated around it, and the larger circle of fitful shadows and furtive forms that come gliding out, and back again into the forest. The opaque darkness pours forth such a volume of sound as never was heard in any forest elsewhere;—a thousand mingled noises of the night, weird, and difficult to associate with any bodily form, but belonging, one might easily fancy, to the shadow spirits of the forest, some of them perhaps the spirits of dead men—of those who, labouring under heavy loads, fell by the wayside, and died of sickness or fatigue, whose skeletons we sometimes pass; of those who by the spell of an enemy’s fetish lost their way, and never saw the face of man again; of those who for some crime have been driven forth into the forest by their own people, to die of hunger, or by the beasts.

Above all the myriad noises of the night, and separate from them, at times there falls upon the ear a prolonged cry of distress, that smites upon the heart, heard always in the African forest and never afterwards forgotten. It is a succession of ten or twelve long cries, shrill, tremulous and piercing; rather low at first, and vague, but gradually rising to a cry of definite terror, and again descending until it is lost in the volume of the forest noise.

It is a little disappointing to find the real source of this peculiar cry; and most people never find it, for it is exceedingly difficult to locate; whether near or far, whether high or low, one cannot be sure. It does not proceed as imagination suggested, from the spirits of the dead at variance and afflicting one another, but from a warm-bodied, innocent creature, the lemur, which lives in the heights of the trees, feeds upon insects, birds and reptiles, and seldom comes to the ground. In appearance it is somewhat like a bulky bear’s cub, but not well armed for offense or defense, and leading a precarious life among the stronger and fiercer creatures of the forest.

And now it occurs to me that the Lemures in Roman mythology were the spirits of those who had died in sin and who could not find rest, for whom expiatory rites were celebrated in the temple. It is generally supposed that Linnæus gave the name lemur to this family of animals because of the pale and strangely ghost-like faces of some of them; but the peculiar cry of this particular kind of lemur is more sepulchral than the appearance of any of them, and might well be a reason for the name they bear.

There is one other characteristic sound in the night-forest, though personally I have not heard this sound when far from the coast. It is a single monotonous note, a little like a low tone on a flute, about ten seconds in duration, and without rise or fall, a doleful sigh or sob of unending remorse. This sound, although it always seems to be distant, is even more difficult to locate than the other. It is human more than all other sounds of the forest, and yet sepulchral, and the superstitious mind is easily persuaded that it issues from the unseen world. The source of it is rather extraordinary; for according to native testimony it proceeds from a certain gigantic snail, as it slowly draws itself into and out of its shell. This theory is difficult either for white man or black man to verify; for the sound is heard only at night, and it ceases as one approaches. But the native is by no means likely to be mistaken.

And now at the camp-fire a native is relating to his fellows a strange legend of the origin of this sound; a legend familiar to all the tribes of West Africa, and illustrating a rare interpretative faculty of the native mind. This is the camp-fire story:

“There was once a wayward and wilful son who lived alone with his mother. One day coming home hungry he ordered her to gather some greens and cook them for him. The mother, who never resisted his wishes, went out and gathered plenty of greens and cooked them. But in the cooking they shrivelled up as greens always do. Then the mother presented the greens to her son; but the son looking at them accused his mother of having eaten the greens herself. This she denied; but the son would not believe her, and in his anger he struck her a blow on the head, and the mother fell dead at his feet. Then he cried out in anguish and sorrow; long and bitterly did he cry, but in vain. She was dead! She was dead! He had killed his own mother. From that day, all the days he mourned, saying always: ‘I killed my mother; I killed my mother;’ and all the nights he sobbed and moaned: ‘I killed my mother.’

“Then the spirits seeing his sorrow, that it was very great, and hearing him cry always day and night, at last were moved with pity, and turned him into a snail, which cannot suffer like a man. But though the snail does not weep in the daytime, yet at night it mourns and cries: ‘I—killed—my—mother;’ and so it will keep on crying until the end of the world.”

The reader will of course understand that the note of the snail is single and bears no resemblance to these articulate words of the son’s sorrow. The interpretation is purely spiritual, and poetic genius could scarcely improve upon it as an expression of the unending remorse which the sound conveys to sensitive and susceptive minds.

Sitting around the camp-fire they listen to the story as interested as if they had never heard it before, as children listen to the repetition of fables and nursery tales. Then remarks are made upon a son’s duty towards his mother, and some of them tell what good mothers they have; for this is the deepest reverence and highest sentiment of the African mind.