THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU

LADY DOROTHY MILLS Frontispiece

55~3 1924 THE/ROAD TO TIMBUKTU/ BY IAAY DOROTHY MILLS .#T Author of" The Tent of Blue," "The Road," etc., etc. I JUN14 1985 LONDON: DUCKWORTH AND CO., 3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.2.

First Published - March, 1924 Second Impression - September, 1924 (ALL RIGHTS RESERVED) Made and Printed in Great Britain by Southampton Times Limited, Southampton

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO ALL FRIENDS, WHITE AND BLACK WHO IN VARIOUS WAYS HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO THE MAKING OF IT

PREFACE FIRST of all I want to express my gratitude to all those whose very great kindness and sympathy helped, and indeed made possible, one of the most interesting trips I have ever undertaken. Their name is legion, and where so much gratitude is due it would be invidious to particularise, though their names and the memories of them are with me as I write. Secondly, a word to those who, if they read it, may blame the superficiality of this book, who asked me to tell people of the inner rather than of the outer aspects of their colony. The reason is a due sense of my own limitations. Naturally, travelling in the colonies of a race other than my own, I found much that was new and interesting to me in their problems, and in their manner of solving those problems. But though I found very much to admire and even to love, I do not feel qualified to generalise, to make comparisons, or to air my personal opinions in print. I spent just three months in the A.O.F., travelling as fast as local conditions would permit. Except at Dakar, the landing-place, Bamako, the jumping-off place, and Timbuktu itself, which in all account for three weeks, much of that time spent ill in bed, I never passed more than fortyeight hours in the same place. Obviously my knowledge cannot be profound I These very rough impressions were jotted down at all sorts of incongruous moments; in 7

PREFACE trains, in boats, laid up in bed with a temperature of 1040, in a Niger barge in the intervals of slave-driving a crew of negroes, and very rarely with the thermometer below iIo° in the shade. All this is my explanation of, and excuse for, any inaccuracies that may have crept in. For the rest, hard-bitten travellers doubtless will say that much of what I have written is, to use the vernacular, " unmitigated rot "! I can only answer that I do not flatter myself on having contributed another document to African bibliography, but merely to have given my own impressions of my own trip. And if nobody reads them I shall break my heart, for no one but myself and the Dark God of Africa knows under what trying conditions they grew, or what an effort it cost me to write them.

CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE PREFACE . . . . .7 INTRODUCTION . . . . II I.DAKAR...... 15 II. SENEGAL . . . . . 22 III. MAURITANIA . . . . . 33 IV. DAKAR TO BAMAKO * * * 43 V. BAMAKO TO SEGOU . . . . 58 VI. SEGOU TO SANSANDING . * . 68 VII. SANSANDING TO MOPTI . * . 88 VIII. MOPTI TO TIMBUKTU . . * 102 IX. THE VOICE OF TIMBUKTU . . 116 X. TIMBUKTU TO-DAY . . . . 124 XI. THE PAST OF TIMBUKTU . . . 138 XII. BLACKAND WHITEINTIMBUKTU .152 XIII. THE ROADS TO TIMBUKTU . . 166 XIV. THE TOUAREGS . . . . 181 XV.TURNINGBACK . . . .198 XVI.DIENNE . . . . .218 XVII. IN ANSWER TO QUESTIONS . 2 232 XVIII.THEENDOFTHEROAD. . *246 INDEXOFPLACES. . . .261

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS LADY DOROTHY MILLS PALACE OF THE FAMA MADEMBA, OF SANSANDING A VILLAGE ON THE BANKS OF THE NIGER WOMAN POUNDING MILLET, KOUAKOUROU. " TIN LIZZIE, SENIOR FRIENDS WITH CUB, MOPTI SOUDANESE STREET VENDORS THE MARKET PLACE, TIMBUKTU THE OLD MOSQUE, TIMBUKTU A TYPICAL SOUDANESE MOSQUE ARRIVAL OF THE NEW ADMINISTRATOR, MONSIEUR LPEONCE JACQUIER . TOUAREG CHIEF, OUTSIDE THE RESIDENCE, TIMBUKTU TOUAREGS AT TIMBUKTU. GIRLS WASHING CLOTHES IN THE NIGER - Frontispiece Face p. 90 ,, 90 92 92 100 I00 126 ,, 134 ,, 134 ,, 162 162 ,, 182 182

INTRODUCTION If I were a cassowary On the plains of Timbuktu, I would eat the missionary, Bible, prayer-book, hymn-buk, too. WHEN reading the travel books of other people I always feel a sneaking curiosity to know the things they have not told one; the purely personal things, the little jokes and mistakes and tiny tragedies of every day; what they did when not actively seeking " copy " for their book; whether they were ever frightened, and of what; all the little trivial things that help to bring the writer before one as a live human being, instead of a splendid impersonal superbeing in a picturesque stage setting. In fact, I want what the trade calls "sob stuff," and plenty of it, for accounts of other people's travels in unfamiliar countries are so apt to be boring unless one can actually visualise all the variety of elements that have gone to their making. And, most of all, I always want to know why the author travelled; whether it was the wanderlust that drove him or her forth, or the Call of the Wild, or cold- blooded and intelligent desire for information, or merely the search for an objective to write a book about. There must be some strong reason that can impel a normal being to leave home and comfortable habits, good food and baths, work and play, family and friends, and to set forth to most uncomfortable and dubiously safe places, to endure seasickness, 31

INTRODUCTION fatigue, heat, cold, and privation, and fear, to sleep in places that an area cat would turn up its whiskers at, to go unwashed and unkempt, to eat mysterious horrors, to look at doubtfully fine scenery, and to smell all manner of unexpurgated smells. Some voice, only varying in timbre, must call, whether the journey be through an unknown corner of one's own town, or to the frozen immensities of the Poles, or the fastnesses of Thibet, or the plains of Timbuktu. I think it was through the verse at the heading of this chapter that I first became conscious of Timbuktu; that it was this verse that made Timbuktu a real place to me, and not the myth, the joke even, that it still is to many people. To the childish mind it had a spacious and a pleasantly cynical sound. And many years later-not longer ago than last year and the year before that-it came to spell Romance for me. On the northern stretches of the Sahara, on burning days and steely nights, round camp-fires, in barracks, in nomad tents, from the lips of traders, officers of the French Colonial Army, heterogeneous civilians, whining Arab guides and home-sick coal-black Soudanese, "Tombouctou" was again made real to me. All the old caravan routes go there; the great cruel roads of the ages, along whose blazing trails, century after century, have toiled long trains of men and animals, bearing gold-dust and spices, ivory and cotton, gum, ostrich feathers, and the skins of strange beasts; roads on which men have died in their thousands and animals in their tens of thousands to gratify the whims of long-dead Emperors and strange Queens, of Faustine and Semiramis and Cleopatra and their wicked sisters. Timbuktu was a centre of the

INTRODUCTION slave trade, and slim maidens, ebony black, with a bloom like that of rich dark grapes, were added to the precious merchandise to serve as foils to golden-haired Circassians in the palaces of the north. Curious things in leather, smelling strongly and strangely, were thrust into my hands, and generally bought by me at ridiculous prices! Thrilling tales were told me by soldiers of the old days before the French occupation filched most of the romance from the Sahara; of razzias and guerilla warfare, of ambuscades and the taking of villages, of curious tribes and customs, of the sluggish, fever-laden rivers of the south, of the " Country of Fear" that lies between where the caravans still travel, of the predatory Touaregs, people of veiled men and free women, of utter desolation and thirst, of the madness of the sun, of forced marches and punitive expeditions, when the sunburnt men who light-heartedly told me the tales faced death a hundred times from hunger and thirst and exhaustion and treachery. And they told me, too, of the men who have made French Colonial history; of le Boeuf, de Mores, le Fouquot, Laperrine, and many another gallant gentleman whose bones, bleached and polished, have made landmarks for passing caravans. Often in the north I have stood and looked down the great invisible roads that lead south, the never-ending roads that each in their turn seemed to lead to Timbuktu or another of her great sister sentinels of the Southern Sahara, and I longed to travel those roads, those fiery roads that lead into the arms of the sun, that bruise the feet and heal the souls of their pilgrims, where one's travel mates are the jackal, the scorpion, and the vulture-grim undertakers. And one day, Inshallah, I will, for it is His

INTRODUCTION country, and He calls His pilgrims in due season But all roads lead to Timbuktu. There is the southern road, the easiest one, the road of the great waterways, of the Senegal and Niger rivers, whose first tracks lay faintly before me on a wet nightmare of an afternoon in late December last at the Liverpool docks. The first landmarks slipped by imperceptibly -the grey blight of the Mersey as the S.S. Prahsu chugged her way to the open sea; the buffeting round the Bay; the long, lazy days, growing warmer and bluer, as we slipped down the African coast, past the Canaries, looking in at Las Palmas and Teneriffe-whose Casino has reason to rise up and call me blessed-into the Tropic of Capricorn, where everyone suddenly blossomed out white as the snowdrops just beginning to show their heads in England, while the days grew more relentlessly blue and golden, till on the bluest and hottest afternoon of all we sighted Dakar.

