In \\'ilclest Africa -♦ 



me. Thoughtfully I tread my homeward way, with my 

 mind richly stored with impressions, but anxious as to my 

 efforts to describe all that I have seen, and doubtful as 

 to my success. 



" To have passed a thousand and more days, a 

 thousand and more nights in the wilderness with a ereat 

 longing in my heart in some way to grasp and make my 

 own all the splendour I have seen and all its charm ; 

 to have again and again delighted in the beauty of the 

 Nyi'ka : this does not make me capable of reproducing 

 it. And even if after many decades of years I could 

 fully comprehend it, I should never succeed in reproducing 

 it in its full significance and bringing it home to the 

 minds of those who have never looked upon it with theii 

 own eyes." 



So runs a passage in my diary. 



Descriptions of things similar to thosci that I have 

 told of in inadequate words in these slight sketches of the 

 Nyika district of East Africa may be read of other regions 

 of our earth. The life and activity of the Arctic fauna, 

 of those gigantic creatures of to-day, the whales, and of 

 the Polar bears, the musk oxen, the wild reindeer, the 

 walruses, the seals — those most sagacious creatures — and 

 the life of main- other animal forms — all these together 

 are waiting for the iiand that will describe them in word 

 and picture and put on enduring record for all time this 

 changing life. Thus only will a new existence be given 

 to those forms of life for which the sentence " \'ae X'ictis! ' 

 has gone forth, 



May the master soon appear who will he able to 



^74 



