Part 10

At Badámuni, the fertile fields are brightened with springs, which feed a couple of lakes, connected by a canal. Notwithstanding this channel of intercommunication, one of these lakes is of fresh water; the other brackish, and strongly impregnated with natron. It is noticeable that in this region all the valleys and all the mountain-chains run from north-east to south-west, and the direction of the two lakes is the same. Their margin is fringed with papyrus, except that at the point where the water turns brackish the papyrus is succeeded by the kumba, the pith of which is edible. Dr. Barth’s two attendants, born on the shores of the Tchad, immediately recognized this species of reed as growing in a similar manner at the point where that great inland sea touches the basins of nature that surround it. It is a curious circumstance that while the lake of fresh water is of a bright blue, and calm and smooth as a mirror, the other is green as the sea, and heaves to and fro in constant commotion, rolling its foamy waves to the beach, which they strew with marine weeds.

The town of Zindu is protected by a rampart and ditch. Its aspect is remarkable: a mass of rock rises in the western quarter; and outside the walls stony ridges run in all directions, throwing forth a myriad crystal streams, which fertilize the tobacco-fields, and secure for the immediate neighbourhood an exceptional fertility. The landscape is enlivened by frequent clumps of date-palms and by the huts of the Touaregs, who conduct a brisk trade in salt. To the south extends an immense piece of ground, utilized, at the time of Dr. Barth’s visit, as a garden of acclimatization. It is easy, let us say, to define the ground-plan of Zindu, but not to depict the stir and movement of which it is the centre, limited as that activity may be, compared with the feverish and far-reaching life of the industrial centres of Europe. Zindu has no other manufacture than that of indigo; nevertheless, its commercial energy is so great that it may justly be termed “the port of the Soudan.”

Here Dr. Barth received the welcome supply of a thousand dollars, which, not to excite suspicion, had been carefully concealed in a couple of sugar barrels. He was enabled, therefore, to purchase the articles necessary for barter or gifts in his expedition to Timbúktu, such as red, white, and yellow burnouses, turbans, cloves, cutlery, beads, and looking-glasses; and on the 30th of January, 1853, he resumed his march.

The country he had to traverse was the scene of incessant warfare between the Fulbi and the independent tribes. At the outset he met with some salt merchants from A’ir, whose picturesque encampments would have delighted an artist’s eye, but did not add to the security of the roads. He arrived in safety, however, on the 5th of February, at Kátséna, and took up his quarters in a residence specially assigned to him. The house was spacious; but so full of ants, that, having rested himself for an hour on a bank of clay, he found that the freebooters had climbed the wall, constructed covered galleries right up to his person, and delivered a combined attack upon his shirt, in which they had eaten large holes.

The governor of Kátséna gave our traveller a courteous reception, and deigned to accept with evident satisfaction the burnouses, cafton, cup, two loaves of sugar, and pistol, which Dr. Barth offered him. The pistol gave him so much pleasure that he asked for a second; and, of course, a refusal was impossible. Thenceforth he ate and drank and walked and slept with his two pistols in his belt, and terrified everybody who approached him by snapping caps in their face. It happened that, at this time, the ghaladima of Sikoto, inspector of Kátséna, was in the town collecting tribute. He was a frank and simple-natured man, neither very generous nor very intelligent, but of benevolent disposition and sociable character. Dr. Barth purchased some silk and cotton stuffs from the looms of Mepè and Kanó, and being very anxious to pursue his journey, waited for the ghaladima to set out, in order to enjoy the advantage of his escort. It was on the 21st of March that this high official, accompanied by our traveller, took his departure. The governor attended them as far as the limits of his jurisdiction, and they had a numerous guard; while, as a further protection against mishaps, they steered to the south, instead of to the west, in which direction war was raging.

It was the happy time of spring; a bloom was on the earth, and a light and perfume in the air; nature put on her greenest attire; the alleluba, the parkia, the cucifera, the bombyx rose in masses of foliage. The country through which the travellers rode was fair and fertile, populous and well cultivated; the pastures echoed with the low of cattle; the fields rejoiced in profuse crops of yams and tobacco. In the district of Maja, cotton, indigo, potatoes were grown on a very large scale. Beyond Kuruyá, a town of 5000 to 6000 souls, the fertility of the land increased, if such increase were possible; the many-rooted banyan, or Indian fig-tree, displayed its colossal splendour:—

“Irregularly spread, Fifty straight columns propped its lofty head; And many a long depending shoot, Seeking to strike its root, Straight, like a plummet, grew towards the ground; Some on the lower boughs, which curved their way, Fixing their bearded fibres, round and round, With many a ring and wild contortion wound; Some to the passing wind, at times, with sway Of gentle motion moving; Others of younger growth, unmoved, were hung Like stone-drops from the cavern’s fretted height.”

