Ewart S. Grogan

“ Then of a sudden the scene shivers and is gray: the sun has gone, and the writhing mists are paramount; a faint humming seems to permeate the world; it swells to a moan, gathers strength, intensifies, drowns even the great sound of the flighting duck, grows ever louder till the whole marsh seems to roar with sound. King mosquito rules the great Nile swamp. Dinkas are buried deep in cowdung ash; cattle stand motionless in clouds of pungent smoke; the birds have flown and left the marsh to thick-skinned hippos, four-legged fish, and the coming of the dawn. ”

“ Then follow babbling shallows, clusters of busy villages, mile upon mile of banana-groves, of fields green with maize, millet, beans, and peas, groups of laughing women balancing pitchers on their heads, lowing herds of cattle, a huge rock-torn gorge, black with forest, and the Nile, fast growing, has swept out into its long, tortuous, course which meanders through the vast alluvium of the Rutchuru plains. ”

“ Far and wide rings the plomp-plomp of rising fish. Elephants stand sphinx-like, belly-deep in weed, hippos galumph and bellow in their play. White clouds of ibis drift across the weed. Geese scream to the whistle of the flighting teal. Silently poling their way down the lanes of water are the scarce-moving forms of natives in canoes. And interwoven with it all, mystifying and enchanting, are the long woofs of mist and the kaleidoscopic dance of noon's mirage. ”

“ A small fire is crackling against the trunk of a mighty podocarpus, and the thin column of smoke creeps upward and hangs like a summer cloud in the stagnant air. In the middle of the glade a framework of sticks supports long strips of drying meat, and the unctuous odour of roasting elephant flesh tickles the nostrils of a group of vultures which are fidgeting and craning their snakelike necks on the lightning-bleached top of a towering juniper. ”

“ Alone, perched like some silly fly far up on the weather-scarred face of one of those vast volcanoes by the mighty travail of whose birth all the stupendous form of the African continent has been distorted, climatic conditions readjusted, and the comings and goings of men from the dim pre-Pharaoh days to the million generations of men as yet unborn moulded anew—alone I sat and saw the sun slide from behind the Ankoli hills and gradually bring into fierce relief the ten million features of the last great stretch of Africa's unknown. ”

“ I see a rocky gorge, fern-draped and cellar-cool, wherein a snowstorm of butterflies heave and sink upon the glistening sands, followed in their giddy maze by the brown eyes of a gorilla, which coughs its sweet content, while a mighty bull-elephant—Njojo Mkubwa of the Batwa—rubs his creaking hide against the rocks and idly fans his ears. ”

“ Here do great crocodiles lurk, and the shy okapi picks his nervous way along the beds of forest streams; ape-men haunt the glades—curious survivals of an infinite past—low-browed, hairy of limb, pathetic-faced as any dog; pigmies seek honey, or fret the testy elephant with tiny poisoned arrows; black-and-white colobus monkeys dash jabbering along the rubber vines; great apes cough and grunt; the air is heavy with mind-wasting scents ”

“ The moisture dripping from the vegetation either fed the Atlantic through the Congo or the Mediterranean through the Nile at the dictate of the morning breeze, for even as the destinies of nations are moulded by the play of the infinitesimally small, so is the form of Africa carved by the breezelets from Karissimbi's snows. ”

“ Mile upon mile of reeking forest, where the pungent sweat of hypertortured life drifts in a maze of liana-strangled trees, where death gives fresh impetus to life, where orchids blaze, where great moths flash fierce colours at the strayed sunbeam, and the tireless music of the insect life peals like an organ night and day. ”

“ There are huge banks of bottomless mud upon which ducks cluster in solid acres, pelicans squat, geese scream, and golden-crested cranes roost in such countless swarms that their night cries sound like gunfire in the distance—birds by the ten million. ”

“ Strange canoes of fibre-sewn planks drift idly on the still surface of the lake, or bustle to and fro in the deep shadows of the Katwe cliffs, which stand sheer and brisk against the stupendous mass of cloud that for ever screens the huge mysteries of the Mountains of the Moon. ”