One hears much about the “silence of the forest,” but the tropical forest is not silent to the keen observer. The hum and murmur of hundreds of busy insect tribes make populous the twilight shadows that reign under the primeval growth. I hear the grinding of millions of mandibles, the furious hiss of a tribe just alarmed or about to rush to battle, millions of tiny wings rustling through the nether air, the march of an insect tribe under the leaves, the startling leap of an awakened mantis, the chirp of some eager and garrulous cricket, the buzz of an ant-lion, the roar of a bullfrog. Add to these the crackle of twigs, the fall of leaves, the dropping of nut and berry, the occasional crash of a branch, or the constant creaking and swaying of the forest tops as the strong wind brushes them or the gentle breezes awake them to whispers. Though one were blind and alone in the midst of a real tropical forest, one’s sense of hearing would be painfully alive to the fact that an incredible number of minute industries, whose number one could never hope to estimate, were active in the shades. Silence is impossible in a tropical forest. About ten o’clock, as we cowered in most miserable condition under the rude, leafy shelters we had hastily thrown up, the people of the wooded bluffs of Iryamba, opposite the Lowwa confluence, came over to see what strange beings were those who had preferred the secrecy of the uninhabited grove to their own loud roystering society. Stock still we sat cowering in our leafy coverts, but the mild reproachful voice of Katembo, our cannibal interpreter, was heard labouring in the interests of peace, brotherhood, and goodwill. The rain pattered so incessantly that I could from my position only faintly hear Katembo’s voice pleading, earnestly yet mildly, with his unsophisticated brothers of Iryamba, but I felt convinced from the angelic tones that they would act as a sedative on any living creature except a rhinoceros or a crocodile. The long-drawn bleating sound of the word “Sen-nen-neh,” which I heard frequently uttered by Katembo, I studied until I became quite as proficient in it as he himself. Peace was finally made between Katembo on the one hand and the canoemen of Iryamba on the other, and they drew near to gaze at their leisure at one of the sallow white men, who with great hollow eyes peered, from under the vizor of his cap, on the well-fed bronze-skinned aborigines. After selling us ten gigantic plantains, 13 inches long and 3 inches in diameter, they informed us that we had halted on the shore of Luru, or Lulu, in the uninhabited portion of the territory of Wanpuma, a tribe which lived inland; that the Lowwa came from the east, and was formed of two rivers, called the Lulu from the north-east, and the Lowwa from the south-east; that about a day’s journey up the Lowwa river was a great cataract, which was “very loud.”