The little camp is soon wrapped in silence. The weary bearers sink into deep and well-earned slumber. Only the sentries, pushed far out, are on the alert. It was but a few days since the rebel Wakamassia hillmen were a source of danger to us, and nightly precautions are not yet forgotten. The moonbeams flicker ghost-like over the lake. Night-jars give forth their songs close to the camp all round us. Strange sounds and cries ring out from the throats of the waterfowl on the lake margins, and not far away one hears the snorting of the hippopotami. Jackals and spotted hyenas prowl round the camp, betraying themselves by their voices. The hyena’s howl and jackal’s wailing bark mingle strangely with the deep bass note of a bull-hippopotamus. Here in the wilderness there is hardly any sound that is louder than the mighty voice of these giants of the water.[8] [Illustration: _C. G. Schillings, phot._ A HERD OF ZEBRAS TAKING REFUGE FROM THE HEAT OF THE MIDDAY SUN.] [Illustration: _C. G. Schillings, phot._ FLAMINGOES ON THE MARGIN OF A LAKE. THEY MUST BE VERY LONG-LIVED BIRDS, SOME OF THEM NOW LIVING IN THE COLOGNE ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS HAVE BEEN THERE THIRTY YEARS.] A strange feeling came over me. Amid all the ever-varying sensations of the last year my capacity for enjoyment, my sensitiveness to outside impressions, had been developed and enhanced. A short time since I was between life and death, struggling with the treacherous infection of fever. Now I was well. I was breathing the air some three thousand feet higher than the place where I lay ill near Victoria Nyanza. I was again in a region whose vast volcanic solitudes contrasted strongly with its abundance of highly developed organic life, and exercised a strange influence upon me. Is there such a place as Europe? Is it possible that thousands of miles away there is a centre of civilisation whose teeming millions would fain imprint their image on the whole earth, and even lay covetous hands on this far-off wilderness, and that in time this must happen? A world of which I myself am a unit! How strange that I can delight so deeply in all this wild charm! And how quickly the wishes of men change! A while ago, in the long nights of fever, I had but one desire--that my heart, my heart alone, should not be buried in a foreign soil, but be taken back to the Fatherland. And now, only a few weeks after my recovery, how different seems to me all I may hope for from Fate, and how much more complex, how much more difficult to accomplish! I yield myself up entirely to the spell of the wilderness, to the mood of the night. That was ten years ago, before the Europeans had banished it--when it ached on the senses like the nocturne of some great tone-poet. But I know well that to-day it is no longer in existence; Lake Nakuro is now only a lake like any other, and the railway whistle wakes its echoes.