There's nothing quite so wideawake as a tropical night in Africa. At
dawn the African dove commences with his long-drawn note like a boy
blowing over the top of a bottle, one bird calling to another from the
palms and mango trees. Then the early morning songsters wake.
There is no libel more grossly unfair than that which says the birds of
Africa have no song. The yellow weaver birds sing most beautifully, as
they fly from the feathery tops of the avenue of coconut palms that line
the road to the clump of bamboos behind the hospital.
But they fly there no longer now, for our colonel, in a spasm of
sanitation, cut down this graceful swaying clump of striped bamboos for
the fear that they harboured mosquitoes. As if these few canes mattered,
when our hospital was on the banks of the reed-fringed river. Morning
songsters with voices of English thrushes and robins wake one to gaze
upon the dawn through one's mosquito net. Small bird voices, like the
chiff-chaff in May, carry on the chorus until the sun rises. Then the
bird of delirium arrives and runs up the scale to a high monotonous note
that would drive one mad, were it not that he and the dove, with his
amphoric note, are Africa all over. A neat fawn-coloured bird this, with
a long tail and dark markings on his wings.
Then as the sun rises and the early morning heat dries up the song
birds' voices, the earth and the life of the palm trees drowse in the
sunshine.
But at night, from late afternoon to three in the morning, when the life
of trees and grasses and ponds ceases for a short while before it begins
again at dawn, the air is full of the busy voices of the insect world.
Until we came south to Morogoro, to the land of mangoes, coconut, palms,
bamboos, we had known the shrill voice of cicadas and the harsh metallic
noises of crickets in grass and trees. But here we made two new
acquaintances, and charming little voices they had too. One lived in the
grass and rose leaves of our garden, for the German blacksmith who
lately occupied our hospital building had planted his garden with
"Caroline Testout" and crimson ramblers. His voice was like the tinkling
of fairy hammers upon a silver anvil. And with this fine clear note was
the elusive voice of another cricket that had such a marked
ventriloquial character that we could never tell whether he lived in the
rose bushes or in the trees. His note was the music of silver bells upon
the naked feet of rickshaw boys, the tinkle that keeps time to the soft
padding of native feet in the rickshaws of Nairobi at night. At first I
woke to think there were rickshaw boys dragging rubber-tyred carriages
along the avenues of the town, until I found that Morogoro boasted no
rickshaws and no bells for native feet.
Punctuated in all the music of fairy bands and the whirr of fairy
machinery were the incessant voices of frogs. Especially if it had
rained or were going to rain, the little frogs in trees and ponds sang
their love songs in chorus, silenced, at times, by the deep basso of a
bull frog. And often, as our heads ached and throbbed with fever at
night, we felt a very lively sympathy for the French noblesse of the
eighteenth century, who are said to have kept their peasants up at night
beating the ponds with sticks to still the strident voices of these
frogs.
With it all there is a rustling overhead in the feathery branches of the
palms in the cobwebby spaces among the leaves that give the bats of
Africa a home. A twitter of angry bat voices, shrill squeaks and
flutters in the darkness. Then stillness--of a sudden--and the ground
trembles with a far-off throbbing as a convoy of motor lorries
approaching thunders past us, rumbling over the bridge and out into the
darkness, driving for supplies.
The road beside the hospital was the old caravan route that ran from the
Congo through Central Africa and by the Great Lakes to Bagamoyo by the
sea. For centuries the Arab slaver had brought his slave caravans along
this path: it may have been fever or the phantasies of disordered
subconscious minds half awake in sleep, or the empty night thrilling to
the music of crickets, that filled our minds with fancies in the
darkness. But this road seemed alive again. For this smooth surface that
now trembles to the thunder of motor lorries seemed to echo to the soft
padding of millions of slave feet limping to the coast to fill the
harems or to work the clove plantations of his most Oriental Majesty the
Sultan of Zanzibar.