Bassiaparkia, sorghum, and millet were abundant. But at Kulfi the travellers reached the limit which divides the Mohammedans from the heathens—civilization (imperfect and undeveloped, if you will, but not wholly without a respect for law and order) and barbarism. As Dr. Barth advanced, he seemed to pass from spring to winter; cultivation disappeared; villages ruined and silent bore witness to the desolating work of war; and it was only by the cattle browsing in the scanty pastures that he knew the land was not entirely deserted. At Zekka, a town of some importance, with wall and ditch, he separated from the ghaladima, and, through a dense forest, pushed forward to the ruins of Moniya. He had intended to halt there, but an armed force had encamped at Moniya on the preceding evening, and he retreated into the shelter of the forest until the morning. A day’s march brought him to Zyrmi, a considerable town, the governor of which was formerly chief of the whole province of Zanfara.

On the 31st of March, he stood on the border of the Gúndúmi Desert, of the passage of which Major Clapperton has left so exciting a narrative. It is passable only by a forced march. Dr. Barth began by striking too far to the south, and lost valuable time in the midst of an impervious jungle. Recovering the direct track, he marched all that day, all that night, without seeing any sign of human life, and until the middle of the following day, when he met some horsemen who had been sent forward to meet him, with vessels of water. Two miles further, and he could see the village where the Emir Aliyú had pitched his camp; he was then at war with the people of Gober. For thirty hours he and his followers had marched without a halt; they were completely spent, and the men, in their absolute weariness, fell prostrate upon the ground. The intrepid Barth rallied his energies; his excitement dispelled the sense of fatigue; and he searched his baggage for some valuable gift to the Emir, who was to depart on the following day, for upon him and his favour the success of his enterprise wholly depended. The day glided by, and he had begun to despair of being admitted to an audience; but in the evening the Emir sent him an ox, four fat sheep, and four hundred parcels of rice, and a message to the effect that he awaited his visit. It must be owned that some of these barbaric potentates do things right royally!

Dr. Barth entered the august presence. The Emir immediately seized him by the hand, made him sit down, and interrupted him when he began to excuse himself for not having visited Sokotó before he went to Kúkáwa. His two requests, for the Emir’s safe-conduct as far as Timbúktu, and a royal letter guaranteeing the lives and property of Englishmen visiting his territories, he received very favourably; affirming that his sole thought was for the welfare of humanity, and, consequently, he desired to promote the friendly intercourse of all nations. Next day Barth had another interview, and offered a second supply of presents. He describes the Emir as a strongly built man, of average stature, with a round, full, but not unpleasant face.

On the 4th of April, with the royal letter, of which he had dictated the terms, and a hundred thousand kurdis which the prince had generously sent to him to defray his expenses during his absence, he took up his residence at Vurno, the Emir’s usual abode. The unsavoury condition of the town, which was traversed by a _cloaca_ more disgusting even than those of Italy, surprised and shocked him. Outside the walls, the Gulbi-n-rima formed several basins of stagnant water in the middle of a plain, where the traveller’s camels sadly pined for pasture. The frontiers of three provinces—Kebbi, Adar, and Gober—meet in this arid plain, which, however, after the rainy season, wears a completely different aspect.

The town became more and more deserted; daily its notables departed to join the Emir; though, as a rule, these warriors cared only for their own pleasure, and would sell their weapons for a dram of kola-nut wine. In no part of Negroland did Dr. Barth see less military ardour or more physical depression. Meanwhile, he amused himself by collecting topographical details, studying the history of the country, and making excursions in the neighbourhood; among others to Sokotó, on the river Bugga. It was not until the 23rd of April that the Emir returned to his capital, after an expedition which, if not glorious, had been at least successful. Always generous towards Dr. Barth, he had invited him to meet him, and king and traveller went together to the palace. On the same day, Barth made him a present of a musical box, which appears to be the prize most eagerly coveted by African potentates. The Emir, in his rapture, summoned his grand vizier to see and hear the marvel; but the mysterious box, affected by the climate and the length of the journey it had undergone, refused to pour forth its melodious treasures. However, after a day or two’s labour, Dr. Barth succeeded in repairing it, and releasing its imprisoned streams of music. Who shall describe the Emir’s excess of joy? He proved the sincerity of his gratitude by immediately giving Dr. Barth a commendatory letter to his nephew, the chief of Gando, and the long-expected permission to depart.

Leaving Vurno on the 8th of May, Dr. Barth reached Gando on the 17th. It was the capital of another Fulbi chief, scarcely less powerful than the Emir, whose protection was of the greatest importance to the traveller, because both banks of the Niger were within his territory. It was not obtained without persevering effort—and many gifts, besides frequent bribes to an Arab consul, who had contrived to make himself indispensable to the feeble prince.

