Glorious and grand, too, is the language of Nature when she herself raises her primeval voice, associated with no sound of life that we can perceive. Thus it is in the hours of storm by night, when on the plain, or in the primeval forest, or on the hill slopes, the thunder roars round the little camp, and the crackling lightning comes down in zig-zags. Then the rumbling thunder, the rushing downpour of the water-floods, the roar of the storm-wind, speak with an impressiveness that is beyond all description. Then in their hour of death the giants of the primeval forest, the mighty, venerable trees, suddenly themselves find a voice that strikes loudly on the ear: they groan in the embrace of the wind, and under its fury crash thundering to the ground. Then, when the earth and the rocks under our feet seem to shake, when the powers of Nature are let loose in all their might, when weak little man in his small tent, alone in the midst of all this violence, listens to the sounds, alone and abandoned like the sailor on a frail plank in the midst of a raging ocean, then it is that the wilderness sings its greatest, noblest, most wonderful song. The traveller may yet return to the African wilderness and hear once more the voices of the smaller denizens of the wild. The chirping of cicadas will lull him to rest, or the buzzing of the mosquitoes forbid it. Their chirping and buzzing will bear witness that these waves of life roll on untroubled and uninjured by the incoming of civilisation. But the greater voices will become rarer and rarer. Soon the trumpeting of the elephant, the roar of the lion, the bellow of the hippopotamus will be heard no longer. But to-day one can still hear all these sounds which I have described, and which our most remote ancestors listened to all day and all night in the ages when there still lived in Europe a fauna very similar to that which we find dying out in East Africa. By day and night they go forth in trees and thickets, by swamp and reed-bed. The song of birds is accompanied by the monotonous deafening chorus of the bullfrogs. Even in the traveller’s tent the crickets chirp, and the night-jar buzzes and buzzes past it, and tells and whispers of the nightly life and movement of the animal world, in its monotonous mysterious song. A jackal holds a conversation with the evening star. In the dark night the deep bass of the hyena is heard; and then it laughs aloud, in a weird, shrill, shrieking treble. This laugh, seldom uttered, but when heard making one’s heart shudder, is not a thing to forget; on feverish nights it plagues one still in memory. No one need jest about it who has not himself heard it. He who has heard it understands how the Arabs take the hyenas to be wicked men living under a spell.