ngs.

Then as the sun rises and the early morning heat dries up the song
birds' voices, the earth and the life of the palm trees drowse in the
sunshine.

But at night, from late afternoon to three in the morning, when the life
of trees and grasses and ponds ceases for a short while before it begins
again at dawn, the air is full of the busy voices of the insect world.
Until we came south to Morogoro, to the land of mangoes, coconut, palms,
bamboos, we had known the shrill voice of cicadas and the harsh metallic
noises of crickets in grass and trees. But here we made two new
acquaintances, and charming little voices they had too. One lived in the
grass and rose leaves of our garden, for the German blacksmith who
lately occupied our hospital building had planted his garden with
"Caroline Testout" and crimson ramblers. His voice was like the tinkling
of fairy hammers upon a silver anvil. And with this fine clear note was
the elusive voice of another cricket that had such a marked
ventriloquial character that we could never tell whether he lived in the
rose bushes or in the trees. His note was the music of silver bells upon
the naked feet of rickshaw boys, the tinkle that keeps time to the soft
padding of native feet in the rickshaws of Nairobi at night. At first I
woke to think there were rickshaw boys dragging rubber-tyred carriages
along the avenues of the town, until I found that Morogoro boasted no
rickshaws and no bells for native feet.

Punctuated in all the music of fairy bands and the whirr of fairy
machinery were the incessant voices of frogs. Especially if it had
rained or were going to rain, the little frogs in trees and ponds sang
their love songs in chorus, silenced, at times, by the deep basso of a
bull frog. And often, as our heads ached and throbbed with fever at
night, we felt a very lively sympathy for the French noblesse of the
eighteenth century, who are said to have kept their peasants up at night
beating the ponds with sticks to still the strident voices of these
frogs.

With it all there is a rustling overhead in the feathery branches of the
palms in the cobwebby spaces among the leaves that give the bats of
Africa a home. A twitter of angry bat voices, shrill squeaks and
flutters in the darkness. Then stillness--of a sudden--and the ground
trembles with a far-off throbbing as a convoy of motor lorries
approaching thunders past us, rumbling over the bridge and out into the
darkness, driving for