NIGHT NOISES IN WEST AFRICA.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 362, 20 May 1911, Page 7

NIGHT NOISES IN WEST AFRICA.

"BEAUTIFUL AND AWESOME."

Noises at night always occupy a place in travellers' tales. But I shall never forget the melange of beautiful and awesome sounds that I heard when in a hut about five hundred yards from the broad West African river Prah, which falls into the sea thirty miles west of Cape Coast Castle, in a rest-village—of about eight houses, no stockade except round one or two of the open above-shaped huts and wild beasts coming! to within three yards of the entrance. Jackals barked and African wolves howled, and an occasional panther came and roared with a huge purr that ended in a gigantic growl. Then would succeed an interval of silence, during which the forest trees resounded with the most symphonious "too-tooing" of what seemed like the voices of hundreds of wild doves, tut which a friend, and a resident in West Africa of twenty-four years, told me was caused by melodious bats that pass high overhead in flocks and settle over a great extent of the "bush." So wildly beautiful were these melancholy sounds, and so like artificial tones, that at first I and my friends fancifully thought -that armed bodies of Ashantis, calling to each other, were coming clown the paths to encompass Cape Coast from the flank. As one aerial voice rose in sweet and mournful cadence, another would follow in the same strain ; and others would join in, until at last thousands were calling to one another in soft silvery notes from tree to tree, ■om the river's brink, echoing to their mates far inland, until they seemed to die away in the distant dark Ashanti. Then silence supervened, and occasionally the night cuckoo would ut:er its drear monotonous notes. Presently more jactoals arrived, snarling savagely at coming on the juts of men, and probably smelling :he domestic poultry of the natives. Then I heard a hyaena ; it was unmistakable, and it laughed and laughid, and gave vent to its sneering tones until it was hoarse, in a way that people never hear even in the best regulated 'zoo. Another curious animal that I often heard in the lower branches of the trees was the basilisk. It is not lnlike the pictures of the mythical king of monsters of that name described by Herodotus, and it clings to the boughs with its long claws, while its ridged back and conical-crowned head give it a truly terrible appearance, even when dead. It is a saurian of the family Iguanidae, and its species is known as Basiliscus Mitratus ; it makes something like the noise of a jackal. Coupled with all these strange noises, there were large spiders running about the ,hut and over the dry thatch which hung down inside, making a sound like rats and mice. Such, on occasions, is a night near a river when the animals are going down to water, and it leaves behind a feeling, which I find one so often loses after much travelling, that one is indeed in a wild place "as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude 'began. When wild in woods the noble savage ran." —H,P. FitsGeraM Marriott, F.R.G.S in the "Spectator,"- j