In Wildest Africa * 



4 



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 

 ot 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 tJicse 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 



O t> O 



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. I) ut how can I describe all this in words ? 



And at a moment like this, as it to heighten the effect, 

 over there the voice of the mightiest bird that the earth 



500 



