SUN-WASHED SPACES
A two days' march brought them clear of the woods and into a broken
country, vast, sunstrewn and silent; a beautiful desolation where the tall
grass waved in the wind, and ridge and hollow, plain and mimosa tree, led
the eye beyond, and beyond, to everlasting space.
Standing here alone, and listening, the only sound from all that great
sunlit country was the sound of the wind in the grasses near by.
Truly this place was at the very back of the world, the hinterland of the
primeval forests. Strike eastward far enough and you would sight the
snow-capped crest of Kilimanjaro, King of African mountains, sitting
snow-crowned above the vast territory to which he has given his name, and
which stretches from Lake Eyasi to the Pare Mountains. The hunters of
Kilimanjaro, which once was the home of elephants, have thinned the herds
and driven them to wander. Elephants that a hundred years ago, even fifty
years ago, were almost fearless of man, have altered their habits from the
bitter lessons they have received, and now are only to be found in the
most inaccessible places. Should they cling to more inhabited districts,
they come out of the sheltered places only by night. A man may spend years
in an elephant district without once seeing an elephant. Driven by the
necessity of food and the fear of man, the great herds wander in their
wonderful and mysterious journeys for hundreds and hundreds of miles.
Never lying down, sleeping as they stand, always on guard, dim of sight
yet keen of smell, they pass where there are trees, feeding as they go,
stripping branches of leaves. Alarmed, or seeking a new feeding place, a
herd moves in the rainy season, when the ground is soft, with the silence
and swiftness of a cloud shadow; in the dry season when the ground is
hard, the sound of them stampeding is like the drums of an army.
"Elephants," said Berselius, pointing to some bundles of dried stuff lying
near a vangueria bush. "That stuff is a bundle of bowstring hemp. They
chew it and drop it. Oh, that has been dropped a long time ago; see, there
you have elephants again."
A tree standing alone showed half its bark ripped off, tusked off by some
old bull elephant, and above the tusk marks, some fifteen feet up, could
be seen the rubbing mark where great shoulders had scratched themselves.
As they marched, making due south, Berselius in that cold manner which
never left him, and which made comradeship with the man impossible and
reduced companionship to the thinnest bond, talked to Adams about the game
they were after, telling in a few graphic sentences and not without
feeling the wonderful story of the moving herds, to whom distance is
nothing, to whom mountains are nothing, to whom the thickest jungle is
nothing. The poem of the children of the mammoth who have walked the earth
with the mastodon, who have stripped the trees wherein dwelt arboreal man,
who have wandered under the stars and suns of a million years, seen rivers
change their courses and hills arise where plains had been, and yet
remain, far strewn and thinned out, it is true, but living still. At noon
they halted and the tents were pitched for a four hours' rest.
Adams, whilst dinner was preparing, walked away by himself till the camp
was hidden by a ridge, then he stood and looked around him.
Alone, like this, the spirit of the scene appeared before him: the sun,
and wind, and sky; the vast, vast spaces of waving grass, broken by the
beds of dried-up streams, strewn here and there with mimosas and thorns,
here dim with the growth of vangueria bushes, here sharp and gray-green
with cactus; this giant land, infinite, sunlit, and silent, spoke to him
in a new language.
It seemed to Adams that he had never known freedom before.
A shadow swept by him on the grass. He looked up and watched the great
bird that had cast the shadow sailing away on the wind, dwindling to a
point, and vanishing in the dazzling blue.