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.  Crows followed the caravan in great numbers, and these reminded Owen of his gamekeeper, a solid man, six feet high, with reddish whiskers, the most opaque Englishman Owen had ever seen. “‘We must get rid of some of them,’” Owen muttered, quoting Burton. “‘Terrible destructive, them birds,’”

Among these remembrances of England, a jackal running across the path, just as a fox would in England, reminded Owen that he was in Africa; and though occasionally one meets an adder in England, one meets them much more frequently in the North of Africa.  It was impossible to say how many Owen had not seen lying in front of his horse like dead sticks.  As the cavalcade passed they would twist themselves down a hole.  As for rats, they seemed to be everywhere, and at home everywhere, with the adders and with the rabbits; any hole was good enough for the rat.  The lizards were larger and uglier than the English variety, and Owen never could bring himself to look upon them with anything but disgust—­their blunt head, the viscous jaws exuding some sort of scum; and he left them to continue their eternal siesta in the warm sand.

That evening, after passing through a succession of hills and narrow valleys, the caravan entered the southern plain, an immense perspective of twenty or thirty miles; and Owen reined up his horse and sat at gaze, watching the dim greenness of the alfa-grass striped with long rays of pale light and grey shadows.  But the extent of the plain could not be properly measured, for the sky was darkening above the horizon.