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.
Now at last the lion raises his commanding voice, and one thing only is wanting to the whole nocturnal spell--the noisy trampling of timid and harassed droves of zebras and other herds of wild things. But if the ground of the velt, hardened by the burning sun, rings once more to the thundering hoof-beats of the zebras, the eye fails in the darkness, and only our ears perceive by their numberless sounds the waves of life that are surging around us; and then indeed the listener comes to full consciousness of how rich the animal-language of the Nyíka still is.... Nowhere else in the world of to-day do all the voices of the wild resound more impressively, and for him who listens to this language there is no escape from that mysterious spell--the Spell of the Elelescho!
[2] _El moran_ = the “young men,” _i.e._ Masai warriors.
[3] Dr. Richard Kandt, _Caput Nili_. (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.)
[4] I gave the skull of this specimen to the Berlin Natural History Museum.
[5] As late as the year 1859 the Masai warriors menaced the places on the coast between Tanga and Mombassa! Even in the eighties the explorers Thomson and Fischer had to submit to their demands. To that flourishing period of the Masai belongs the origin of their view that even if the Bantu Negro races have cattle, they must have been stolen from the Masai, for, as say, “God gave us in earlier days all the cattle on the face of the earth.”
[6] According to Hollis, the singular of the word is “O-‘l-leleshwa.”
[8] The pachyderms seem to feel no ill effects from the natron-bearing water; but for men the water of the lake--at least, near my camp--proved very unpleasant. Our drinking water was obtained from a small marsh near the shore of the lake.
[9] John Hanning Speke, one of the discoverers of the Victoria Nyanza, has already remarked that the Arabs know well how to manage their slaves, and to tame them like domestic animals; that they are able to entrust them with business matters, and send them out of their own dominions into foreign countries, without the slaves ever attempting to escape from their masters.