CHAPTER I DAKAR THE approach to Dakar is not welcoming. On the left Cape Verde juts out stark and yet puerile, and " La Residence," seat of the GovernorGeneral of the French West African colonies, like a huge, ornate coffee cake, seems to scream for attention beside the smaller dignified square of the British Consulate. Ahead is a low conglomeration of ugly European buildings and innumerable coal boats and lighters, and to the right a long, low coast of a yellowish colour, where hangs an impalpable haze of dust. Closer in one sees that the wharves are piled high with arachides, or ground nuts (what our American cousins call peanuts), waiting for shipment. There are mountains of them, some in sacks, some just loose, when they will be shovelled haphazard into the holds of ships. A small knot of black humanity jostles languidly on one's own particular wharf. One's first impression is that each unit of it looks exactly like part of a jazz band, one's second that each and all are wearing the most amazing mixture of clothing, Arab, negro, and European. Sometimes an outfit will consist of slacks and a turban, or bare legs, a khaki tunic, and a Homburg hat, or Jaeger vest and pants and a topee; and some coal black gentlemen are resplendent and immaculate with the ultra-dandyism of the all-the-world-over clerk. This impression remains

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU with one throughout one's stay at Dakar; in fact, all the way up the " Coast." I think the neatest costume that I saw consisted of a loin cloth and a bowler, though it was run pretty close-at St. Louis-by a dirty blue bou-bou and a silk hat. At Dakar there is none of the charm of a disembarkment at any of the North African ports. Though a little below latitude 15', there is nothing of the luxuriance of the tropics, or even of the splendid barrenness of the Sahara. Desiccated scrub and a few seedy-looking palms fail to relieve the vista of European buildings, hideous in their utility, and the distressing half-and-halfness of the streets and their occupants. That is at first sight. A little exploration reveals that Dakar is but in the process of evolution, that it has the elements of quite an attractively laid out French Colonial town, which before long will blossom out in fine, broad, treeshaded boulevards and cool gardens. Already there are a few fine buildings and quite an imposing square, the Place Protet, with a bandstand smothered in a riot of bougainvillaa. In spite of its comparative smallness Dakar is one of the easiest places in the world to lose one's way in. Whatever the objective, one always seems to come back to where one started, and everything seems to look like something quite different. Some most unpretentious institutions have exceedingly imposing fagades, and some highly important ones disguise themselves behind modest and quite incongruous exteriors. Dakar (from the Ouloff word meaning" tamarisk tree ") is the capital of the A.O.F. (Afrique Occidentale Frangaise) and the most important town on the middle western coast. In the treaties of 1763, 1765, and 1767 the peninsula

DAKAR of Cape Verde was ceded to France, and for a long time Dakar remained nothing but a little native village, and it was not till 1857 that it was effectively taken in hand and the French flag set flying. In fifty years the French have brought to the A.O.F. the third great civilisation that West Africa has known. First in the memory of man were the great negro kingdoms, till they were overrun by the descending hordes of Berbers from the north, who brought Mahommadanism in their wake. The Portuguese, those superb empire-makers and losers, were the first white people to get a footing. We also set predatory teeth and claws into West Africa, and it was not till a few years ago that the limits of French and British territory were definitely settled. The colonisation of the A.O.F. makes of history a romance, and it was General Faidherbe, son of a small tradesman of Lille, who gave the first impetus to that romance. In 192o a liaison was effected between it and Algeria, in the north, and a great chain of forts do sentinel work between the rich country of the south and the Sahara and its wild peoples. One's arrival in a new continent or a new country is always rather thrilling. One's instinct is to do nothing of importance, but to wander about absorbing the new aura, trying to guess what lies behind the novelty of it all, wondering what experiences, emotions, tragedies, or comedies it holds for one. However civilised the country may be, there is about one's first encounter with it something of the thrill of exploration. And the thrill is intensified when one stands at the portals of a dark continent, a continent of strange gods. After the first twenty-four hours this somewhat babyish thrill wears off, and one becomes absorbed in practical matters-in BT

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU matters of transport, of ways and means, and in the prospective needs of one's vile body. To me, alas! West Africa denied the first fine flavour of this thrill. She veiled the essence of our mental and emotional meeting with-of all things ridiculous-a hat! By what stupidity I know not, I had come out unprovided with a sun helmet. This sounds an insignificant omission till one has learnt the horror of the sun-and sunstroke-that permeates the " Coast." An unprotected head and a chink of sunlight make a trainload or a hotel full of strangers one's cautionary well- wishers. In view of this the presiding spirits of my steamer had used strong argument to prevent my landing till a helmet could be sent for, and, when I turned obstinate, sent me forth under the lee of a huge umbrella that looked self- consciously and conspicuously ridiculous in the blazing sunshine. By that time the shops were shut. Next morning I was shepherded in a series of closed cabs round the trading-houses. French Colonial helmets must have been designed by someone who had never seen a human head, and a morning's search produced an object, destined to be my close companion for many weeks, shaped something like a plate, that bounced and slid precariously, seeming to have no relation to the rest of me, and that had every drawback that headgear can have both as to comfort and becomingness. It was not till the afternoon, after the siesta hour, that I, and my hat still bouncing and sliding, were allowed to go forth and see the sights." They are not many. If you are energetic, you can motor out to Cape Verde to the north, and see much the same view of Dakar and its bay as you saw before landing. If you are

DAKAR romantic you can motor in the evening to a rather attractive bit of beach at Bellevue, a few miles away, where it is fashionable to combine supper with moonlight. The oasis of Hann is a patch of fertile ground that has been transformed, skilfully enough, into a kind of botanical gardens, a compromise between the palm house at Kew and Count Landon's garden at Biskra. Every sort and species of palm make deliciously shady paths, and there are nurseries of little trees, shrubs, and indigenous flowers that once a week can be purchased by whoso wills. But Goree is, so to speak, the star turn. Some nine hundred yards of basaltic rock, it rises sheer in the middle of the bay. Goree has been called " The Cradle of Civilisation," though her native name puts it less attractively-" Ouloff de Ber," meaning " Stomach of the Ouloffs." The French took possession of her in 1693, and at varying periods thereafter she was under British domination, till the Treaty of Paris finally restored her to France. Commercially, and as the seat of the Governor-General, she has been supplanted by Dakar, and now is a little dead town of old, old houses overshadowed by the Castel, now used as a barracks, that stares defiantly out to sea. Dakar used to boast a casino, but it went under and now the only distraction to keep the tourist out of bed after nine in the evening is the cinema, which, catering for European tastes, " features" somewhat serious themes. Personally, whenever I visited it it seemed to be absorbing itself in the life of Mary Magdalene, in thousands of reels, with all the interesting bits left out. The cinema, great modem octopus, has spread its tentacles far into the interior of West Africa, right into

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU the Soudan. The negroes have a passion for it, preferring films of super-perfervid melodrama, of Wild West exploits, of murder, pillage, and arson. Also, they seem to have most unregenerate love for the lower kinds of French farce, especially those relating to the seventh commandment. Efforts have been made to infuse an element of moral uplift into their intellectual bill of fare and their conception of white humanity, but these efforts have met with a marked lack of appreciation. Dakar, like every other town where everyone is known to everyone else, is a hot- bed of gossip. It is quite worth while to go away for a short time for the sake of the heavenly crop of scandal that is awaiting one's return, concerning either oneself or other people. But the element of gossip is but a superficial crust to the most warmhearted hospitality, and I cherish a most cordial remembrance of kindness and assistance, both from the French and the tiny colony of British. Owing to the exigences of the Senegalese train service, I was obliged to spend a week in Dakar, and spent it tearing my hair out with uncertainty and discouragement. With the kindest intentions in the world everyone combined to put me off going to Timbuktu, or, indeed, anywhere up-country. I was told that even on the journey up to the railhead I should die of heat and exhaustion, that there were no practicable means of transport down the Niger, that if I didn't die of sunstroke or a variety of other fell diseases I should be eaten by anything from a crocodile upwards, or done to death in some way yet unknown. The Soudan was represented to me as a place teeming with every sort and shape of things and people who were simply existing to put me away in the least comfortable manner.

DAKAR 21 Statistics were given to prove it, and every telling argument was used-so much so that, though I've had much the same experience before, as I suppose has every other lone and irresponsible-looking woman who tries to go barging about the far corners of the earth, I had to call up a large stock of natural pig-headedness, and, half doubting, decided to go to Bamako, the jumping-off place up-country, and find out things for myself.

CHAPTER II SENEGAL AT the end of a week, having made all arrangements to plunge straight up- country to the Niger, a sudden whim found me entrained at an unearthly hour of the morning for St. Louis, farther up the Coast at the mouth of the Senegal River. Among other things, I wanted to find out whether it was possible or practicable to return to Europe by the north, through Mauritania or the Sud Orannais. In a country where I have found much to admire I cannot pay compliments to the Senegalese railway; they would ring fulsome and untrue. The first-class carriages on the St. Louis line are considerably more uncomfortable and unclean than our English" thirds," and in them black and white herd indiscriminately; and though at first blush I considered the proximity of my black brothers an admirable occasion to study their habits, I decided not more than half an hour later that the interests of those same habits scarcely recompensed the accompanying offence to one's senses of sight, sound, and smell. And there were twelve hours of it ! The train was an express; that is to say, it galloped along at about fifteen and a half miles an hour, with the jolting, noise, and general fuss of a Ford over a bad road, stopping at innumerable little wayside stations. The first halt of any importance was at Rufisque,

SENEGAL low down on the bay formed by Cape Verde, known to the old Portuguese as Rio Fresco (Fresh River) and to the Ouloffs as Teunuegued. She is another of the four great Communes of Senegal, and, though founded as long ago as 1881, it is only quite recently that she has been developed into her present condition of prosperity and commerce. From the tourist point of view she is not interesting, being in the uncomfortable transition stage, with finely-constructed and halfconstructed buildings standing in a nondescript welter. But she has a wireless station of great range that is in connection with the Tour Eiffel in Paris. The scenery never varied; scrub and yet more scrub, a few palms and graceful trees of mimosa and tamarisk, and absurd-looking baobabs, from which are evolved cord and paper pulp. We were running through the country of the Ouloffs, who form the chief ingredient in the mixture of races that populate Senegal. They are Mahommadans, as are the Toucouleurs, and the Peuhls of Semitic origin. In the old days Senegal, like all West Africa, was fetishist, but Mahommadanism, sweeping from the north, is spreading rapidly, and now it is practically only the Sereres who abide by the old religions. As the taint of a civilised port receded the costumes of the natives became more picturesque and less grotesque-bou-bous (a kind of loose, chemise-like garment something on the lines of the gandourahs of the north) of brilliantly coloured cotton, that on magnificent black torsos achieved lines almost sculpturesque, chechias in all materials, and particularly in purple velvet, yellow Algerian slippers, a great many bracelets and amulets, and little red Koran boxes hung round the neck by a fine leather cord. Blue in all shades and violet

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU seemed the favourite colours, with splashes of scarlet or yellow, and never did the mixtures, however violent, seem to clash. Going north, the type of physiognomy showed traces of admixture with the Moorish tribes of Mauritania; the noses became longer and straighter and the craniums better developed. The villages looked like groups of large beehives, each house a circular erection of straw with a heavy conical roof of thatch. Of course, we were very late all along the line, and as for lunch, we devoured five courses of it in almost as few minutes at a wayside buffet, producing a condition of indigestive torpor for the rest of the afternoon. At St. Louis followed the usual African scramble for sleeping accommodation. Being a quick sprinter, I managed to secure a room in the town in the house of an oil merchant, quite reasonably clean, though I have long since given up worrying myself as to how many relays of persons have occupied my sheets since last they were washed. The lack of sleeping accommodation in the A.O.F. is one of the chief drawbacks to the casual traveller, even in the civilised parts of it. When a hotel does exist, which is rarely, it is generally bad and invariably full. I don't know whether it is that the colonists are like a big family, where everyone is known or in some way connected with everybody else, or whether the white man has adopted the habits of the black, who will never let a man of his own colour go without bed and board. Certain it is that no one but myself, and that not for long, ever seemed at a loss where to lay his head, and when, later, I had a black servant of my own, I soon discovered that I could turn him loose in any town or village a thousand miles from his home or tribe, and whose language even he perhaps did not know, and half an hour later I should be sure

