Part 12

A feeling of something like resentment comes upon the traveller who has had to pay toll for his journey with the ceaseless sweat of his brow, when he thinks that now any one can reach Lake Nakuro in a few days from the coast. It is true that the over-anxious globe-trotter is kept in check by only too well justified fears of the treacherous malaria and the sleeping-sickness that has made such terrible progress of late. Otherwise the railway journey from Mombassa to the Victoria Nyanza, and then down the Nile to Cairo, would be a much-travelled route.

I have tried to describe, in brief outline, the rapid, unwelcome change of our time, the result of European civilisation forcing its way in. As I describe things, so they were half a century ago, and even yet ten years ago, when I stayed by the shores of Nakuro, and no railway had yet been made there.

To-day one can no longer find the old spell of the Elelescho there, or anywhere else where the white man has penetrated.

The traveller probably sees only a shrubby plant.

It covers many a ridge, and the lonely plains of the uplands, and sends afar its spicy perfume. The botanists call it Tarchonantus camphoratus, L. They class it among the Compositæ.

C. G. Schillings, phot.

A HOT DAY IN THE GREAT RIFT VALLEY.]

But here it can no longer exercise any spell.

That has flown far, far away, into the interior. There, where the white man has not yet come, it still prolongs its existence.

How long, yet will it be before it has entirely departed?

(From L. Reinhardt’s work Der Mensch zur Eiszeit in Europa.)]

From the Cave-dweller’s Sketch to the Flashlight Photograph

The mysterious charm of wild nature, undisturbed, almost untouched, by the hand of man,--the charm inherent in all that I have in mind when I talk of “the spell of the Elelescho”--explains the keen and profound interest with which my pictures of animal life were received at home.

In these days, when even electricity has been harnessed by men, there is a feeling that the knell has been sounded of all that is wild, be it man or beast. And however unpretending and inadequate the little pictures might be that I had won from the wilderness, yet all nature-lovers felt that they had here before them authentic, first-hand records revealing secrets which the eye of man had never before looked upon, or had had but scant opportunity for studying.

These pictures were the first to show really wild animals in full freedom, just as they actually live their life on velt and marsh-land, in bush, forest, air, and water. They showed nature in its unalloyed reality, and therefore a peculiar stamp of truth and beauty must have imprinted itself upon them. They came, too, as a surprise, for in many points the hitherto accepted representations of the animal world and those given by my photographs did not agree.

Mere subject counts for so much in a picture with most people that it takes them a long time to appreciate a work of art the subject of which does not at the first glance appeal to them. This applies peculiarly to my African photographs. It is not a very easy matter for the eye to grasp the movements of the varying forms of animal life in their natural freedom. Often their appearance is so blended with their surroundings that it requires long practice to distinguish the individual characteristics of each, the fleeting graces of their momentary aspects.

I could not, therefore, help feeling a certain apprehension that every one would not at once be able to understand and decipher my pictures in my book, With Flashlight and Rifle. It is necessary when one looks at them to understand, in some degree, how to read between the lines; one must make an effort to grasp their more elusive features; in short, one must devote oneself to the study of them with a certain gusto, a certain intelligence. There was a further difficulty arising from the fact that the illustrations could be reproduced only by a process in which unfortunately much of the finer detail of the originals is lost. The use of the process, however, was necessary for various reasons.

There can be only two ways of securing the best possible result in the execution of pictures of such subjects. The ideal method would be for heaven-sent artists, after years of study, to give us works of this class, and combine in these masterpieces the strictest truth with the finest craftsmanship. But this requires a thorough study of each separate species of animal seen from afar and at close quarters--and how is this possible, seeing that one gets only momentary glimpses? The other method is that of photography, the picture on the negative, which can claim the advantage of documentary accuracy, and at the same time leaves a certain scope for the artistic sense of the operator. So the greatly improved photographic methods of to-day can step in, at least as a substitute and makeshift, in the absence of works of art such as the genius of one man may give us. Considering the extreme difficulty of taking portraits of living animals in their wild, timid state, such pictures can only in a few instances lay claim to technical photographic perfection. But at least so far as my own taste goes, a certain lack of sharp definition in the picture (often deliberately sought for in taking other objects) is not only no disadvantage, but is even desirable. As a confirmation of this idea of mine, I may mention the opinion of an American journalist, who declares that my picture of a herd of wild animals given on page 327 of With Flashlight and Rifle to be the most perfect thing of the kind he has seen, and the most pleasing to him, and compares it to the work of a Corot.

It must be noted that if the animals are drawn so as to stand out separated from the landscape which is a needful accessory of the picture, and brought forward into the foreground in an obviously selected pose, they must appear unnatural to the eye of the expert. Such pictures cannot fail to give an unnatural impression, for in the freedom of the wilderness the animal world never presents itself in this way to the eyes of man. In their full significance as masterpieces of nature, all the various aspects of the animal world are first manifested to us in close connection with their environment. It has been a keen satisfaction to me to find that many world-renowned artists have appreciated warmly the beauty of these photographs, and have given expression to this feeling. I have been told, for instance--what I myself had already noticed--that numbers of the pictures, especially, those showing birds on the wing, bear a great resemblance to certain famous works of Japanese painters of animal life, works that seem to dive into the secrets of nature. It has been brought home to me, indeed, both by hundreds of letters and thousands of opinions expressed in conversation, that the pictures have excited almost universal interest, and that my labours have not been in vain.

