418 
SAVAGE SUDAN 
They cannot all be “ colour-protected.” Big objects on open 
ground can never be concealed by colour. Whether your 
zebras be striped or unstriped, whether the objects be red 
impala or blue gnus, white oryx or black buffaloes —- there 
they stand distinct to be seen up to the limits of human 
vision. 1 
None need go to Africa to learn these elementary truths. 
Watch the sheep on a Northumbrian moor, or on “ Hampstead 
Heath,” or on open downlands anywhere else. It is a breezy 
day, with clouds continuously coursing across the sky. During 
alternate periods of sunlight, the brown bosom of the moor is 
everywhere flecked with snow-white flocks ; now a passing cloud 
shuts off the sunshine and the landscape is fleckless, unbroken 
umber-brown. But the sheep are all there still. A moment 
before, in the river far below, had stood a heron, showing white 
by contrast with dancing blue waters. Look now and you see 
nothing. Has that heron gone? No; the binoculars reveal 
him still standing statuesque ; but the passing shadow has 
momentarily blended bird and stream into a common mono¬ 
chrome. Stated so, in terms of fell or veld, the matter appears 
to resolve itself into a mere truism. But when truth has been 
dethroned—distorted and perverted to prop up some nebulous 
hypothesis—it becomes necessary to restate elementary facts 
in terms no less forceful than were truth itself the paradox. 
Naturally in forest or among bush, animals are less easily 
detected than on open veld. That is simply because they are 
then partly concealed from sight—sometimes entirely! Any 
protective contention arising therefrom rests on a double 
confusion, which may be crystallised thus:— 
(1) That the eye can distinguish colour or detail at a 
distance as clearly as when close at hand—as who 
would sing:— 
No distance lends enchantment to my view 
Nor paints my distant zebras blue. 
(2) That the eye can distinguish with equal facility things 
1 I feel tempted to ask, against what danger are these creatures pre¬ 
sumed to be protected at 500 yards ? Again the theorists would be 
constrained to evoke either their pet “ Lion-Rampant ” ex Heraldry— 
(. Nec Leo Africanus )—or cordite ; both items barred by axiom ! But both 
points have already been mentioned. 