SENEGAL of finding him in the best corner of somebody's case, eating a huge meal at no expense to himself or me. St. Louis-N'Dar in Ouloff-is a pretty little town with about four hundred white inhabitants built on an island in the mouth of the Senegal River. It was founded by the French, and its first house built in 1658, and was taken and retaken by the British two or three times before it was finally restituted to France by the Treaty of Paris. Government House, that divides it into two sections, is built on the site of the first French fortress. Its streets are straight and neat, and its white, terraced houses give it something of the effect of an Algerian town. It is the capital of Senegal, as against Dakar, which, as I have said, is the capital of the A.O.F. in general, and the A.O.F. comprises, besides, Guinea, Dahomey, the Ivory Coast, the Soudan, and the Haute Volta, in the Great Bend of the Niger. St. Louis is a trading port of considerable importance, and, like Dakar, exports great quantities of arachides, from which are made cattle food and any number of things, produced from the acacia Verek, and which come largely from the land along the Senegal River. Raw skins from Mauritania are another export, and some rubber from Caramance. A great deal of millet is grown by the natives, whose principal food it is, and in some places maize and manioc. The Peuhls and Toucouleurs and Sereres are great cattle-breeders, and count their wealth by the numbers of heads they possess. The species that one sees most often are the Gobra, good for transport and tractable, but bad milkers, and whose queer humps spoil their skins for market value. Never does one see a mule in the A.O.F. -for some reason that I do not know they do

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU not thrive-but I fell in love at once with the donkeys, of which there are legion; jolly little grey things that the negroes, in striking contrast to the Arabs of the north, keep beautifully tended and conditioned, clean and soft as babies. Opposite St. Louis two great native suburbs, N'Dar Toute and Guet N'Dar, lie on either side of the river, reached by the bridges Faidherbe and Servius. The former is very attractive, with its shady avenues and little clusters of beehive dwellings running alongside the estuary, Guet N'Dar has the distinction of being the birthplace of Siki, the boxer. Which reminds me that throughout my brief sojourn in Senegal the amount of differing information handed out to me concerning that muscular gentleman was prodigious. No two narrators ever agreed as to his age, original status, habitat, or the date or reason of his exodus. But all and sundry claimed acquaintance, and, indeed, the Siki family must have had an unusually large visiting list! But indubitably his birthplace was Guet N'Dar, and there his brother still lives, and the general feeling is that in early childhood his parents, well-to-do people, moved to Dakar, where his mother died a few years ago. Guet N'Dar is composed almost entirely of native huts, with a very few European buildings saved from the fire that followed an outbreak of plague in 1918. Its inhabitants are mostly fishermen, and it is an attractive sight to watch them start out to sea in perilous-looking canoes after fish and lobster. It runs along a spit of land-the Langue de Barbarie- jutting out to sea, where towers alone the giant palm known as the " Palmier de Loti," written about by Pierre Loti in his famous novel, Roman d'un

SENEGAL Spahi. The cocoa-palm, which is beginning to be exploited, though not yet in sufficient quantities for the exportation of copra, seems to do extremely well round St. Louis. I don't know why, but never does a cocoa-palm grow straight; always it leans drunkenly at an angle of forty-five degrees. When I commented on this to a Frenchman he quoted the unkind Colonial proverb: " Never is there a straight palm-tree or a straight woman !" As to pugilism, I am convinced that, had I wished, I could have brought back to England scores of Senegalese who would confidently guarantee to rival, or even surpass, the achievements of Siki, to whom his countrymen are unanimous in denying any science in boxing beyond the innate fighting qualities of any Senegalee. They are all born fighters, their quality being, not science, but enormous physical strength and powers of endurance, and amazing toughness. But wrestling, and not boxing, is their speciality. All the Senegalese wrestle; it is as much a part of every gentleman's social equipment as is golf with us. Each town or village has its champion, who challenges and visits other towns. A wrestling match, called by them leete, is a great event, and while it lasts no European resident can count on the performance of any household duties. It is held in any large, empty space, and all the town assembles. It may continue all through a day and a night, or even longer, to the accompaniment of enthusiastic beating of tom-toms and a general din that makes the air hideous for several kilometres round. The performance, of a catch-as-catch order, is a superb exhibition of sheer animal strength. Many an evening, later, on the banks of the Niger, I have watched a party of young Tirailleurs wrestle

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU by the light of a camp-fire. I don't know what an habitue of the Albert Hall or Olympia would have thought of it, for I don't understand science when I see it, but to my mind for sheer thrill it was worth many a fight I have seen from a ten guinea seat. From St. Louis I embarked on a quaint little steamer, the Bani, that in the dry season proceeds up river as far as Podor, and in the rainy one to Khayes, where it connects up with the overland route to the Niger. Its passengers consisted of a distinguished French botanist in search of specimens of mimosa, some officers of Colonial Infantry, including a young captain who three years ago helped make the liaison between the West African Colonies and Algeria, now en route for the hinterland of Mauritania, and some officials and traders with their wives. These people received me with the greatest cordiality, considering that I had committed the solecism of being seen off by the bad character of the town, a gentleman who made his living by various unbeautiful professions, and with whom, in my innocence, I had fraternised as a person of much interest, courtesy, and information, and who had apparently been trying to whitewash his reputation at the expense of my impeccably respectable appearance ! For thirty hours we plodded up-stream, stopping occasionally to hoist ourselves off a sand-bank and once to exchange cargo at an adorable little conglomeration of human beehives called Dagana, where we were very kindly entertained by the only European inhabitants, the Administrator and his wife. The hours passed idly, getting acquainted with each other, talking interminably, cursing, after the habit of Colonials, every aspect of Colonial administration, and taking pot-shots with rifles

SENEGAL at crocodiles unwary enough to show their ugly noses above water. Luckily, being the dry season when trade is slack and travellers consequently few, we had plenty of elbow room. A few months later even the first-class deck would be three deep, and as for the pont, or fourth class, where the negroes travel-well, I was told by an eye-witness that last year, on the third day of the journey, a native fell overboard. On being fished up and reprimanded for his carelessness he excused himself on the grounds that for three days his only accommodation had been an insecure perch on the rail, and that at last, from exhaustion, he had fallen asleep. The excuse was not considered adequate, and he was reprimanded again ! The Senegal is not a beautiful river. It runs through the inevitable scrub and dwarf trees between naked-looking mud-banks that are submerged in the rainy season. Very occasionally one can see a heron or a duck, or a monkey scuttling on all fours like a dog. The river is the great divide between north and west-central Africa, between the Sahara and the river countries, between the Berber races and the negroes. To the north lies Mauritania, illimitable desert that runs up to the Atlas Mountains. In all the villages one sees its blue-robed men, who come down from their sandy desolation to trade. At Podor, as nothing went any farther, I was obliged to remain. It is a cosmopolitan little place, where the commerce of Mauritania and Senegal overlap, straggling and arid in a waste of grey scrub. For all Europeanism it comprises a Poste Militaire, consisting of a captain and a military doctor, a" Residence" where the Administrator lives, and a trading house. And at Podor it rained and rained, a steady and

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU really and truly English downpour, and the evenings were cold and desolate. So much, so far, for the West African sun! For months before I left England, and on the boat, and ever since, I had been apostrophised and warned about that sun. Horrible stories had been told me about sunstroke and sun fever and sun blindness. Did I happen to comment on the coolness and salubrity of the climate, I was assured: " Ah, but at Dakar!" "When you reach St. Loiis, take care! " Podor, the hottest place out of Hell!" I renounced all belief in human verity as I plodded round Podor under an umbrella, wearing a borrowed overcoat! Podor has made a good deal of history in its time. It, or rather a village just near it, was the birthplace of the El Hadj Omar, son of Seydou, one of the famous adventurers who forced their way to eminence two or three hundred years ago, when West Africa was in a bad way after the decadence and fall of the great negro empires. Omar at an early age made himself something of a reputation as a miracle-maker, and, having visited Mecca and learnt all the wisdom of old Egypt, made much money in the Haoussa country, and came back to his native land laden with gold and precious merchandise and slaves. He then started a Holy War against the tribes of the Niger and the Soudan, and for fifteen years he and his horde of fanatics left in their wake a trail of blood, killing, pillaging, destroying, burning, in a fury of devastation. But, like most adventurers, he came to an ignominous end. Beaten by the French under Faidherbe in the West, he turned to the East, taking possession even of Timbuktu, but, inveterate warrior, he knew none of the arts of peace and prosperity, and was turned upon by the people he had conquered, and eventually

SENEGAL imprisoned and done away with in his own fortress at Hamdallahi. At Podor I heard rather a neat retort from a Frenchman who had been annoyed by the bragging assertion of a negro that the black races are superior to the white. The latter based his definition of superiority on the grounds of physical power, and related how, on one particularly arduous expedition up in the Sahara at the climax of the hot season, the two white men of the party died from sunstroke and privation, while of the four negroes only one was seriously affected. " Of what use are cultivation and brains," he asked, "to a man whose body is dead? It is physical endurance that is the real superiority." " Grant you that much," answered the Frenchman. " But under the same circumstances a monkey would not have suffered at all. So in the order of superiority we will place them-the monkey, the black man, and the white! " Which reminds me that the negro simply hates being called such. Call him un negre and he will be offended; call him un noir and he will be perfectly content, the reason being, so I have been told, that in the mouth of the French the word negre is generally qualified by some adjective-sacry negre or sale negre-so that the word, even by itself, has taken on to the black mind a quality of opprobrium. The most tactful thing of all is to refer to " Europeans " and " Africans." They are, most of them, fine physical specimens, the Senegalese, well over six feet and well proportioned, though their legs have a tendency to look like broomsticks. They are brave fighters, at any rate when the weather isn't cold, and large garrisons of Colonial Infantry are doing sentinel work all along the great divide. At the outbreak of war the effective of Tirailleurs was over fourteen

32 THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU thousand, of which nine thousand were distributed over various fronts, and which by 1915 had risen to thirty thousand. Their women are rather darlings; sleek black creatures with skins like rich black grapes, an unerring colour sense, and the most amazing fashion in hairdressing. The latter consists of hundreds of tiny plaits or equally tiny spirals produced with the aid of fine straws, so that the effect is not that of human hair, but of tufts of chenille fringe. The spirals are about six inches long, cemented with karity butter and ornamented with beads, or gri-gris (amulets), or coins. The building up of this coiffure takes several hours a day for many days, and is not repeated very often, and during the process course of it the lady pursues her usual avocations, generally complete with straws, looking for all the world like a porcupine.

