At night, too, he is seconded, as I have already mentioned, by his more timid cousin, with an ever repeated “Kí-kü-kü--kí-kü-kü,” that resounds monotonously in the distance.
There is a strange charm in continually hearing these voices again and again, without knowing the little singers; and a triumph at last in making out which they are.
“During a sleepless night,” said Richard Wagner, “I once went out upon the balcony of my window on the Grand Canal at Venice. As if in a deep dream the legend-haunted city of the lagoons lay spread out before me under the darkness. Out of the soundless silence there came the loud call of a gondolier waking up just then on his boat ... then from the farthest distance the same call answered back along the dark canal; I recognised the old, melancholy, melodious sounds, doubtless as old as the canals of Venice and their people. After a solemn pause the far-sounding dialogue at last began, and it seemed to me to melt into harmony, till the notes heard close at hand and coming more softly from afar died away as sleep came back to me again.”
Who could describe in such noble words the impression made upon our minds by the spell of the sounds and songs of the nocturnal wildness, and all its strange and beautiful music? All that at first is strange there, and even alarming, comes gradually to be something one loves intimately. Shall I ever be able to listen to it all again? Who knows? Let me try then to make some record of what I have so often heard, and in these few sentences attempt to give some faint echo of these once familiar voices.
We are in the midst of the great forest. Giant podocarpus and juniper trunks rise up towards the sky. It is cool and shady all around us here; we breathe a moist, and not unfrequently a musty air. The sunlight plays only upon the tops of these giants of the primeval woods, and can but scantily illumine the almost bare ground below them, sending here and there shimmering, dancing rays of light amongst the tree-trunks. High overhead the giants arch their branches, interlacing them in a vast living roof of green. Only where clearings make a break in the mass of trees, a sea of light floods all the ground--a flood of light so strong that our eyes, accustomed to the obscurity, the mysterious semi-darkness of the forest, are dazzled, and there comes to our minds involuntarily recollections of old Bible pictures, in which such floods of light are shown streaming down from heaven to earth. A confusion of trees, creepers and undergrowth, with amidst it uprooted tree-trunks lying mouldering away; the earth black, and often marshy; no road or way far and wide, but only here and there the tracks and beaten paths made by the elephants and rhinoceroses that have roamed the old forest since primeval times.