In Wildest Africa, Vol. 2 — Reading Companion

From Rifle to Camera: A Change in Pace

The most striking feature of this volume is Schillings' evolving attitude toward his subjects. He admits that in earlier years he could not have resisted killing the great bull elephants, but now he restrains himself. This is not a moral epiphany but a practical one: the photograph offers "irrefutable proof" of surprising facts. The pace of the narrative slows accordingly. Where a hunting account might rush toward the kill, Schillings lingers on the landscape—the "undulating velt-region," the "cool moisture" of the crater hollow, the paths trodden by game. He describes the process of scouting, the frustration of bad weather, the patience required to capture a single image. The reader is invited to share in the waiting, not just the action.

Landscape as Character

Schillings devotes considerable attention to the physical setting, treating it with the specificity of a field report. The western spurs of Kilimanjaro end in a high tableland, grass-grown and dotted with acacias. The Njiri marshes are almost dry in some seasons. Volcanic hills rise from the plain, one with a water-filled crater like the lakes of his native Eifel. The grass is dried by the burning sun; only xerophytes can stand the drought. These details are not mere backdrop—they shape the behavior of animals and the movements of the Masai herders. Schillings notes that the road to the crater lake was originally made by elephants and rhinoceroses, later used by Masai cattle until rinderpest devastated them. The landscape carries history, and Schillings reads it like a text.

The Voice of the Translator

Frederic Whyte's translation preserves a formal, slightly archaic English that suits the early twentieth-century scientific travelogue. Sentences are often long and periodic, with clauses stacked like geological strata: "It used to be the haunt of beasts of prey, and the smaller animals would probably seek drinking-places miles distant rather than come to this grim declivity." The vocabulary is precise—"xerophytes," "declivity," "irrefutable"—but not ostentatious. Whyte occasionally lets through a German construction, as in the phrase "the want of sunlight for days together," which gives the prose a faintly foreign rhythm. This voice, measured and patient, mirrors Schillings' own method: slow, deliberate, attentive to detail.

Readers should approach this volume not as a hunting narrative but as a naturalist's journal, where the real quarry is a clear negative or a well-composed frame. Schillings' patience is the subject as much as the wildlife. The book rewards those who read slowly, who pause over the descriptions of terrain and the mechanics of photography. The translator's voice, too, deserves attention: it is a lens through which Schillings' German observations become English prose, and it shapes the rhythm of every paragraph.