^ The Voices of the Wilderness 



But to-day one can still hear all these sounds which 

 I have described, and which our most remote ancestors 

 listened to all day and all night in the ages when there 

 still lived in Europe a fauna very similar to that which 

 we find dying out in East Africa. By day and night 

 they go forth in trees and thickets, by swamp and 

 reed-bed. The song of birds is accompanied by the 

 monotonous deatening chorus of the bullfrogs. Even 

 in the traveller's tent the crickets chirp, and the night- 

 jar buzzes and buzzes past it, and tells and whispers of 

 the nightly life and movement of the animal world, in 

 its monotonous mysterious song. 



A jackal holds a conversation with the evening star. 

 In the dark night the deep bass of the hyena is heard ; 

 and then it laughs aloud, in a weird, shrill, shrieking 

 treble. This laugh, seldom uttered, but when heard 

 making one's heart shudder, is not a thing to forget ; on 

 feverish nights it plagues one still in memory. No one 

 need jest about it who has not himself heard it. He 

 who has heard it understands how the Arabs take the 

 hyenas to be wicked men living under a spell. 



Now at last the lion raises his commandincr voice, and 

 one thing only is wanting to the whole nocturnal spell — 

 the noisy trampling of timid and harassed droves of 

 zebras and other herds of wild things. But if the ground 

 of the velt, hardened by the burning sun, rings once 

 more to the thundering hoof-beats of the zebras, the 

 eye fails in the darkness, and only our ears perceive by 

 their numberless sounds the waves of life that are surging 

 around us ; and then indeed the listener comes to full 



-) T '7 



