And when
later the whole safari, loads on heads, marched inconsiderately
through their jungle! We happened to be hunting on a parallel
course a half mile away, and we could trace accurately the
progress of our men by the outraged shrieks, chatterings, appeals
to high heaven for at least elemental justice to the monkey
people.
Often, too, we would come on concourses of the big baboons. They
certainly carried on weighty affairs of their own according to a
fixed polity. I never got well enough acquainted with them to
master the details of their government, but it was indubitably built
on patriarchal lines. When we succeeded in approaching without
being discovered, we would frequently find the old men baboons
squatting on their heels in a perfect circle, evidently
discussing matters of weight and portent. Seen from a distance,
their group so much resembled the council circles of native
warriors that sometimes, in a native country, we made that
mistake. Outside this solemn council, the women, young men and
children went about their daily business, whatever that was. Up
convenient low trees or bushes roosted sentinels.
We never remained long undiscovered. One of the sentinels barked
sharply. At once the whole lot loped away, speedily but with a
curious effect of deliberation. The men folks held their tails in
a proud high sideways arch; the curious youngsters clambered up
bushes to take a hasty look; the babies clung desperately with
all four feet to the thick fur on their mothers' backs; the
mothers galloped along imperturbably unheeding of infantile
troubles aloft. The side hill was bewildering with the big
bobbing black forms.
In this lower country the weather was hot, and the sun very
strong. The heated air was full of the sounds of insects; some of
them comfortable, like the buzzing of bees, some of them strange
and unusual to us. One cicada had a sustained note, in quality
about like that of our own August-day's friend, but in quantity
and duration as the roar of a train to the gentle hum of a good
motor car. Like all cicada noises it did not usurp the sound
world, but constituted itself an underlying basis, so to speak.
And when it stopped the silence seemed to rush in as into a
vacuum!
We had likewise the aeroplane beetle. He was so big that he would
have made good wing-shooting. His manner of flight was the
straight-ahead, heap-of-buzz, plenty-busy,
don't-stop-a-minute-or-you'll-come-down method of the aeroplane;
and he made the same sort of a hum. His first-cousin,
mechanically, was what we called the wind-up-the-watch insect.
This specimen possessed a watch-an old-fashioned Waterbury,
evidently-that he was continually winding. It must have been
hard work for the poor chap, for it sounded like a very big
watch.
