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. On this stage they had piled great heaps of saffron yellow
clouds, and struck shafts of yellow light, and filled the spaces
with the lurid portent of a storm-while the twenty thousand foot
mountains below, crouched whipped and insignificant to the earth.
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