198 FROM NORTH POLE TO EQUATOR. 



flight. It is true that the animals of the North African steppes 

 have their migrations and journeyings; but they do not flee in 

 a panic as do those which inhabit other steppe-lands, and forsake 

 them in hundreds of thousands before a threatened destruc- 

 tion. Of the immense herds of antelopes, such as crowd together 

 in the south of Africa, one never hears in the north. All the gre- 

 garious mammals and birds gather together when the winter sets 

 in, and disband when the spring draws near; all the migratory birds 

 go and come about the same time; but all this takes place in an 

 orderly, old-established fashion, not spasmodically nor without 

 definite ends. There is, however, one power from whose influence 

 the animal life of these steppe-lands is not exempt, and that is 

 fire. 



Every year, at the time when the dark clouds in the south and 

 the lightning which flashes from them announce the approach of 

 spring, during days when the south wind rages over the steppe, the 

 nomad herdsman takes a firebrand and hurls it into the waving grass. 

 Rapidly and beyond all stopping the fire catches. It spreads over 

 broad stretches; smoke and steam by day, a lurid cloud by night, 

 proclaim its destructive and yet eventually beneficial progress. Not 

 unfrequently it reaches the primeval forest, and the flames send their 

 forked tongues up the dry climbing-plants to the crowns of the 

 trees, devouring the remaining leaves or charring the outer bark. 

 Sometimes, though more rarely, the fire surrounds a village and 

 showers its burning arrows on the straw huts, which flare up 

 almost in a moment. 



Although a steppe-fire, in spite of the abundance of combustible 

 material, is rarely fatal to horsemen or to those who meet fire by 

 fire, and just as rarely to the swift mammals, it exerts, nevertheless, 

 a most exciting influence on the animal world, and puts to flight 

 everything that lives hidden in the grass-forest. And sometimes the 

 flight becomes a stampede, to hasten which the panic of the fugitives 

 contributes more than the steady advance of the flames. Antelopes, 

 zebras, and ostriches speed across the plain more quickly than 

 the wind; cheetahs and leopards follow them and mingle with them 

 without thinking of booty; the hunting-dog forgets his lust for 



