The Immensity Of Primal Space Was In It, And The
Simplicity Of Primal Things-Rough, Unfinished, Full Of Mystery.
There Was No Colour.
The scene was done in slate gray, darkening
to the opaque where a tiny distant rain squall started;
lightening in the nearer shadows to reveal half-guessed peaks;
brightening unexpectedly into broad short bands of misty gray
light slanting from the gray heavens above to the sombre tortured
immensity beneath.
It was such a thing as Gustave Dore might have
imaged to serve as an abiding place for the fierce chaotic spirit of
the African wilderness.
I sat there for some time hugging my knees, waiting for the men
to come. The tremendous landscape seemed to have been willed to
immobility. The rain squalls forty miles or more away did not
appear to shift their shadows; the rare slanting bands of light
from the clouds were as constant as though they were falling
through cathedral windows. But nearer at hand other things were
forward. The birds, thousands of them, were doing their best to
cheer things up. The roucoulements of doves rose from the bushes
down the face of the cliffs; the bell bird uttered his clear
ringing note; the chime bird gave his celebrated imitation of a
really gentlemanly sixty-horse power touring car hinting you out
of the way with the mellowness of a chimed horn; the bottle bird
poured gallons of guggling essence of happiness from his silver
jug. From the direction of camp, evidently jumped by the boys, a
steinbuck loped gracefully, pausing every few minutes to look
back, his dainty legs tense, his sensitive ears pointed toward
the direction of disturbance.
And now, along the face of the cliff, I make out the flashing of
much movement, half glimpsed through the bushes. Soon a fine
old-man baboon, his tail arched after the dandified fashion of
the baboon aristocracy stepped out, looked around, and bounded
forward. Other old men followed him, and then the young men, and
a miscellaneous lot of half-grown youngsters. The ladies brought
up the rear, with the babies. These rode their mothers' backs,
clinging desperately while they leaped along, for all the world
like the pathetic monkey "jockeys" one sees strapped to the backs
of big dogs in circuses. When they had approached to within fifty
yards, remarked "hullo!" to them. Instantly they all stopped.
Those in front stood up on their hind legs; those behind
clambered to points of vantage on rocks and the tops of small
bushes: They all took a good long look at me. Then they told me
what they thought about me personally, the fact of my being
there, and the rude way I had startled them. Their remarks were
neither complimentary nor refined. The old men, in especial, got
quite profane, and screamed excited billingsgate. Finally they
all stopped at once, dropped on all fours, and loped away, their
ridiculous long tails curved in a half arc. Then for the first
time I noticed that, under cover of the insults, the women and
children had silently retired. Once more I was left to the
familiar gentle bird calls, and the vast silence of the
wilderness beyond.
The second picture, also, was a view from a height, but of a
totally different character. It was also, perhaps, more typical
of a greater part of East Equatorial Africa. Four of us were
hunting lions with natives-both wild and tame-and a scratch
pack of dogs. More of that later. We had rummaged around all the
morning without any results; and now at noon had climbed to the
top of a butte to eat lunch and look abroad.
Our butte ran up a gentle but accelerating slope to a peak of big
rounded rocks and slabs sticking out boldly from the soil of the
hill. We made ourselves comfortable each after his fashion. The
gunbearers leaned against rocks and rolled cigarettes. The
savages squatted on their heels, planting their spears
ceremonially in front of them. One of my friends lay on his back,
resting a huge telescope over his crossed feet. With this he
purposed seeing any lion that moved within ten miles. None of the
rest of us could ever make out anything through the fearsome
weapon. Therefore, relieved from responsibility by the presence
of this Dreadnaught of a 'scope, we loafed and looked about us.
This is what we saw:
Mountains at our backs, of course-at some distance; then plains
in long low swells like the easy rise and fall of a tropical sea,
wave after wave, and over the edge of the world beyond a distant
horizon. Here and there on this plain, single hills lay becalmed,
like ships at sea; some peaked, some cliffed like buttes, some
long and low like the hulls of battleships. The brown plain
flowed up to wash their bases, liquid as the sea itself, its
tides rising in the coves of the hills, and ebbing in the valleys
between. Near at hand, in the middle distance, far away, these
fleets of the plain sailed, until at last hull-down over the
horizon their topmasts disappeared. Above them sailed too the
phantom fleet of the clouds, shot with light, shining like
silver, airy as racing yachts, yet casting here and there
exaggerated shadows below.
The sky in Africa is always very wide, greater than any other
skies. Between horizon and horizon is more space than any other
world contains. It is as though the cup of heaven had been
pressed a little flatter; so that while the boundaries have
widened, the zenith, with its flaming sun, has come nearer. And
yet that is not a constant quantity either. I have seen one edge
of the sky raised straight up a few million miles, as though some
one had stuck poles under its corners, so that the western heaven
did not curve cup-wise over to the horizon at all as it did
everywhere else, but rather formed the proscenium of a gigantic
stage.
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