David Livingstone

“ It is, indeed, well calculated to inspire fear if you hear it in combination with the tremendously loud thunder of that country, on a night so pitchy dark that every flash of the intensely vivid lightning leaves you with the impression of stone-blindness, while the rain pours down so fast that your fire goes out, leaving you without the protection of even a tree, or the chance of your gun going off. ”

“ Very curious are the effects of African fever on certain minds. Cheerfulness vanishes, and the whole mental horizon is overcast with black clouds of gloom and sadness. The liveliest joke cannot provoke even the semblance of a smile. The countenance is grave, the eyes suffused, and the few utterances are made in the piping voice of a wailing infant. An irritable temper is often the first symptom of approaching fever. At such times a man feels very much like a fool, if he does not act like one. Nothing is right, nothing pleases the fever- stricken victim. ”

“ The drought drives all the game to the river to drink. An hour's walk on the right bank, morning or evening, reveals a country swarming with wild animals: vast herds of pallahs, many waterbucks, koodoos, buffaloes, wild pigs, elands, zebras, and monkeys appear; francolins, guinea-fowls, and myriads of turtledoves attract the eye in the covers, with the fresh spoor of elephants and rhinoceroses, which had been at the river during the night. ”

“ Another climber is like the leaf of an aloe, but convoluted as strangely as shavings from the plane of a carpenter. It is dark green in colour, and when its bark is taken off it is beautifully striated beneath, lighter and darker green, like the rings of growth on wood; still another is a thin string with a succession of large knobs, and another has its bark pinched up all round at intervals so as to present a great many cutting edges. ”

“ Let us imagine an English village standing in a field of this sort, bounded only by the horizon, and enemies setting fire to a line of a mile or two, by running along with bunches of burning straw in their hands, touching here and there the inflammable material,—the wind blowing towards the doomed village—the inhabitants with only one or two old muskets, but ten to one no powder,—the long line of flames, leaping thirty feet into the air with dense masses of black smoke—and pieces of charred grass falling down in showers. ”

“ In the quietest parts of the forest there is heard a faint but distinct hum, which tells of insect joy. One may see many whisking about in the clear sunshine in patches among the green glancing leaves; but there are invisible myriads working with never-tiring mandibles on leaves, and stalks, and beneath the soil. They are all brimful of enjoyment. Indeed, the universality of organic life may be called a mantle of happy existence encircling the world, and imparts the idea of its being caused by the consciousness of our benignant Father's smile on all the works of His hands. ”

“ Moenembagg said, "Your people must not steal, we never do," which is true: blood in a small quantity was then conveyed from one to the other by a fig-leaf. "No stealing of fowls or of men," said the chief: "Catch the thief and bring him to me, one who steals a person is a pig," said Mohamad. Stealing, however, began on our side, a slave purloining a fowl, so they had good reason to enjoin honesty on us! They think that we have come to kill them: we light on them as if from another world: no letters come to tell who we are, or what we want. ”

“ The Shire marshes support prodigious numbers of many kinds of water-fowl. An hour at the mast-head unfolds novel views of life in an African marsh. Near the edge, and on the branches of some favourite tree, rest scores of plotuses and cormorants, which stretch their snake-like necks, and in mute amazement turn one eye and then another towards the approaching monster. ”

“ On taking alarm they erect their slender tails in the air, and trot off swiftly in a straight line, keeping their bodies as steady as a locomotive on a railroad. A mile beyond the pool three cow buffaloes with their calves come from the woods, and move out into the plain. A troop of monkeys, on the edge of the forest, scamper back to its depths on hearing the loud song of Singeleka, and old surly fellows, catching sight of the human party, insult it with a loud and angry bark. ”

“ The hippopotamus, having selected some still reach of the river to spend the day, rises out of the bottom, where he has been enjoying his morning bath after the labours of the night on shore, blows a puff of spray from his nostrils, shakes the water out of his ears, puts his enormous snout up straight and yawns, sounding a loud alarm to the rest of the herd, with notes as of a monster bassoon. ”