Ace pointed to this fascinating essay by Caitrin Nicol, which includes in it this equally affecting excerpt by Lyall Watson:
It is a sound that sneaks up on you, something you feel rather than hear, a rumble which is more visceral than cerebral, threatening to addle your mind…. I knew that blue whales can make high-energy, low-frequency moans that last for thirty seconds or more, but I had never heard one before when watching blue whales off Baja California or Peru. I supposed that the sound of ship engines and generators might have masked it, but I hadn’t imagined that the calls would fall within our range of hearing anyway….
The sensation I was feeling on the clifftop was some sort of reverberation in the air itself. Perhaps an interference pattern set up between the whale call and its echo from the rocks below? That too seemed unlikely, and I was still puzzling over it when I realized that the whale had submerged and I was still feeling something. The strange rhythm seemed now to be coming from behind me, from the land, so I turned to look across the gorge, sweeping my gaze across the cliffs, over the great milkwood tree — and then swiftly back to the tree again, where my heart stopped….
Standing there in the shade of the tree was an elephant. A fully grown African elephant, facing left, staring out to sea! … A female with a left tusk broken off near the base, looking for all the world like the stub of a large cigar. I had never seen this elephant before, but I knew who she was, who she had to be. I recognized her from a color photograph put out by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry under the title “The Last Remaining Knysna Elephant.†This was the Matriarch herself. But what was she doing here?…
She was here because she no longer had anyone to talk to in the forest. She was standing here on the edge of the ocean because it was the next, nearest, and most powerful source of infrasound. The underrumble of the surf would have been well within her range, a soothing balm for an animal used to being surrounded, submerged, by low and comforting frequencies, by the lifesounds of a herd, and now this was the next-best thing!
My heart went out to her. The whole idea of this grandmother of many being alone for the first time in her life was tragic, conjuring up the vision of countless other old and lonely souls. But just as I was about to be consumed by helpless sorrow, something even more extraordinary took place….
The throbbing was back in the air. I could feel it, and I began to understand why. The blue whale was on the surface again, pointed inshore, resting, her blowhole clearly visible. The Matriarch was here for the whale! The largest animal in the ocean and the largest living land animal were no more than a hundred yards apart, and I was convinced that they were communicating! In infrasound, in concert, sharing big brains and long lives, understanding the pain of high investment in a few precious offspring, aware of the importance and the pleasure of complex sociality, these rare and lovely great ladies were commiserating over the back fence of this rocky Cape shore, woman to woman, matriarch to matriarch, almost the last of their kind.
I turned, blinking away the tears, and left them to it. This was no place for a mere man….