On the 4th of June our indefatigable explorer entered the deep valleys of Kebbi, which, in the rainy season, are converted into extensive rice-fields. At Kombara, the governor hospitably sent him all the constituents of a first-class Soudanian repast, from the sheep to the grains of salt and the Dodua cake. Gaumaché, formerly a thriving town, is now a village of slaves. A similarly fatal change has passed over Yara; formerly rich and industrious, rank weeds now grow in its silent streets. But life and death lie cheek by jowl in these fertile regions; and to the ruined towns and deserted villages immediately succeed prolific rice-fields, shaded by clumps of trees.

The whole country was overshadowed by the thunder-clouds of war; yet the traveller passed continuously through plantations of yams, and cotton, and papyrus, whose fresh green foliage waved above the walls. He halted at Kola, where the governor could dispose of seventy matchlocks and the men who handled them; an important personage in the disturbed condition of the country, whom it was politic to visit. The sister of this lord of warriors presented Dr. Barth with a fine fat goose—an addition to his dietary which rejoiced him greatly. As he approached Jogirma, the three sons of its chief came forth to salute him in their father’s name. It proved to be a much more considerable town than the traveller had expected, and the palace was a spacious and even imposing building, in its architecture recalling the characters of the Gothic style. The population numbered seven to eight thousand souls, whom civil discord had reduced to a pitiful extremity. It was with no little difficulty that Dr. Barth obtained even a supply of millet.

On the 10th he entered a beautiful forest, where the air was heavy with the sweet odours of flowering trees; but the place is noted for its insalubrity. Dr. Barth was compelled to remain there for twenty-four hours, one of his camels having gone astray; and this circumstance appeared so extraordinary, that the neighbouring peasants were in the habit of referring to him as “the man who passed a whole day in the deadly desert.”

On a quadrangular eminence, about thirty feet high, in the valley of Fogha—an eminence built up of refuse—stands a village with some resemblance to the ancient town of Assyria. The inhabitants extract salt from the black mud out of which their little hillock rises. There are other villages of a similar character. The condition of the population is most wretched; they suffer continually from the forays of the robbers of Dendina.

After a march of two or three miles over a rocky soil, sprinkled with bushes and brushwood, Dr. Barth, with intense satisfaction, caught the glimmer of water, as if the sun were lighting up a broad mirror, and rapidly pushing forward, came, in an hour’s time, to Say, a ferry on the great river of the Soudan—the river which has divided with the Nile the curiosity of geographers, and attracted the enterprise of the adventurous; the river which, perhaps, surpasses the Nile in its promise of future commercial industry; the river which we associate with the names of so many heroic travellers, from Mungo Park to Cameron,—the Niger.

III.

The Niger—all the various names of which (Joliba, Mayo, Eghirrau, Isa, Kuara, Baki-a-rua) signify one and the same thing, _the River_—is about seven hundred yards broad at the Say ferry, and flows from north-north-east to south-south-west with a velocity of three miles an hour. The left bank has an elevation of about thirty feet; the right bank is low, and crowned with a town of considerable size. The traffic is incessant; Fulbis and Sourays, with their asses and oxen, continually pass to and fro. The boats in use are constructed of two hollow trunks of trees, fastened together, and measure a length of forty feet and a breadth of four feet and a half. With feelings of a mingled character Dr. Barth crossed this stately river, the exploration of which has necessitated the sacrifice of so many noble lives, and entered the busy town of Say. Its walls form a quadrilateral of fourteen hundred yards; the houses of the inhabitants, all built of reeds except the governor’s, are scattered in groups over the area they enclose. In the rainy season, a hollow or valley, which cuts across it from north to south, is filled with water, which impedes communication, and renders the place insalubrious. When the river is flooded, the town is entirely inundated, and all its inhabitants are compelled to migrate. The market of Say is not well provided: the supply of grain is small, of onions _nil_, of rice _nil_, though the soil is well adapted to their cultivation; of cotton, however, there is always a large quantity; and Say will prove an important position for Europeans as soon as the great river route of Western Africa begins to be utilized.

Dr. Barth was told by the governor—who had the manners of a Jew, but was evidently born of a slave-mother—that he should welcome with joy a European vessel bringing to the town the many articles its inhabitants needed. He was astonished to find that the traveller was not a trader; and believing that only some very powerful motive could induce any man to undertake such an expedition, he grew alarmed at the possibility of treacherous and insidious designs, and requested him to leave the place. Dr. Barth was by no means unwilling, and on the following day left behind him the Niger, which separates the explored regions of Negroland from the unexplored, and eagerly directed his course towards the mysterious zone which stretched before him.

