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.
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