It shone across Lake Tanganyika to Mount Kungwe beyond—the holy mountain whose priests were solitary, rogue-male baboons, whose acolytes were bounding bands of screeching hyrax. The expedition would have heard the eerie cries of these dassies or rock rabbits, one of the most extraordinary sounds of the animal kingdom. As the naturalist Richard Estes memorably puts it, ‘the call starts with a series of spaced cracking sounds, likened to the rusted hinge of a huge gate slowly opening, followed by a series of expiring screams suggesting a soul in torment’. Despite the shower that had greeted the expedition, the rains seemed to be holding off a little. The weather was glorious, in fact; the sun’s rays made the high sandstone and granite cliffs of the lake’s precipitous shores gleam like shields of gold. The foliage that clothed the cliffs luxuriated in its own greenness. Here and there the bluffs were broken by a pebble or small sand beach, upon which dugout canoes were drawn up, carved from huge trunks with axe and adze and infinite labour.
What do You think about 2004 - Mimi And Toutou Go Forth?
