His gait was the peculiar mincing teeter
of savage conventional society. According to custom, he
approached unsmiling, spat carefully in his palm, and shook
hands. Then he squatted and waited.
"What is it?" we asked after it became evident he really wanted
something besides the pleasure of our company.
"N'dowa-medicine," said he.
"Why do you not go the Government dispensary?" we demanded.
"The doctor there is an Indian; I want REAL medicine, white man's
medicine," he explained.
Immensely flattered, of course, we wanted further to know what
ailed him.
"Nothing," said he blandly, "nothing at all; but it seemed an
excellent chance to get good medicine."
After the clinic was all attended to, we retired to our tents and
the screeching-hot bath so grateful in the tropics. When we
emerged, in our mosquito boots and pajamas, the daylight was
gone. Scores of little blazes licked and leaped in the velvet
blackness round about, casting the undergrowth and the lower
branches of the trees into flat planes like the cardboard of a
stage setting. Cheerful, squatted figures sat in silhouette or in
the relief of chance high light. Long switches of meat roasted
before the fires. A hum of talk, bursts of laughter, the crooning
of minor chants mingled with the crackling of thorns. Before our
tents stood the table set for supper. Beyond it lay the pile of
firewood, later to be burned on the altar of our safety against
beasts. The moonlight was casting milky shadows over the river
and under the trees opposite. In those shadows gleamed many
fireflies. Overhead were millions of stars, and a little breeze
that wandered through upper branches.
But in Equatorial Africa the simple bands of velvet black, against
the spangled brightnesses that make up the visual night world,
must give way in interest to the other world of sound. The air
hums with an undertone of insects; the plain and hill and jungle
are populous with voices furtive or bold. In daytime one sees
animals enough, in all conscience, but only at night does he
sense the almost oppressive feeling of the teeming life about
him. The darkness is peopled. Zebra bark, bucks blow or snort or
make the weird noises of their respective species; hyenas howl;
out of an immense simian silence a group of monkeys suddenly
break into chatterings; ostriches utter their deep hollow boom;
small things scurry and squeak; a certain weird bird of the
curlew or plover sort wails like a lonesome soul. Especially by
the river, as here, are the boomings of the weirdest of weird
bullfrogs, and the splashings and swishings of crocodile and
hippopotamus. One is impressed with the busyness of the world
surrounding him; every bird or beast, the hunter and the hunted,
is the centre of many important affairs. The world swarms.
And then, some miles away a lion roars, the earth and air
vibrating to the sheer power of the sound. The world falls to a
blank dead silence. For a full minute every living creature of
the jungle or of the veldt holds its breath. Their lord has
spoken.
After dinner we sat in our canvas chairs, smoking. The guard fire
in front of our tent had been lit. On the other side of it stood
one of our askaris leaning on his musket. He and his three
companions, turn about, keep the flames bright against the
fiercer creatures.
After a time we grew sleepy. I called Saa-sita and entrusted to
him my watch. On the crystal of this I had pasted a small piece
of surgeon's plaster. When the hour hand reached the surgeon's
plaster, he must wake us up. Saa-sita was a very conscientious
and careful man. One day I took some time hitching my pedometer
properly to his belt: I could not wear it effectively myself
because I was on horseback. At the end of the ten-hour march it
registered a mile and a fraction. Saa-sita explained that he
wished to take especial care of it, so he had wrapped it in a
cloth and carried it all day in his hand!
We turned in. As I reached over to extinguish the lantern I
issued my last command for the day.
"Watcha kalele, Saa-sita," I told the askari; at once he lifted
up his voice to repeat my words. "Watcha kalele!" Immediately
from the Responsible all over camp the word came back-from
gunbearers, from M'ganga, from tent boys-"kalele! kalele!
kalele!"
Thus commanded, the boisterous fun, the croon of intimate talk,
the gently rising and falling tide of melody fell to complete
silence. Only remained the crackling of the fire and the
innumerable voices of the tropical night.
VIII. THE RIVER JUNGLE
We camped along this river for several weeks, poking indefinitely
and happily around the country in all directions to see what we
could see. Generally we went together, for neither B. nor myself
had been tried out as yet on dangerous game-those easy rhinos
hardly counted-and I think we both preferred to feel that we had
backing until we knew what our nerves were going to do with us.
Nevertheless, occasionally, I would take Memba Sasa and go out
for a little purposeless stroll a few miles up or down river.
Sometimes we skirted the jungle, sometimes we held as near as
possible to the river's bank, sometimes we cut loose and rambled
through the dry, crackling scrub over the low volcanic hills of
the arid country outside.
Nothing can equal the intense interest of the most ordinary walk
in Africa.