CHAPTER III MAURITANIA AT Podor I found to my disgust that there was no practical possibility of returning overland through Mauritania. It is under military rule, and there was not a chance in a thousand of getting a permit, and even had there been it was the bad season, and would have taken at least three months to reach the Atlas through waterless country, largely uncontrolled of the French. But in small trips I had a fair opportunity of seeing something of the Moors and their country. It is not a country that tempts one to linger. On the southern fringes it is an illimitable grey nothingness of scrub and sand, swept by a scorching sun and little less scorching wind. Farther north it is a desolation of rocks, and yet more sand and nothingness. Farther north still is the Adrar, where there are mountains and rocky plateaux and oases, where the chief wealth of the Moors lie. And to the north-east is El Yuf, " The Belly of the Desert," which is nothing but rock salt. In Mauritania there are virtually no permanent water courses, merely the dry beds of old rivers, and water lies only in the subsoil, which in rare places recent civilisation attains by means of artesian wells. Owing to this shortage the Moor trains himself to economise in water as much as possible. The simplest and most obvious form of economy is washing. It may be safe to say that he never Ci

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU washes, and that his ablutions, if any, are done in sand. I have never seen anything quite so dirty as a Moor, except his wife, for besides mere dirt his skin is permanently discoloured by the dye of his garments, made from an imported cotton called guinee, dark indigo in colour. Far from attempting to remove these stains, he even seems to take a pride in them, which peculiarity has won the Moors the nickname of " The Blue People " from the negroes. Also, he trains himself to do without drinking, and can go without water for very many days at a time, however parched and scorching the climate, and has trained his camels to do the same for periods almost incredible to those who have only known the camels of the Northern Sahara. Mauritania has, considering its area, a meagre population of under three hundred thousand inhabitants, of which two-thirds are Moors and the rest the dust of a variety of negro tribes, principally Sarakolees. The religion of the former is exclusively Mahommadan, but adapted to the needs of their race, and tinged with the Soufism of the north. In spite of it the Moors are monogamous, which is surprising in so barbarous a people, and their women are treated with extreme consideration and given almost complete freedom. A philosophical and enlightened Moor who had just returned from a trading trip down in Senegambia told me that he considered his race and mine were the only ones that showed wisdom in giving their womenfolk their freedom, adding: " For whatever the heart of woman craves, whether it be a lover, or the death of her husband, or amber for her hair, that will she encompass, even though we beat or slay her." Perhaps he was right.

MAURIIANIA 35 The Moorish woman is good looking, or would be if she were cleaner; straight featured, well built, and small boned; but, unfortunately, embonpoint is the ideal of Moorish beauty, and, like the women of the Touaregs, the more well-todo are fattened like Christmas turkeys from the age of seven or eight years. They wear long blue garments of the same guinee as the men, and only cover their faces in the presence of strangers. Both men and women are of a warm coffee colour, and the former are well featured, with noses curved like scimitars and high, intelligent-looking foreheads. From drinking so little and the general hardship of their lives they are thin and spare, with muscles like steel cords. Apart from the ragged misery of their appearance one would deduce them as men of a superior race, and, considering that they are essentially war-like and not wanting in courage, it is curious that from time immemorial they have been content to eke out such a wretched existence. Truly theirs is a country "forgotten by Allah," as the negroes say of it. As one stands looking out over the abomination of desolation, the sunscorched, arid nothingness, it makes one shiver ever so slightly, as with some sinister suggestion. It looks as if some angry God had frowned on it and blasted it. Once when motoring home from a nomad camp, that in spite of ill-omened looking weather I had persisted in visiting, I was caught in a tornado, luckily a mild one as tornadoes go. There was one other white passenger in the car, besides an Ouloff chauffeur, who was much the most frightened of the three-not of the darkness or the tearing wind which might at any moment have sent us off the road into a series of deep gullies, or of the driving sand that

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU threatened to put our engine out of action, but of the djins and evil spirits which, as he muttered between loose grey lips, had been let forth in their myriads to destroy us. The sand blinded one, stinging one's face with excruciating pain, filling every crevice of one's clothing; the wind through the fissures of the rocks shrieked like devils. Every now and again a vivid flash of lightning showed us the horror that inch by inch we were crawling through, distorting the outlines of the rocks to fantastic shapes and proportions, splashing the shifting wall of sand with livid, unwholesome colours, like the coloured lights that an unskilful operator sometimes flashes at dance clubs. Perhaps Amadou, our chauffeur, had been right. Certainly it was not a sane world, but a world of unchained madness and wrath, of flying, unspeakable horror, that held, for me at any rate, a queer, rather morbid thrill. The fact that such tornadoes apparently happen quite frequently, that camps are upset and tents blown over and caravans buried, consoled me a little for having been thwarted in my ambition to be the first white woman to cross Mauritania! The Moor, when one first meets him, gives one a queer mixed feeling of fascination and repulsion, followed by puzzlement. First of all one notices his rags and his unkempt air of a wild beast, then the detailed fineness of his form and physiognomy oddly at variance with the predatory sullenness of his expression. And then, perhaps, he smiles, and one's impressions are turned upside down. One reads of, but rarely sees, a smile that illuminates a face. Well, the smile of a Moor, man or woman, does just that. The whole face literally shines with a light that seems to come, not from the eyes or the lips, but from somewhere very far off, a smile that is child-like, beatific,

MAURITANIA rapt, almost sickly-sweet. It gives one the sensation-not altogether pleasant-of a smile that is not directed at oneself or at anything tangible, that comes from the recesses of a soul that has lived with itself in great places, that smiles at something invisible to ordinary eyes or senses. But the whole atmosphere of the Moor breathes of solitude and big spaces. He is biblical in every line and movement, and I used to think of all the lonely characters of old Scripture. First of all I thought of St. John the Baptist, after his sojourn in the Wilderness, then of Ishmael, the first nomad, but lastly and permanently I registered the Moor as Cain, such as one's childish imagination had conceived him, wild, bearded, with the eyes of a seer and the gait of a wild beast, every man's hand against him, walking in eternal, unrepentant loneliness, for ever denied rest. But the Moor has his less romantic aspect. Sometimes, when walking or riding through the bush, my nostrils have been assailed by some smell vaguely familiar. Sniffing enquiringly, I come to the conclusion that the smell is goats. Possibly a little later I trace the smell to its source. It is not goats, or rarely, and never exclusively. It is Moor. Under tiny tents of leather pitched in the lee of low bushes they crouch, doubled up on their haunches, for all the world like animals that one has disturbed in their lairs. The concentrated smell does not tempt one to run them to earth. It is a mixture of the sun-tanned leather of their tents, of stale food and whining yellow dogs, but mostly it is Moor. The Moorish woman shares with her Arab sister the intensest interest and curiosity concerning white women, in which they are different from the negroes. A negress, even though one

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU may possess the first white face she has ever seen, seems to take no particular interest in it. At the most she will solemnly plant herself in front of one, stare unblinkingly and unappraisingly for five minutes, and then go off into a roar of hearty laughter, which, even though it comes from a coal black ball of fat, never fails to make one feel rather hurt and foolish! But the Moorish women, when I visited their tents, were embarrassingly eager, after the first shyness had worn off, to know all about me. No detail of my person or clothing was too small for their attention. Like all nomads, they were shy at first, suspicious of my intentions, crouching in the shadow of their tents or behind a bush holding a corner of their garment across their faces, and peering out with the bright, scrutinising eyes of squirrels. Then, perhaps, the proffer of a small gift, or a few halting words in Arabic that was so different from their tongue, and they would suddenly unbend. The famous smile would appear, and little claw-like hands stretch forth eagerly to finger my dress, to try by gentle stroking to test the texture or fathom the colour of my skin, to tweak gently at my hair. " White, white ! " they would murmur. Growing bolder, they would fidget with my hat till I removed it, and tug at my hair till it came down, and then they would try to re-do it, laughing at their failure to get it as it was before. They could not understand my riding breeches. " The face of a woman and the legs of a man!," I have had that phrase hurled at me also in North Africa! Taking my coat off, they would make intimate and indiscreet examination of my figure, commenting on my thinness, and sometimes one, chuckling, would run off to where her menfolk waited discreetly round the fire, to tell them, I

MAURITANIA am afraid, all about it. And before I departed they would invariably insist on my drinking a bowl of none too fresh goats' milk, and, turning on the famous smile, beg for some small article of jewellery. Tie-pins they seemed especially fond of, and to save myself being compelled, in the name of politeness, to part with my own cherished belongings, I laid in a stock of inexpensive and rather bounderishly gaudy ones for use when paying visits. In a little encampment that I used to ride over to fairly frequently I was much puzzled by the behaviour of one old gentleman. As soon as the news of my arrival went round he used to come rushing to meet me with every sign of exuberant delight. As long as I remained he never left me, following me about like a dog, and whenever he could attract my attention he would point to himself, and then to me, smiling and chattering quite incomprehensibly, and motioning me towards his tent. Eventually I asked my escort what it was all about. " It is because he has never seen a fair woman before," was the answer. " But, so near the river, he must have seen the French," I said. " Yes, but the French are generally dark, or at any rate dark-eyed. His eyes, have you noticed, are grey, something the same colour as your own. All his life he has been criticised for the colour of his eyes, and at last, having found someone similarly endowed, he is sure you must be some kind of relation, and he is delighted, and wishes you to remain with him." On another occasion, too, the colour of my eyes created a diversion. Like most people of indeterminate colouring, I suppose, my eyes vary through most of the shades of grey and blue according to

