ct ratio to the speed of
our advance. And when later the whole safari, loads on heads, marched
inconsiderately through their jungle! We happened to be hunting on a
parallel course a half mile away, and we could trace accurately the
progress of our men by the outraged shrieks, chatterings, appeals to
high heaven for at least elemental justice to the monkey people.
Often, too, we would come on concourses of the big baboons. They
certainly carried on weighty affairs of their own according to a fixed
polity. I never got well enough acquainted with them to master the
details of their government, but it was indubitably built on patriarchal
lines. When we succeeded in approaching without being discovered, we
would frequently find the old men baboons squatting on their heels in a
perfect circle, evidently discussing matters of weight and portent. Seen
from a distance, their group so much resembled the council circles
of native warriors that sometimes, in a native country, we made that
mistake. Outside this solemn council, the women, young men and children
went about their daily business, whatever that was. Up convenient low
trees or bushes roosted sentinels.
We never remained long undiscovered. One of the sentinels barked
sharply. At once the whole lot loped away, speedily but with a curious
effect of deliberation. The men folks held their tails in a proud high
sideways arch; the curious youngsters clambered up bushes to take a
hasty look; the babies clung desperately with all four feet to the thick
fur on their mothers' backs; the mothers galloped along imperturbably
unheeding of infantile troubles aloft. The side hill was bewildering
with the big bobbing black forms.
In this lower country the weather was hot, and the sun very strong. The
heated air was full of the sounds of insects; some of them comfortable,
like the buzzing of bees, some of them strange and unusual to us. One
cicada had a sustained note, in quality about like that of our own
August-day's friend, but in quantity and duration as the roar of a train
to the gentle hum of a good motor car. Like all cicada noises it did not
usurp the sound world, but constituted itself an underlying basis, so
to speak. And when it stopped the silence seemed to rush in as into a
vacuum!
We had likewise the aeroplane beetle. He was so big that he would have
made good wing-shooting. His manner of flight was the straight-ahead,
heap-of-buzz, plenty-busy, don't-stop-a-minute-or
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