He had crossed the low swampy island occupied by the town of Say, and the western branch of the river, at that season entirely dry, when a great storm of thunder and rain broke upon him, and his progress was arrested by the rolling clouds of sand which the wind accumulated in his path. After a halt of three hours his march was resumed, though the soil was flooded with water to a depth of several inches. The country through which he passed had been colonized by the Sourays; it is a dependency of the province of Guinea, and the natives were at war both with the colonists and the Fulbi. Thence he entered a well-cultivated district, where the Fulbi, who regard the cow as the most useful member of the animal world, breed large herds of cattle. The scenery was varied by thickets of mimosas, with here and there a baobab or a tamarisk. More attractive to the traveller, because more novel, were the numerous furnaces, six or seven feet high, used for casting iron.

The ground broke up into great irregularities; ridges of rock ran in all directions; formations of gneiss and mica schist predominated, with rare and beautiful varieties of granite. There, through banks of twenty feet in height, picturesque and rocky, flowed the deep waters of the Sirba. To effect the passage, Dr. Barth’s followers could obtain only some bundles of reeds; the chief and all the inhabitants of the village sitting calmly on the bank, and watching their operations with lively interest. The men had expressive countenances, with effeminate features; long plaited hair, which fell upon the shoulders; a pipe in their mouths; and, for attire, a blue shirt and wide blue trousers. The women were dumpy and ill proportioned; they wore numerous collars, and pearls in their ears; their bosom and legs were naked.

Another storm overtook the travellers, and converted the jungles through which they wound their way into a wide expanse of water. The solitariness of the land was broken at one point by a village, charmingly enclosed within a quickset hedge; fields of maize were succeeded by a tract of forest; then they entered a populous district, where the loaded camels laboured heavily through the clayey soil. At Sibba, where the governor, standing at the gate, was explaining to his people certain verses of the Koran, Dr. Barth was handsomely lodged in a hut newly built, with walls excellently polished, and quite an attractive and refreshing appearance. But, in life, there is always a flavour of wormwood in the cup of joy; appearances are proverbially deceitful; and Dr. Barth’s beautiful abode proved to be a nest of ants, which committed wholesale depredations on his baggage.

The day after his arrival chanced to be the last of the great Mohammedan feast of the Ramadan. That it was to be a day of festival was announced at earliest dawn by the sound of merry music; the Fulbi streamed forth from their houses, clad in white chemises, as a sign of the white purity of their faith; and the governor paraded through the town at the head of a _cortége_ of forty horsemen. As the cadi showed an inclination to represent Dr. Barth in the unwelcome capacity of a sorcerer, he deemed it prudent to distribute a largess among the people of the procession.

He arrived at Doré, the chief town of Libtako, on the 12th of July. The soil is dry, and troops of gazelles frolic about the arid plain which borders on the market-place. The market, on the occasion of Dr. Barth’s visit, was frequented by four or five hundred persons, who were buying or selling salt, and cotton stuffs, and copper vessels, and corn, and kola-nuts, and asses. The inhabitants of Doré are partial to ornaments made of copper; and Dr. Barth noticed two young girls wearing in their hair a copper device of a horseman, sword in hand and pipe in mouth. The pipe, be it observed, is in great request among the Sourays, who seem to be of the opinion of Lord Lytton, that “he who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refused himself the softest consolation, next to that which comes from heaven.”

Beyond Doré the country was a network of rivers and morasses. Buffaloes were exceedingly numerous. A venomous fly, very rare to the east of the Soudan, seriously annoyed Dr. Barth’s cattle. It was the wet season; rain descended perpetually, as if the floodgates of heaven had been opened, and water was everywhere—in front, in rear, on either side; water, water, water! For quiet English gentlemen, living at home at ease, or occasionally indulging in a railway journey of a few hundred miles, in a comfortable carriage, through fields well cultivated and well drained, where rivers seldom break their bounds, or if they do, never accomplish greater injury than the overflowing of a green meadow or two, it is almost impossible to conceive the difficulty, and even danger, of traversing the African plains in the rainy season, of conveying heavy baggage through leagues upon leagues of swamps, which the unloaded camel finds it laborious to cross. More than once Dr. Barth was afraid that his horse, in spite of its robust vigour, would fail to extricate its limbs from the deep mud, and sink with its rider in the slough. So tremendous are the rains, that in a single night they have been known to sweep away the fourth part of a large village, and in one house eleven goats have perished.

Hitherto Dr. Barth had maintained his quality as a Christian; but on entering Dalla, a province belonging to the fanatical chief of Masina, who would never have permitted “an infidel” to traverse his territories, Dr. Barth thought it advisable to assume the character of an Arab. But a dispute which he had with his host, respecting a pack of dogs that showed a decided unwillingness to give place to a stranger, indicated no great religious fervour on the part of the population. Good Mohammedans have no liking for the canine race. The Fulbi will not employ them even as guides for their cattle, which they direct by the voice. All the dogs were black; the poultry were black and white. Dr. Barth observed that the crops suffered greatly from the ravages of a large black worm, which he had not met with since his expedition into Bagirmi.