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU weather, health, the clothes I happen to be wearing, and, most of all, mood. On my second visit to a certain tent I noticed my hostess staring at me very intently, and finally she came across to me, and, pulling up the brim of my hat, looked right into my eyes. She looked puzzled and not very pleased about something, and whispered in the ears of two of her companions. Remembering my old friend, I wondered if again I was going to be claimed as a long-lost relation. But this time I flattered myself, for, after a slight demur, my escort said: " She says that yesterday your eyes were the colour of pale stones when the sun does not shine, and that to-day they are dark, and blue as the sky at night. And she thinks that your body must be possessed of a djin that sometimes looks out of your eyes, and she is afraid." Resisting a desire to laugh, I tried to find out whether the djin was the grey or the blue one. They did not seem disposed to give a diagnosis, but I rather fancy it was the blue one. Of commerce the Moors have but little, and in the oases they still trade by the primitive method of exchange. Next to salt from the neighbourhood of Taoudeni, dates are the chief export, with some sheep and cattle, also skins and worked leather. The latter goods are rather attractive, especially the bags and horse trappings, rather reminiscent of the work of Fez and Marrakech. But every kind of handwork, even jewellery and guns, is done by the women and a despised caste called " blacksmiths," for, like the Touareg, the Moor considers any form of manual labour a dishonour. All along the coast are excellent fishing-grounds, particularly in the vicinity of Cap Blanc and the Baie du Levrier. Port Etienne, about half-way up, which from

MAURITANIA time immemorial has been the chief Mauritanian point of interchange, has a brisk trade in fish, especially salted and smoked, and the natives and intrepid fishermen from Brittany come down in small boats for lobsters. Fish, one might say, is the raison d'etre of Port Etienne, and mainly in its interests the French have installed a lighthouse, a military post, an apparatus for distilling water, and a wireless station. To an impatient modem mind, with its tabloid tendencies, the life of the Moor, like the game of golf, would seem to have helped Shakespeare to one of his best titles. I refer to Much Ado about Nothing. In both cases there seems to be such a tremendous amount of effort to produce such a small result. However, everyone's temperament differs, and one can only suppose that each finds some queer recompense to which Heaven knows he or she is entitled. I suppose the Deity created a people to suit each country that He made, even one that, like Mauritania, He seems not to have troubled to finish. Not only does every man's hand seem against the Moor, but Nature itself. To maintain life he has to fight Nature every inch of the way, to train himself to do without everything that to the rest of us makes life worth living. It is true that the wind and the sun and the sand wage equal war on his neighbour to the east, the Touareg, but, then, the Touareg is a born fillibuster who loves fighting for its own sake, who is drunk with his own beauty and cunning and rapacity, and who, perhaps because he does not take life very seriously, seems to get more out of it. The Moors have a quaint legend accounting for the saltness of the ocean. Originally, they say, the sea was fresh, but, full of pride because of its power, it blasphemed against God. To

42 THEROADTOTIMBUKTU punish it God sent a myriad of gnats to drink it. Later, when he thought it had been sufficiently punished, he commanded the gnats to vomit it, which they did. But the salt from the stomachs of the gnats remained in the ocean as a reminder of its sin and of God's clemency.

CHAPTER IV DAKAR TO BAMAKO THE return journey to St. Louis was memorable for nothing in particular but the addition to our passenger list of a singularly evil-tempered young lion domiciled in a frail-looking cage three yards from my cabin door. Poor beast, he was being sent down by the Administrator of Dagana to a lion-tamer at St. Louis collecting new blood for a travelling menagerie, and his views on the matter kept me awake most of the night. When, later, I saw the lion-tamer, my sympathies were entirely with the lion. At St. Louis I missed the connection for Dakar by exactly two minutes, and was obliged to possess my soul in patience for another twentyfour hours, wondering if ever I should be in time to catch the up-country for the Niger. Here it was that I discovered an infallible method of ensuring accommodation, and decent accommodation at that, in a country where, as I have said, accommodation is difficult of attainment. At the place where I was to lodge for the night, which shall be nameless, I was given a room that, for details I cannot go into, was, from a hygienic point of view, simply unfit for human habitation. No expostulations availed to get me a better one, though I was practically certain that one or more existed. But I had no intention of sleeping in that room. It was on the first floor, leading out on to an open-air

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU gallery reached by a flight of stairs from the courtyard below. When night came I unpacked my camp bed, set it up opposite my door, surmounted it comfortably with my flea-bag and pillow, and hung my mosquito-net with the help of sticks and tape. It looked quite snug, and I started to undress. The first person, climbing the stairs, to stumble over me was the proprietor. "What are you doing here ? " he asked angrily. "Sleeping here," I answered. "But you can't sleep here." I pointed out that if I couldn't sleep there I wouldn't sleep in the room, that I had made that perfectly clear already, that I wasn't going out in my pyjamas at that time of night to look for another, and what was he going to do about it ? In five minutes the thing was done. A perfectly good, clean room was conjured up, every available luxury pressed upon me, and I was sleeping the sleep of triumph. Later I learnt that I was not the patentee of this idea, for I was told-how truly I know not -that a certain officer arriving at Dakar from months in la brousse, having failed to find accommodation and considering himself badly treated by his superiors, had set up his tent and batterie de cuisine in the smart little Place Protet, the hub of Dakar, where he was found eating a succulent meal, prepared by his orderly, by the rank and fashion of the town as they returned from their evening's amusements. Certainly travelling in the A.O.F. proves the axiom concerning doing things for oneself ! I arrived at Dakar at dinner-time the following day, tired unto death, with a wracking headache, to find that in spite of having telegraphed they really had not been able to find a room for me anywhere in the town. At least there was one

DAKAR TO BAMAKO room, in a house with reputation such that the very charming hotel proprietor would not even give me the address, though I assured him that I didn't care about anything so long as it had four walls and a floor. By midnight, when I had reached a stage half-way between tears and blasphemy, a room in the annexe was made over to me through the kindness of a complete stranger. I had five trunks to repack, including all my camping outfit, some essential letters to write, none of my business done, barely enough money on me for my railway fare, and the once- a-weekonly up-country train left at five in the morning. Of course, I did not have time to go to bed, and at 4 a.m., empty and breakfastless, was battering at the door of the hotel, where I had been definitely assured that there would be a conveyance, or at any rate porters, to carry my stuff to the station. Of course, there was nothing and no one, and the town and hotel slept like the dead. The station was nearly a mile away, my luggage was very heavy, and it was pitch dark, and I didn't know the way. Feeling my way furiously through the black streets, at the end of ten minutes I was fortunate enough to stumble over a negro asleep on a doorstep. I kicked him awake (for negroes sleep soundly), and, hustling him to where my luggage lay, we shouldered it between us and staggered to the station just five minutes before the train started. I had settled down to my night's sleep before we had left the station, in company with two gentlemen who felt even worse than myself --officers back from home leave who had been making a last night of it before returning to two long years in the hinterland of the Haute Volta, and who proved themselves angels of kindness throughout the rest of the journey.

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU All that day we ran through a country of sparse forest, of acacia and tamarisk, dotted with baobabs that looked for all the world like fat gentlemen bathing, and here and there the scarlet, waxy mosaic of the kapokier, from whose fruit, as its name implies, comes the kapok that stuffs our cushions. Also there were a great many karity trees, from which vegetable butter is made. One cannot pass over karity in a sentence, for it so impregnates every phase of one's life in West Africa as to be essentially a part of the scenery, of the very air one breathes, particularly the latter. Mungo Park writes about it as follows: " The tree itself very much resembles the American oak, and the fruit, from the kernel of which, being first dried in the sun, the butter is prepared by boiling the kernel in water, has somewhat the appearance of a Spanish olive. The kernel is enveloped in a sweet pulp under a thin rind, and the butter produced from it, beside the advantage of its keeping a whole year without salt, is whiter, firmer, and to my palate of a richer flavour than the best butter I ever tasted made from cow's milk." I am prepared to agree with every word except the last sentence, and all the Europeans I have heard comment on karity agree with me. Its taste is only equalled in nastiness by its smell, which, like the poor, is always with us. There is no use to which the negroes of both sexes do not put it. For food, of course; the men rub their bodies all over with it after work, to keep off chills; and it forms the pomade with which the women cement the complicated structure of their hair. There is something extremely sickly and pervasive about it, especially, as I found, when I lived in an atmosphere of it for over two months, and most intimately of all on

DAKAR TO BAMAKO the craft going up and coming down the Niger. In time I came to hate it as I never hated putrefying sheep-skins, dead dogs, or bad fish. At moments it became a nightmare. To the sensitive nostril all countries have their own individual smell, and that of the Soudan is karity. In the recesses of the Senegalese forest country there is much game-wild boar, birds of all sorts, panthers, and occasionally a rhino strays up from the south. At sundown we alighted at Tambacounda, where we spent the night at the buffet, and were dislodged at the unearthly hour of 3 a.m. to rescue our baggage train, that had broken down somewhere along the line. By the time the sun was properly awake we had bundled ourselves pell-mell into a variety of camions and Ford cars, and were bowling along ninety kilometres of road to Ambidedi, on the Senegal River, where one picks up the Soudanese railway. Until it got too hot to do anything but simmer the drive was charming, through forest country that increased in density and colour as we left the dusty grey monotony of Senegal behind. Much of the time we ran alongside the nearly finished railway, that in a few months' time will connect the Soudan with the Coast. We passed hundreds of native labourers engaged in felling and transporting trees. Naked except for a few inches of rag, they were the most magnificent physical specimens I have ever seen; over six feet, broad shouldered, lean flanked, superbly muscled without being thickset, almost any one of them might have served as a model for the Hercules or Apollos of old Greek sculpture. Half-way we reached the River Fal6m6, which, after infinite hanging about, we crossed on handpulled ferries, one car at a time. By this time,

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU with the sun at the meridian, we were all very thirsty, and a gentleman with two bottles of tepid beer in his valise was the most popular person of the party. Gold used to be found in the neighbourhood of the Fal~m6, and was exchanged by the negroes for European goods with the caravans from the north. It was found, not in veins, but in small grains, called by the native Mandigoes munko (gold powder). The native idea of gold-mining was somewhat primitive, beginning with the sacrifice of a bullock; and a hoe for digging up the sand when the streams subsided in the dry season, and some calabashes for washing the grains, were the only equipment. As we crossed the Falme we passed from Senegal into the French Soudan, into the country of the Bambaras, whose men form some of the most valuable recruits to the Colonial Infantry. At midday we reached a rough railway station at Ambidedi, where we picnicked, and till sundown sat sweltering and grousing, till the arrival of our heavy baggage enabled us to entrain again. Honestly speaking, it was not a nice train, though it boasted a dining-car with a most entertaining attendant, black as a well-polished boot, incongruously enough named Mabelle. He had the quickest gift of repartee I have ever listened to, cultivated during twelve years' service on the same train and polished by much chaffing and exchange of wit with the officers and traders who pass and re-pass. I spent the night adjusting myself to the idiosyncrasies of the very hard seat which I was lucky enough to have to myself. Something had gone wrong with its inside, and every half-hour or so, as I was getting nicely to sleep, it collapsed and threw me heavily to the floor. At last, I gave up the

