In Wildest Africa ^ 



Glorious and grand, too, is the language of Nature 

 when she herself raises her primeval voice, associated 

 with no sound of life that we can perceive. Thus it 

 is in the hours of storm by night, when on the plain, 

 or in the primeval forest, or on the hill slopes, the thunder 

 roars round the little camp, and the crackling lightning 

 comes down in zig-zags. Then the rumbling thunder, 

 the rushing downpour of the water-floods, the roar of 

 the storm-wind, speak with an impressiveness that is 

 beyond all description. Then in their hour of death the 

 giants of the primeval forest, the mighty, venerable 

 trees, suddenly themselves find a voice that strikes 

 loudly on the ear : they groan in the embrace of the 

 wind, and under its fury crash thundering to the ground. 

 Then, when the earth and the rocks under our feet seem 

 to shake, when the powers of Nature are let loose in all 

 their might, when weak little man in his small tent, 

 alone in the midst of all this violence, listens to the sounds, 

 alone and abandoned like the sailor on a frail plank in 

 the midst of a raging ocean, then it is that the wilderness 

 sings its greatest, noblest, most wonderful song. 



The traveller may yet return to the African wilderness 

 and hear once more the voices of the smaller denizens 

 of the wild. The chirping of cicadas will lull him to 

 rest, or the buzzing of the mosquitoes forbid it. Their 

 chirping and buzzing will bear witness that these waves 

 of life roll on untroubled and uninjured by the incoming 

 of civilisation. But the greater voices will become rarer and 

 rarer. Soon the trumpeting of the elephant, the roar of the 

 lion, the bellow of the hippopotamus will be heard no longer. 



31b 



