The sun is setting. It is time for me to come down from my hill and return to my camp. The sun goes to his rest in flaming splendour, there is a glowing radiance of violet and purple light; soon dark night will surround me. Thoughtfully I tread my homeward way, with my mind richly stored with impressions, but anxious as to my efforts to describe all that I have seen, and doubtful as to my success.
“To have passed a thousand and more days, a thousand and more nights in the wilderness with a great longing in my heart in some way to grasp and make my own all the splendour I have seen and all its charm; to have again and again delighted in the beauty of the Nyíka: this does not make me capable of reproducing it. And even if after many decades of years I could fully comprehend it, I should never succeed in reproducing it in its full significance and bringing it home to the minds of those who have never looked upon it with their own eyes.”
Descriptions of things similar to those that I have told of in inadequate words in these slight sketches of the Nyíka district of East Africa may be read of other regions of our earth. The life and activity of the Arctic fauna, of those gigantic creatures of to-day, the whales, and of the Polar bears, the musk oxen, the wild reindeer, the walruses, the seals--those most sagacious creatures--and the life of many other animal forms--all these together are waiting for the hand that will describe them in word and picture and put on enduring record for all time this changing life. Thus only will a new existence be given to those forms of life for which the sentence “Vae Victis!” has gone forth.
May the master soon appear who will be able to give us a noble and true picture of the East African Nyíka in all its vast proportions. For, as the night is now descending on the wilderness, so will an everlasting night soon come down upon all the life and movement that I have tried so inadequately to describe in merest outline.
HARTEBEESTS IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF THE WESTERN ’NDJIRI SWAMPS.]
[Illustration: A PAGE OF MY DIARY SHOWING HOW I NOTED MY MOVEMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS BY MEANS OF A ROUGH MAP.]
About a century ago the “Twilight of the Gods” (_Götterdämmerung_) began for all the wild life of the Cape region of South Africa. Even before these hundred years had run out it was ended; this abundant flood of life had disappeared....