Part 24

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 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.

C. G. Schillings, phot.

ZEBRAS AND GNUS. [p. 292]

Deep silence all around. If the traveller stands still and holds his breath, this silence seems to weigh down upon the soul with a weird force. At such moments it is as though some vague disaster threatened, or something wicked and dangerous were creeping around unseen.

Suddenly, a squealing and chattering. There is a scurry up and down the tree-trunks, and again there is a strange sound of spitting and growling. Just now there had come over us a feeling such as is expressed in Böcklin’s masterly picture, directly inspired by nature, Schweigen des Waldes (the “Silence of the Forest”). We had almost expected each moment that legends set before us by the power of his genius would here become realities; we felt that here one might surprise nymphs and dryads. The spell is soon broken. The gnomes of the primeval forest, the tree-climbing hyraxes, have scared away the silence. Wonderful to say, these dwarfish hoofed animals, the nearest still surviving relatives of the rhinoceros, are here scrambling up and down on the trunks of the venerable trees.

From all sides, from every spot, every direction, there resound the same cries, and again there is silence all around us. Here, far in the depths of the primeval forest, the bird world seems to have no home. But hark! I hear a curious chirping, and I notice on a bare bough above me one of the most gloriously coloured of African birds, the banded trogon (Heterotrogon vittatum, Shell.), which, uttering a most peculiar sound, is carrying on its characteristic sport--flapping its beautiful wings.

Then loud-sounding trumpet-like notes break on the ear. We hear a rushing in the air, and big hornbills with their huge beaks come sailing, as I judge by their cries, through the air, and alight on the top of a giant juniper (Juniperus procera). They, too, fly away after awhile; their trumpeting, dies away in the distance, and again there is silence all around. Their voices and that of the brightly coloured helmet-bird give to the primeval forest of Africa a strange charm that is all its own.

But now there suddenly breaks forth a remarkable sound, rising and again falling as I listen, a strange music of a most peculiar kind. It is the chatter of the colobus monkeys, a sound that cannot be described in words. A party of these wonderful creatures seems to be in good humour, for their song comes to me in chorus unceasingly, and in rising strength. “Murúh-murúh-murúh-rrrrrrmúh rrrrrrmúh-murúh quoi-quo-quo-quo-rrrr,” it sounds, now swelling strongly out, now gently dying away. These, too, are doomed to death, who now are letting us hear their primitive song, that in our days may so easily be their death-song; for these monkeys are keenly hunted for the sake of their beautiful fur, and their song often betrays them to the hunter, eager for their spoils. Some poisoned darts, which I find here with points as sharp as needles, and which were once shot with a bad aim at the little monkeys, are evidence enough of this.

And again I hear the great wood ringing and echoing with the countless cries of birds. There was a time, too, when the call of millions of the now all but extinct passenger pigeon resounded in North America; so, too--and of this I have no doubt--the cooing of the ringdoves was heard repeated by thousands of birds in our beech and oak woods at home when the acorns and beech-nuts were in season.

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.

C. G. Schillings, phot.

NESTS OF WEAVER-BIRDS ON THE BOUGHS OF AN ACACIA.]

The strange duet has now long died away. But it often comes up to me again in the midst of the movement of civilised life and takes me back on the wings of fancy to the glorious beauty of the wilderness.

But that uncouth tropical singer is not really needed to conjure up this frame of mind. A little unseen lark, all by itself, can evoke for me the charm of the solitudes of Nyíka as with a magic wand.