It may seem that I myself am not quite guiltless of such misdeeds. It is true that I named an island, that resort of the wild buffaloes in the Pangani River, “Heck Island,” in honour of Professor Ludwig Heck. But the island had till then no name whatever. One feels sad, on glancing over the map of Africa, to note the degradation of so many old traditional names, which is in no way justified, and is a sign of the hasty and violent introduction of civilised life. “The Boers are not people who think much about natural history,” says a writer somewhere. And in fact, through their agency, the euphonious names of the various wild species of South Africa are now to a great extent already obsolete. They hastily gave vulgar-sounding names of their own to the wild animals.[39] Thus the oryx antelope became the “gemsbock,” and the cow-antelope, because it was tenacious of life and difficult to kill, the “hartebeest.” The gnu, on account of its wildness, was called the “wildebeest,” the bustard the, “pauw,”[40] the hyena the “wolf,” and the giraffe--incredible though, it may seem--the “kameel”! Hand in hand with this went the changing of place-names: so we read of “Hartebeests Fontein,” “Olifants River,” “Kameeldoorn,” “Zwartkop,” and we have a whole series of unpleasant, and sometimes utterly ugly names by the introduction of which the beautiful aboriginal names of various places have become obsolete. Thus not only do the primitive inhabitants of the land disappear, but their names, too, are blown away upon the wind. Countless are the voices that resound by day in the Nyíka. But by night these voices speak still more mysteriously and wonderfully to him who listens to them, bringing him into still closer union with nature. From the multitude of these voices I choose a few only. Old memories come back to me! It is in the year 1896. I have just landed, and am sitting in my night shooting-encampment by an inlet of the sea near Dar-es-Salaam. A concert of the voices of nocturnal birds mingles with the sharp buzz of the mosquitoes. Again and again one hears a strange cry. Unspeakably sad and monotonous, this peculiar sound rings out over the waters of the inlet; in the distance a changing answer comes back in response to it. [Illustration: _C. G. Schillings, phot._ FLIGHT OF SANDFOWL.] I did not then suspect _that it would take me nearly a year_ to be absolutely certain that this sound was uttered by an extremely shy and restless kind of cuckoo!