WHITE-BEARDED GNUS AND ZEBRAS TAKING REFUGE FROM THE MIDDAY SUN UNDER THE SHADE OF THE MSUALLI TREE.] I have still clearly before my eyes the picture that presented itself to me as I emerged from the over-growth of creepers on the boughs of that uprooted tree. First a shrill cry from the monkeys. In a trice the little young ones were clinging to their mothers, and with long bounds the whole crowd of them galloped away over the level ground, hidden in a cloud of dust, and disappeared on the far side of the clearing. There a good many of them halted to look back. Of all the animals known to me only the baboons and the spotted hyenas take to flight in this way. The spectacle has such a surprisingly strange and unaccustomed, almost uncanny effect, that it always recurs to me when I think of these animals. The antelopes follow the example of the fugitive baboons, after first rushing hither and thither, right and left, leaping wildly into the air. At this moment the impallah-antelopes, especially, make a splendid picture. Bounding along as if on springs of steel, they shoot up several yards high into the air. Wherever the eye turns it sees the graceful forms of these beautiful animals in all possible positions, making long bounds, some four feet high off the ground, and in every other attitude that one can imagine. But the end of all these splendid pictures, each seen for a moment, is a general stampede. Whirling clouds of dust in the far distance tell for some time longer which way the fugitives have taken. But it is not every day that such varied pictures, so richly stored with the life of the primitive animal world of the tropics, present themselves to the traveller. And it needs, too, a trained eye to enjoy all the separate impressions in their combined effect, as making up one masterpiece of Nature. But often, too, an almost too great wealth of beauty gathered together in a small space presents itself to our eyes. Thus, more especially, I keep a memory of these small idyllic lakes of the wilderness, that are hidden away here and there in the Nyíka district, and give a home to a wealth of animal life that often seems almost too abundant. We sometimes find one of the most interesting species of the larger mammalia, the hippopotamus, living here in somewhat narrow quarters, but thus more easily accessible to observation than in the great lake basins, where it lives in hundreds or thousands, but where also it can much more easily get away from the sight of the observer. It is true that one can see numerous heads emerging from the water in the distance, one can mark the thin spray of water blown from their nostrils, forming numbers of little fountain jets that glitter in the sun. But the peculiar life and activity of these giants of the animal world goes on chiefly at night, invisible to our eyes. In the smaller lakes it is all different. [Illustration: _C. G. Schillings, phot._