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.
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