pics. When we emerged, in
our mosquito boots and pajamas, the daylight was gone. Scores of little
blazes licked and leaped in the velvet blackness round about, casting
the undergrowth and the lower branches of the trees into flat planes
like the cardboard of a stage setting. Cheerful, squatted figures sat in
silhouette or in the relief of chance high light. Long switches of
meat roasted before the fires. A hum of talk, bursts of laughter, the
crooning of minor chants mingled with the crackling of thorns. Before
our tents stood the table set for supper. Beyond it lay the pile of
firewood, later to be burned on the altar of our safety against beasts.
The moonlight was casting milky shadows over the river and under the
trees opposite. In those shadows gleamed many fireflies. Overhead were
millions of stars, and a little breeze that wandered through upper
branches.

But in Equatorial Africa the simple bands of velvet black, against the
spangled brightnesses that make up the visual night world, must give way
in interest to the other world of sound. The air hums with an undertone
of insects; the plain and hill and jungle are populous with voices
furtive or bold. In daytime one sees animals enough, in all conscience,
but only at night does he sense the almost oppressive feeling of the
teeming life about him. The darkness is peopled. Zebra bark, bucks blow
or snort or make the weird noises of their respective species; hyenas
howl; out of an immense simian silence a group of monkeys suddenly break
into chatterings; ostriches utter their deep hollow boom; small things
scurry and squeak; a certain weird bird of the curlew or plover sort
wails like a lonesome soul. Especially by the river, as here, are the
boomings of the weirdest of weird bullfrogs, and the splashings and
swishings of crocodile and hippopotamus. One is impressed with the
busyness of the world surrounding him; every bird or beast, the hunter
and the hunted, is the centre of many important affairs. The world
swarms.

And then, some miles away a lion roars, the earth and air vibrating to
the sheer power of the sound. The world falls to a blank dead silence.
For a full minute every living creature of the jungle or of the veldt
holds its breath. Their lord has spoken.

After dinner we sat in our canvas chairs, smoking. The guard fire in
front of our tent had been lit. On the other side of it stood one of our
askaris leaning on his musket. He and his three companions