DAKAR TO BAMAKO unequal contest, and slept on the floor until the morning. It was a battered, grimy little group of us that alighted at Bamako at midday of the third day. There was the new Administrator for Timbuktu, to whom I owe very much gratitude for his subsequent infinite kindness and help, a woman artist travelling en mission, a geometrician, the new stationmaster, a variety of officers and traders, and a pretty little lady joining her husband, who had wept quietly most of the way from Dakar because it was hot, because it was dirty, because she didn't like the look of the country or anything in it, because she was scandalised by the sight of so much naked black skin. We were all of us grey in the face, unbelievably dirty, uncombed, unwashed, unshaved. Naturally there was no room at the Buffet Hotel, so eventually I was given a room over a tradinghouse, a long, unshaded kilometre's walk away, overlooking the native market-place. Bamako is the most important town in the Western Soudan, and it is really rather charming. The new part, where the European buildings stand, has been attractively arranged by the Hon. Secretary of the Soudan in long, shady avenues, each house standing back in a garden flaming With bougainvilloa and hibiscus. Beyond lies the native town, with a new and an old part, of innumerable streets and courtyards. The beehive architecture of Senegal has given way to walls and roofs of plastered mud of the same red hue as one sees in Morocco and in many of the Saharan cities, that, as the sunlight catches it, has an almost transparent effect, as if the houses and the ground were lit by some subterranean fire. Above, at Koulouba, on a square hill, towers the Residence, seat of the mighty, and DT

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU beyond, between flat banks, lies the Niger in its infancy. Bamako, of all the towns I saw in the A.O.F., has about it a flavour of that much- abused word Oriental. Away from the grey monotony of Senegal, where the Harmattan from the north seems to shrivel colour and vegetation, and yet out of the reach of the Saharan influence, its atmosphere has a prismatic colouring vaguely Eastern. The trees are really green, the houses really white, the sky has not the Saharan air of having been withered by the heat, the flowers are crude patches of crimson and purple, and the avenues make zebra-like effects of light and shade. In the big market-place North and South meet and mingle, as do East and West the other side of Suez. White trading-houses present neat white stucco fronts; small, dangerously-swift cars, flashing with white drill suits and cretonne parasols, scatter the swarming black humanity. In the Square sit the merchants under shelters of rough wood or grass mats, chaffering and bickering. In a long wooden stand is the jewellerylong strings of beads of all shapes and colours, loathsome bracelets made in Birmingham, grigris of skin and leopards' claws, lumps of coral and amber and little jackdaw-like collections of odds and ends; of bits of coloured glass, of metal, of bead, of local stones. These little collections seem dear to the hearts of their owners, old, white-bearded negroes who crouch on their haunches, running them lovingly through their fingers, holding them out invitingly, one by one. Near by are the booths of the tailors and shoemakers, stitching at bou-bous and babouches, and behind, where the women cluster, is the food market, where everything that is sticky and

DAKAR TO BAMAKO smelly offers itself to the sun and the innumerable flies. Here the only edible- looking form of comestible is the baskets of -kola-nuts, redly purple, covered with damp grass to keep them fresh. The crowd is a cosmopolitan one-Bambaras and Malinkes, whom one can never tell apart, whose women colour their lips blue; Soninkes, also called Sarrakol6s, whose staring eyes and high cheek-bones denote perhaps an Asiatic origin, Foulahs or Peuhls, nomad shepherds from the north, finer featured, almost Semitic, tattooed, whose women cover their eyelids with antimony (a stone that comes from Dienn6, half-way up to Timbuktu) and stain their nails with henna, as do the Arab women. Here and there is a wild-eyed, blue-robed Moor, or a Sonhrais, the latter rather " niggery," with thick nose, crinkly hair, and face scored with heavy cicatrices. These Sonhrais come from the East, and their architecture and certain methods of interring their dead have given rise to the belief that they originally belonged to the region of the Nile. All these people are polygamous, and herd together in big towns like Bamako, although they inter-marry little. The chief institution of them all is the family. Each family forms a social, economic, and judicial centre on a tacit co-operative basis, each member bringing in the result of his labour-fishing, hunting, and what not-from which the head makes a fair division and distribution. At Bamako, as at Dakar, many of the shops or trading-houses are held by Syrians. Shopping in the A.O.F. is a business as topsy-turvy as Alice Through the Looking Glass. One wants to buy a hat and one is directed to an establishment that seems full of hardware. Houbigant and coti scent can be run to earth among the most unpromising-looking collection of sardine tins.

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU No one specialises in anything; each tradinghouse, however small, is a general store supplying anything that its clients, white or black, are likely to require. Some of the stores are French, some Greek, a good many English, of which latter Manchester cotton is the chief commodity, for it is a depressing fact that almost invariably the negroes, however remote from civilisation, dress in Manchester or other imported cotton, and have done so since caravans first crossed the Sahara. One can buy the most authentic-looking bou-bou or pagne that a native tailor has been stitching at all day, and it is British through and through. The native woven cotton can be recognised by its air of being composed of narrow strips sewn together, and is more expensive to buy. The bou-bou, that most characteristic garment of the negro, is woven, made, and embroidered in its thousands at Manchester in the fashion of the moment at Timbuktu, or Gao, or Bamako. Many of the traders, as I have said, are Syrians, a race neither white nor brown, but yellowish in colour, unattractive and shifty eyed, but shrewdest of business men. If I seem harsh in denying them whiteness I must quote a remark that made me laugh by my native servant a few weeks later at Segou. He was quite the blackest thing I have ever seen, except coal, and he told me that un monsieur wanted to speak to me. " Un monsieur ?" I said. " Un blanc ?" "Non, pas un blanc," he answered. "Un Syrien." The only hotel at Bamako is the Buffet, an annexe of the station itself, whose faqade gives on to an unpaved platform swarming with native loafers hoping for a job from the dirty little trains that grunt in and out two or three yards away. The enterprising manager of the

DAKAR TO BAMAKO Buffet has arranged at the back quite an attractive little hedge-surrounded garden, with green chairs and tables where it is fashionable among the Europeans to come and take an apiritif before lunch and dinner. But when the sun shines too strongly at the back they go through to the front for their apiritifs and gossip, and I never could help smiling at the incongruous sight of smart and immaculate figures in white, and elegant ladies in Paris frocks and wonderful shoes and stockings, flirting and flaner-ing with an air most fashionable on the partially built platform of a really particularly grubby little station. The French Soudan, of which Bamako is the capital, though the largest, is the most sparsely populated of the French West African colonies, owing to the perpetual state of insecurity in which its peoples existed before the French occupation, to infant mortality, and to the old slave-trade, which carried off a great number of the youthful population. The very early history of the Soudan is unknown. Implements of polished stone have been found, also grottos with mural decorations exist, similar to those of the stone age. But who made those implements and those drawings, and how long ago, is wrapped in mystery, for the interior of Africa in its human development is so far behind that of other continents that such relics are hard to date, and those corresponding to the palaolithic or neolithic periods might, as a great French archaologist has said, be either four thousand or a hundred thousand years old. The earliest known history of the Soudan starts in about the eighth or ninth century, in the days of the great negro empires. The ancestors of these empires, as far as anyone can tell, were a primitive people who in prehistoric times probably covered the greater part of North Africa, and who,

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU under the impulsion of invading northern races, fled farther and farther to the south. One of the principal negro empires was that of the Mandingoes, or Mandes, and another that of the Mossis, who were at constant warfare with the Mandingoes, and whose king in 1533 pillaged Timbuktu itself. A third and possibly the greatest of them all, the empire of the Sonhrais, had its capital at Gao, and its king, Da Kassai, was converted to Mahommadanism. It took seven centuries to achieve its greatest eminence of art and letters, and finally fell into decadence through warfare with the Moors of Morocco. A fourth empire was that of Bornou, which too, early in its history, became converted to Mahommadanism, and reached its apogge in fifteen hundred, when it stretched from the Nile to the Niger. Now the greatness of Bornou has fallen. Only last year, in a little lost town of Spanish Morocco, an accident of travel introduced me to a coal black gentleman who called himself Cachala, Crown Prince of Lake Chad, and was really, so I was told, a son of the present Emir of Bornou. His customary dress consisted of blue serge trousers, a dinner jacket, and a flowing tie. He was known to the police in several European countries, and, I believe, had just done a month's "hard " in Tangier for stealing oranges. A polished and not unamusing blackguard! These negro kingdoms were undoubtedly very great and very powerful, in close connection, through the caravan routes, with the learning, art, and culture of Morocco, effecting brisk interchange of trade, and, as they advanced in civilisation, creating caste and trades and systematic work. Later, as they grew soft with prosperity, came from the north the Arab and Berber invasions and Mahommadan propaganda, infusing new blood

