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Updated: June 23, 2025
The thick river jungle gave cover to such animals as the bushbuck, leopard, the beautiful colobus, some of the tiny antelope, waterbuck, buffalo and rhinoceros. Among the thorn and acacia trees of the hillsides one was certain of impalla, eland, diks-diks, and giraffes.
The beast let go and fell like a plummet. "Good shot," said I to myself. Fifty feet down the colobus seized a limb and went skipping away through the branches as lively as ever. In a moment he stopped to look back, and by good luck I landed him through the body. When we retrieved him we found that the first shot had not hit him at all!
For gaudily marked beasts the colobus were extraordinarily difficult to see. This was in no sense owing to any far-fetched application of protective colouration; but to the remarkable skill the animals possessed in concealing themselves behind apparently the scantiest and most inadequate cover. Fortunately for us our boys' ability to see them was equally remarkable.
Therefore we evolved a method productive of the maximum noise, row, barked shins, thorn wounds, tumbles, bruises-and colobus! It was very simple. We took about twenty boys into the jungle with us, and as soon as we caught sight of a colobus we chased him madly. That was all there was to it.
Round the ankles he wore black fringes of hair, and, projecting from the upper portion of the calves, to which they were attached, were long spurs like spikes, from which flowed down tufts of the beautiful black and waving hair of the Colobus monkey.
All M'booley's attendants were the giddiest and gaudiest savages we had yet seen, with more colobus fur, sleighbells, polished metal, ostrich plumes, and red paint than would have fitted out any two other royal courts of the jungle. The women too were wealthy and opulent without limit.
We may suspect that a hand as perfect as that of man would have been disadvantageous for climbing; for the most arboreal monkeys in the world, namely, Ateles in America, Colobus in Africa, and Hylobates in Asia, are either thumbless, or their toes partially cohere, so that their limbs are converted into mere grasping hooks.
A silence dwelt there, a different silence from that of the veldt at night; compounded of a few simple elements, such as the faint, incessant drip of hidden waters and occasional loud, hollowly echoing noises such as the bark of a colobus or the scream of a hyrax. There were birds, rare, flashing, brilliant, furtive birds, but they said nothing.
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