merge from the scrub and
come forward to watch for a moment and then go away to the edge of a
ravine where his goats were browsing, and sit upon a rock, followed
by a yellow dog with a pointed face like a fox. It was pleasant,
too, to discover the tents of the tribe at a little distance, and
the next day to catch sight of a town, climbing a hill so steep that
it was matter for wonderment how camels could be driven through the
streets.

The same beautiful weather continued--blue skies in which every shade
of blue could be studied; skies filled with larks, the true English
variety, the lark which goes about in couples, mounting the blue
air, singing, as they mounted, a passionate medley of notes,
interrupted by a still more passionate cry of two notes repeated
three or four times, followed again by the same disordered cadenzas.
The robin sings in autumn, and it seemed strange to Owen to hear this
bird singing a solitary little tune just as he sings it in England--a
melancholy little tune, quite different from the lark's passionate
outpouring, just its own quaint little avowal, somewhat
autobiographical, a human little admission that life, after all, is
a very sad thing even to the robin? Why shouldn't it be? for he is a
domestic bird of sedentary habits, and not at all suited to this
African landscape. All the same, it was nice to meet him there. A
blackbird started out of the scrub, chattered, and dived into a
thicket, just as he would in Riversdale.

"The same things," Owen said, "all the world over." On passing
through a ravine an eagle rose from a jutting scarp; and looking up
the rocks, two or three hundred feet in height, Owen wondered if it
was among these cliffs the bird built its eerie, and how the young
birds were taken by the Arabs. Crows followed the caravan in great
numbers, and these reminded Owen of his gamekeeper, a solid man, six
feet high, with reddish whiskers, the most opaque Englishman Owen had
ever seen. "'We must get rid of some of them,'" Owen muttered,
quoting Burton. "'Terrible destructive, them birds,'"

Among these remembrances of England, a jackal running across the
path, just as a fox would in England, reminded Owen that he was in
Africa; and though occasionally one meets an adder in England, one
meets them much more frequently in the North of Africa. It was
impossible to say how many Owen had not seen lying in front of his
horse like dead sticks. As the cavalcade passed they would twist