DAKAR TO BAMAKO and beliefs, making the genealogy of the present very hard to trace. A few of the aborigines, such as the Hab6s, N'Dogoun, Toumbos, etc., dispossessed of all their original importance but fairly pure of origin, clung together in remote mountains, and a few of the Sorkos, Boros, and Somonos still exist in remote villages and islands of the Niger. But the Moors, turned out of Spain, sent, late in fifteen hundred, armies that raided and pillaged and conquered, then Pashas and Amirs to assume the reins of government. But, occupied by troubles at home, they became careless, and the Soudanese, after a period of revolution, assassination, and general oppression, called for aid to the Touaregs. They did not fare much better at the hands of these fierce nomads, who ruled by violence and anarchy, and split up the country into an infinity of little states too disjointed and too weak to form any real force of empire. The end came late in seventeen hundred, and for nearly two centuries the population decreased, commerce declined, and agriculture disappeared. During these years, unhappy and without real leaders, the Soudanese were the prey of many adventurers. One of these was Samory, born in 1835. He was made slave by the sovereign Sori Ibrahima, who gave him command of some troops, and eventually turned upon his master, and, after eight years of warfare, possessed himself of the surrounding country, with a population of nearly two million people. Later he waged war against the French for sixteen years, and finally, beaten but resisting to the end, was taken prisoner, and died in 19oo. Another such adventurer was Mahmadou Lamine, who dreamed from his earliest youth of kingship. Cunning and clever, he posed as a holy THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU man, visiting Mecca, and during seven years in Constantinople and other centres of Mahommadanism grew rich in money and experience. He returned proclaiming himself marabout and prophet, and spent the rest of his life exercising rare gifts of treachery and diplomacy against the French or anyone else who stood in his way, till, late in eighteen hundred, he fell in battle, and was beheaded by a black partisan of France. Yet another adventurer was Rabat, fosterbrother of Zobeir, an Egyptian slave- trader, and who for twenty years was the terror of the Eastern Soudan, till he, too, fell before the French. It was in 1876 that the French, firmly established in Senegal, undertook the penetration of the Soudan under the auspices of Colonel Briere de ' Isle. A few years later the entire length of the Niger, right down to British territory, was negotiated by a French naval lieutenant. By 1899 a Franco-British treaty approximately fixed the boundaries of the West African colonies, since which immense strides have been made in social and economic conditions, in trade and means of communication. At Bamako I was treated to much the same tale of woe as at Dakar. But this time, with the great water-highway, the Niger, running, so to speak, past my door, I was not to be discouraged. Also, through some French officers I had met in the train, I had heard of a convoy of Senegalese soldiers running from Koulicoro, fifty kilometres farther down the river. After two days' sheer hard work, making a nuisance of myself to everybody, moving heaven, earth, and another place, I obtained the promise of a chaland (a covered barge, or kind of tiny houseboat, with four walls and a square yard of deck) to be towed behind the convoy. In this I was lucky, for it was said

DAKAR TO BAMAKO 57 to be the last convoy to be run till the next rainy season. As it was, the Niger was at very low water, and progress would be slow. I was fully two months too late to do the trip in the best and safest conditions, but at last it really began to look as if I were going to get there.

CHAPTER V BAMAKO TO SAGOU ON the third day, hurriedly equipped and in possession of a " boy" (as all black servants are called), body and soul, at sixty francs a month, I proceeded to Koulicoro. Here, to my disgust, I found that my chaland had been taken over by an aviation officer, and that I had been accommodated with a kind of rough shelter, five feet by ten, on the tug itself. To add to my disgust, the boys dropped most of my provision cases into the river in process of transit. Two I rescued as they bobbed gaily on the surface of the Niger; the one containing my cellar, alas, went irretrievably to the bottom. The tug was a veritable " Tin Lizzie " of a boat, indescribably grimy, piled three deep with black humanity. She towed behind a long trail of flat-bottomed barges, carrying a company of Senegalese Tirailleurs, an officer or two, merchandise, and some large, oddly-shaped cages to bring back giraffes and antelopes from Gao. A strenuous afternoon on the part of Saghair, my boy, and myself cleared my shelter of most of the dirt and variously shaped beasties that encumbered it, and the installing of my camp bed and mosquito-net, baggage, and batterie de cuisine made it quite homelike, if a trifle overcrowded. Through the days that followed housekeeping was a simple affair. For all washing purposes one leant over the side and fished up the Niger in

B BAMAKO TO SEGOU a calabash; for laundry one did the same thing, hanging it on any unoccupied bit of space, and, thanks to the climate, finding it dry and ready to wear in the morning. For fresh meat one kept a few chickens tied by the leg outside the shelter, killing them as required, and replenishing supplies by raids on passing villages. The only drawback to my chickens was that, living in such close proximity to them, and personally waiting on them, I got quite attached to them, and used to feel remorseful when eating for lunch the cheery little creature that had crowed me awake a few hours earlier. In particular I mourned for a pretty little white hen, who the day after I bought her, and on the two following afternoons, most obligingly laid an egg. It seemed so ungrateful to eat her, and I gave her a few days' grace to see if it would become a habit. But it didn't, so she, too, had to go the way of all flesh, or, rather, fowl. In any case that egg, if I may mix my metaphors, was a bone of contention on board our Tin Lizzie. On the first day Saghair contended that it would be company for her, and encourage her to go on laying, if we left it beside her till we required it for the evening meal. Half an hour later the egg had disappeared, and Saghair went round furiously hitting any of the coloured crew or passengers whom he thought might have stolen it. At the same time on the following afternoon I found a solemn circle, consisting of Saghair and half a dozen others, sitting round the unfortunate bird. They waited so in the broiling sun for over two hours. At last came a faint, triumphant cackle, and a wild pounce from Saghair and the others. But that evening I had a new laid egg for supper. For the first time in my life housekeeping accounts gave me no qualms, with chickens (on

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU the exchange) at threepence apiece and eggs at a farthing. When one got tired of these and tinned stuff one fished over the side with a bit of string and a bent pin, producing excellent results. In particular a largish fish, called capitaine, made excellent eating. Baths on a large scale were at a discount, owing to crocodiles. Once I attempted to bathe, but an active young crocodile made a breach in a ring of blacks I had told to keep beating the water round me, and by the time I had scrambled frantically to the shore I had decided that the r6le of Jonah held no charms. One rather felt the lack of fresh vegetables, but made shift with an occasional find of tomatoes, or a species of small water-melon, tasteless but cool, that was certainly good value at a sou apiece. Saghair, like most new brooms, swept clean for awhile. At least, " swept clean" is scarcely the right term, for sweeping to him was an abomination. He was a moderate cook, an excellent scavenger, and for awhile obliging, and scrupulously clean in his person, but soap and water for household purposes he simply could not see the use of. Every day I had to stand over him to see that he did not merely, with the flat of his hand, sweep the worst of the mess under the bed. Nor could he understand why I objected to a million flies living their little lives on my uncovered food. He called himself Touareg, but was really of, the tribe of Cou6aboro, a primitive people of the Eastern Soudan. Though perfectly hideous, he was the vainest creature I have ever met, and spent hours a day washing and cleaning his two layers of cotton garments, and, especially before we put into a village, preening and titivating himself in front of my looking-glass. But he persisted in crowning an otherwise respectable appearance with a green Homburg hat of the

BAMAKO TO SEGOU vilest shape, texture, and colour, and a knuttishlooking cane, with which and a cigarettegenerally one of mine-suspended from a corner of his huge mouth, he used to stroll about, staring at the girls with a languid man-of-the-world air. It was the first time he had ever valeted a lady, and it took me a long time to teach him not to burst in upon me at all times without knocking, or in some way manifesting his intention, and not to sit on my bed and watch me while I dressed. When at last he realised that, for some unknown reason, these things annoyed me, he solved the problem by sitting with his eye glued to a crack in the wall, so as to be informed and ready the moment I might want him. Though the Niger at this point is still in its infancy, it is an infancy already many hundreds of miles long. It rises in the Fouta Djallon, far to the east, Sierra Leone way. At first sight it is not a beautiful river. For the first twenty-four hours after leaving Koulicoro the banks were prettily wooded, with low, swelling hills against the sky-line that gave relief to the fiat immensity. But soon the hills and the verdure disappeared, and the river ran interminably between fiat banks, where the water, very low, lay bare two lines of red-gold sand. Beyond stretched la brousseinterminable scrub of a dull greyish brown, semiSaharan in character. Although well down in the tropics, there was no colour, no tropical wealth of vegetation, and the blazing sun and the harsh wind from the desert makes the landscape wizened and arid. The Niger is the divide between north and south, between the brown men and the black-what the old writers describe as " a moral boundary." The natives on its banks call it Djoliba, which has been translated by some as meaning " Great

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU Water" and by others as meaning "The River of Griots." The old Arabic name was Neel Khebir, "Great Water," or Neel Abeed, " The River of Slaves." The ancients, in naming it Niger, meant " The River of the Black People," or Ethiopians. Under whatever name, it used considerably to puzzle those same ancients, and possibly no big river has ever been more incorrectly mapped in its time. For many years it was confused with the Senegal and Gambia rivers, and most of the old writers declared it to be a continuation of the Nile. Pliny, Herodotus, and Ptolemy all argued about it, and most of the old maps, including that of the Edrissi in 1154, showed it running across the continent from east to west in a straight line, with its mouth at St. Louis. Even the Portuguese, blindly following the lead of such distinguished geographers, made the same mistake. These mistakes rose probably from the fact that the early explorers took it for granted that a river does not run inland. Which is exactly what the Niger does, starting westward from the Fouta Djallon for about fifteen hundred miles before turning sharply south, till it reaches the Gulf of Benin. Apropos of the Nile, a story is told about a priest who, some time during the fourteenth century, was sent by the Pope through Egypt to Abyssinia. Apparently he was not too well received at Cairo, and in revenge he drew up a scheme for the diversion of the Nile half-way down, so that its waters should be emptied into the Red Sea near Suakim, and Egypt left dry and destitute. But though the Niger is disappointing at first sight, after a time, to use the popular expression, it " grows on one." As one travels, its endless

BAMAKO TO SEGOU monotony seems to become grandiose, in some way impressive. The broad, smooth sweep of water that merges into the wide horizon, its slow and majestic curves, the great, unshadowed blaze of light that wraps it as in a garment, overawes one a little, seeming part of a vast unconquered spirit, fitting mate of the great African continent. We were going down it in a north-easterly direction, to where it rises in an immense curve, where Timbuktu stands. Our boat drew under three feet of water, and at present the river was so low that though in parts nearly a kilometre wide, I have seen natives wade right across it. We spent most of the first two days, and many times thereafter, sticking on sandbanks and hoisting ourselves off them, a process that generally took from one to two hours. It was helped-and often hindered-by the efforts of the laptots (native river sailors) on the barges behind us manceuvring with their long poles to get a leverage on Tin Lizzie, who, with a sudden " full steam ahead" with any luck floated once more. My lingering regret for the privacy of the aviation officer's chaland vanished on the second day, when it was rammed by a larger one coming up from behind and its side smashed in. Life gradually acquired a definite routine. One got up early in the morning while it was cool, and attended to one's livestock and housework. After a light and early lunch one hibernated till four or five, when it was again cool enough to do a little work, and to wash and mend one's clothes. The only excitements were when one stuck on a sandbank or stopped to collect wood at a wayside village. I could not stir overmuch outside my shelter on account of the swarms of men, women, and children, who, with their household goods and cooking-pots, covered every inch of surface, and THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU from whom exuded an almost unbearable odouran odour of hot flesh and pungent cooking. At six we moored by the land for the night, resuming progress at sunrise next morning. As we went east we left behind the hills and forest land, and the horizon on either side lay flat as the back of one's hand. Quite frequently we passed a tiny village, built on a small cliff-like promontory, whose inhabitants, male and femaleblack, friendly creatures-would swarm to greet us, with calabashes containing millet, mealies, and sometimes eggs for sale. The beehive houses of the Coast had disappeared. The Soudanese architecture is something like that of Egypt, only rougher and simpler, of baked mud built in squares, and each family has its little collection of houses enclosed in mud walls. Sometimes the archways and doorways have a portico of roughly Egyptian design, and the mosques (for as one goes northeast the Mahommadan element predominates), instead of a tapering minaret, have a lumpy protuberance at one end studded with wooden beams. For a long time I puzzled over the wherefor of these wooden beams, which always gave the building rather the air of a dumpling studded with cloves, and hoped for some picturesque explanation. The explanation, when it came, was disappointing, being merely that the mud minarets crumble badly in the rainy season, and, standing in need of frequent repair, the stumps are to enable people to climb up. Sometimes we passed pirogues, native canoes made of split limbs of trees bound together in the middle, or wooden barges propelled by poles, or, more rarely, by battered sails. Little cameos of line they made against the glittering sheet of water, where the sun danced with queer optical