Fully to enjoy the peculiar beauty of such photographs of living wild animals, the best way is undoubtedly to see the pictures considerably magnified by means of the magic lantern. On account of the special character and strangeness of most of the objects shown, I have the lantern slides lightly tinted. This colouring can be done without in the least altering the picture in its details, and its object is merely to secure greater effectiveness. Approval from all sides, both from artistic circles and from the public, satisfies me as to the correctness of this proceeding. Only in this way do photographic pictures shown by transmitted light produce the full impression of beauty and naturalness; they seem to transport the spectator directly to the far-off wilderness.

There must be some good reason for the widespread interest manifested in these pictures of the life and ways of animals, some of them still so little known, and all of them living in remote solitudes. It seems to me that the cause is deep-seated--that deep down in the heart of the highly-cultured civilised man there are involuntary yearnings after the sensations of wild, healthy, primeval nature. The progress of mankind from the so-called barbaric stage to the highest civilisation has been accomplished in so short a time, in comparison with the whole period of man’s existence, that it is easy to understand how such a longing may survive. In every man there must be something of this craving for light and air and primeval conditions.

Camelo-pardus feu Giraffe.

A GERMAN PICTURE OF THE GIRAFFE DATING FROM ABOUT TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO.]

“The conflict of man with the animal world,” says Wilhelm Bölsche, “has passed away unsung and uncelebrated. The civilised man of to-day has hardly a recollection of the endless lapse of time during which mankind had to struggle with the beasts of the earth for mastery.” Let us for a few moments turn our gaze backwards to that far past. In epochs that the learned date back by hundreds of thousands of years, we find attempts made by the cave-dwellers to execute artistic representations of nature as they saw it. The artist of prehistoric times set to work with his rude instruments to draw in merest outline on a smooth rock-face, on a tusk taken in the chase, or on some such material, the things that had particularly attracted his thoughts or stimulated his efforts. Specimens of these primitive works of art have been handed down to us. In the first place there are pictures of animals, scratched upon ivory, and notwithstanding all their crudeness, sketched with sufficient ability to enable us to-day to recognise with certainty the objects which the artist tried to depict. Such sketches scratched on ivory, showing various kinds of animals (some of them now extinct) and forming the oldest documents of the animal-sketcher’s art, have been found in the caves of the south-west of France, in the old dwelling-places of the so-called “Madeleine” hunters of La Madeleine and Laugerie Basse. The museum at Zurich also possesses similar primitive documents from the Kesslerloch cave, near Thaingen, in the canton of Schaffhausen.

(Some South African tribes actually hunt the lion on foot with javelins, and I have myself more than once observed the courage of the East African natives in similar circumstances.)]

It is indeed not surprising that the cave-dweller of those days took his models from the ranks of the animal creation. All his thoughts and efforts were directed to the chase; he had no resources but in this pursuit, and he had to carry on, day and night perhaps, a fierce struggle for existence with wild beasts. One can thus follow the development of the human race through the course of time from the primitive sketches of beasts down to our own days, in which it has been reserved for the hand of man to execute masterpieces inspired by genius, and in which man makes the sun to serve him in depicting and preserving representations of all that lives and moves, creeps and flies. By means of the sketches of animals laboriously scratched on pieces of ivory by the Cave men of Southern Europe, we make the acquaintance of the long-haired prototypes of the living elephants of to-day. These animals were the most coveted big game in Europe. Clearly recognisable sketches of reindeer tell us that a climate like that of the northern steppes prevailed at the time; others of horses show that the wild horse was then to be found in Europe; those of the aurochs prove the existence of that animal. There is a remarkably close resemblance between the style of all these drawings and that of the rude sketches made by the Esquimaux of our own day. Some such Esquimaux sketches of animals on walrus tusks, at the most a hundred years old, are to be found in the Berlin Ethnographical Museum. Interesting, too, are the sketches of giraffes from the hands of ancient Egyptian artists. They show us that the artist of those days in drawing animals allowed a loose rein to his fancy and imagination. Thousands of years must separate these representations of animals from the sketches of Asiatic wild life which Sven Hedin discovered at Togri-sai-Tale near Lôb-nor. They are scratched on bright green slate, and depict yaks, wild asses and tigers, and the hunting of them with bow and arrow. They appear to be of the same kind as the animal-sketches made by the South African Bushmen, discovered by Fritsch in the year 1863. These cave pictures show us various members of the fauna of Cape Colony, which has already been to so great an extent exterminated. During the period of the Middle Ages a more perfect style of representing animals was gradually evolved, but even about the year 1720 we find representations that are inaccurate to an incredible extent, and, indeed, so recently as the early part of last century, one sees in the travels of the French naturalist Le Vaillant, in the picture of a female hippopotamus, a proof that the development of animal-drawing had as yet made little progress.

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN REPRESENTATIONS OF GIRAFFES AND OTHER ANIMALS. (THE BIRD AT THE TOP ON THE LEFT IS PLAINLY RECOGNISABLE AS THE SHOE-BILLED STORK--BALAENICEPS REX. NOW IT SEEMS ONLY TO BE FOUND IN THE MARSHES OF THE UPPER NILE. I HAVE TO THANK PROFESSOR HOMMEL OF MUNICH FOR THESE ILLUSTRATIONS, WHICH ARE TAKEN FROM “MONUMENTS ET MÉMOIRES DE L’ACADÉMIE DES INSCRIPTIONS ET BELLES LETTRES.”)]

SKETCHES OF ANIMALS MADE BY THE BUSHMEN. (DISCOVERED IN SOUTH AFRICA BY PROFESSOR G. FRITSCH IN THE ‘SIXTIES, AND REPRODUCED BY HIS KIND PERMISSION.)]