B BAMAKO TO SEGOU effects-black silhouettes in a world where everything was the colour of baked mud. The charm of the Soudan, as I have said, is not that of colour, but of silhouette, of long lines fading to the horizon, suggesting space and eternity. There is something strangely satisfying about it, with its hardness and its arid vigour, yet somehow in certain moods it produces in some souls an unreasoning terror; to others-myself among the number-a hunger, a vague anguish mixed with rapture, a longing to annihilate the space, to conquer the eternity. At sunset we really woke up, and the most popular evenings of all were when we encamped by a village, for distant tomtoms throbbed an invitation, and our Tirailleurs would sally ashore in search of eggs for supper and of the smiles from bright eyes. One little village of Bambaras that we passed is believed by its inhabitants to be haunted by a jealous guinea (djin), who lays in wait for human men to attack them. Very many years ago, they say, one of their young men, called Bondiagou, was on his way to his rice-fields when he saw the guinea's wife sitting above in a tree. She was very pretty, as are all female guineas, and she smiled at him, inviting him to join her in the tree. Nothing loath, he did so, but as they exchanged wonderful elfin kisses her husband suddenly appeared and attacked Bondiagou fiercely with his stick. The lady was much annoyed at the interruption and began to throw the fruit of the tree at her husband's head, and in the domestic altercation that ensued Bondiagou made good his escape. But ever since the guinea has been as a creature possessed, and, holding all mankind to blame for the insult to his elfin honour, prowls round the village at night, wreaking vengeance on any human that he meets. ET

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU One night I went ashore after supper between Sama Markala and Kamane, and as I stepped ankle deep into loose sand it seemed as if I had stepped right into the heart of the Sahara. The world was an infinity of pale sand, turned to molten silver by a slender moon and the steely tips of stars that peered from an iridescent sky. Far away on the horizon a feathery group of palms broke the skyline, and from the low drin rose like an incessant, sibilant whisper the chirrup of innumerable crickets. Two or three camp fires, round which a group of negroes gossiped over their supper of rice curry in a common calabash, threw long shafts of red light along the pale carpet of sand. By the fire nearest to me half a dozen Tirailleurs were dancing. Crouching in the soft sand, that felt warm and comforting to the body, hidden by a tuft of high grasses, I was unnoticed. It seemed to be a kind of wardance they were doing, some dance of fierce ceremonial, with a stamping of feet, a wild leaping into the air, and a rhythmic shouting of guttural voices. " Hogh ! Hogh ! Hogh ! Hogh ! Heya ! Heya! Heya ! Heya!" The vigour and suppleness of their movements, the height and the distance that they leapt, were amazing, and the shouting sent a little fierce tingling through one's veins. Sometimes one of them repeated a couple of short lines, that were echoed in unison by the others. " Heya ! Heya ! Heya ! Heya ! " Sometimes they imitated the movements of various animals, gyrating dizzily till, exhausted, they flung themselves upon the ground. Near by crouched an old and bearded Sonhrais, bowing till his forehead touched the ground, making his belated prayer to the Moghreb. Four of the Tirailleurs were squatting on the ground, clapping their hands in rhythm,

I BAMAKO TO SEGOU while the other two danced opposite eaci other. Now they were doing the dance of the women, simulating the gestures of love, the one retreating while the other advanced. The dance and the intention of it were perhaps a trifle obscene, but there was about it a spontaneous abandon and a natural unconsciousness that lent it beauty. The clapping grew louder, and with a more insistent beat behind it. A small boy wrapped in a loose blue bou-bou, who had been crouching near me, leapt to his feet as if possessed, spinning and gyrating in circles, leaping as he spun, his fluttering draperies giving him the air of a whirling bat, till at last, exhausted, he fell to the ground and lay motionless. The old Sonhrais had finished his prayers, and, hugging his knees, gazed into nothingness. The dance of the soldiers had ceased, and two of them were going through the travesty of a drill, while a third gave orders, in the lisping pidgin-French of the negro. " An! Deaux ! An! Deaux ! Droite ! Gauche ! Au repos! An! Deaux! Couchez! Debout! Toi mauvais soldat! Toi pas bon!" Evidently the ringleader was miming the idiosyncrasies of some officer. They shouted with all the power of their healthy lungs in the falsetto laugh of the negro, till, breathless, the two victims turned upon their mock officer and rolled him over and over in the sand. The other camp fires had died down, and one by one the soldiers were creeping back to the barges. A hush was falling over the night, the hush of great spaces. A little wind was blowing from the north, a wind from the Sahara, carrying with it, for the first time, a trace of the cool tang of the desert night. It rustled through the drin that I lay among, and, for the first time since I landed, I felt in some queer way that I was back in the Africa that I know and love.

CHAPTER VI SAGOU TO SANSANDING ON the morning of the fifth day we sighted Segou, a hundred and eighty kilometres from Koulicoro, and before landing were hung up for over an hour while all the natives, to their great disgust, were sent ashore to the Sanitary Inspector to have their clothing washed and fumigated. Segou is heralded many kilometres in advance by vast fields of tobacco. The tobacco of the Soudan is of quite good quality, and the natives smoke it in the leaf, without shredding it as we do. All I can say of the result is that I was reduced to smoking it when I ran out of cigarettes, crumbled up in a black clay pipe, and if anything could cure me of a permanent habit of oversmoking it would have done so. Segou is a metropolis as Soudanese towns go; that is to say, it boasts over forty white inhabitants. Of the latter, however, I only saw three very wilted-looking ones, and was told that the others were taking their siesta. Personally, I wondered that life could be anything but one long siesta considering the burning fiery furnace the poor dears have to live in. In such little outposts even the soldiers, and especially the old timers, seem too wilted and devitalised to grow even a vestige of such a coat of sunburn as was beginning to make my own face merge in with the landscape. One hears tragic little stories sometimes of men who have succumbed and "gone black," living outside their work in a state of primitivism, of

SEGOU TO SANSANDING bestiality almost. And sometimes one hears, too, of women who have become brutalised and degraded. It is surprising that such stories are not more frequent in a climate that withers all energy and enterprise, where healthy exercise is impossible almost, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to stimulate or keep the mind up to a civilised level. But there are stories, too-that, unfortunately, one is told less about--of unobtrusive grit and sheer heroism of which the French Coloniale is the heroine. There are people who say that the French have not the true colonising spirit, that the women in particular cannot survive a rough life. Well, I saw a good many of them, not only in comparative civilisation like Segou, but far up in the bush; sometimes two of them, sometimes one alone with her husband, the only white woman within a hundred miles, and I have admired them even more than I admire an Englishwoman under the same circumstances. For we have a little of the masculine element in our make-up-possibly generations of Englishmen have drummed it into us-and can to a great extent take up man's pursuits and sports, and lead his life. But greater is the gallantry of these little Frenchwomen, some of them mere girls, who have not even the distraction of sport, with their smart little homemade frocks and pretty, useless shoes, who live, year in year out, in a desolation that would drive many men to drink, riddled with fever, losing, in that wicked climate, that withering heat, their looks and youth and health. The first Britisher ever to visit Segou was Mungo Park, that amazing traveller who, sent first by the African Association and then by the British Government, made two expeditions down the Niger. During the first, in 1794, he reached

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU Segou, where apparently he was treated with a good deal of suspicion by the King Mansong, and was left to the tender mercies of a poor woman, who took him in and gave him food and shelter. Probably the first Europeans to travel over this section of the Niger were the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, and in 1507 Leo, the African, pushed farther still, and gave the civilised world the first definite account of a then quite unknown continent. The French quarter of S6gou is attractively laid out with houses of the bungalow type, standing back in gardens along an avenue gratefully shaded with trees. The big native quarter round the market-place is without interest architecturally speaking, though the reddish mud of which it is built lights up at the sunset hour with a queerly beautiful luminosity, as if consumed by fire within, and the view from the roof-tops over the broad blue sheet of water belted with red-gold sand is rather wonderful. When European buildings spring up the native seems to lose or become confused in his own natural architecture. He tries to ape the European plan of building and construction, and the result is a conglomeration of neither one thing nor the other, without charm or character. At Segou the big market-day is held on Monday, and from dawn there is a never- ending procession along the road leading across the grey, dusty plain-men, women, children, and donkeys carrying every imaginable kind of merchandise. The concourse is so great that it spreads all over the surrounding streets. The fetishists outnumber the Mahommadans by two to one. After supper I fell in with a native tom-tom, or dance, at some cross-roads. An old bearded negro played on a huge tom-tom, while

I SEGOU TO SANSANDING three satellites played on small, bowl-shaped ones supported by sticks. There was no tune, but the rhythm was faultless. Some two score of boys and young women revolved wildly in circles, whirling and leaping, falling and rising in the moonlight, and stamping their feet in a wonderful complexity of steps. With their black skins and the flapping of their white rags it looked for all the world like a dance of gnomes out of a book of fairy-tales. In the old days the country round Segou formed part of the great Mossi Empire. Once some Portuguese travellers brought back to King Jean the Second at Lisbon some negroes whom they had made prisoners in what is now British territory, who told tales of a very great monarch who held even their king, the King of the Mossis, under his sway. They said that his territory started at Timbuktu and stretched many miles to the east, also that he and his people had many of the habits of the Christians. For awhile King Jean firmly believed this monarch to be Prester John, that strange apocryphal figure round whom so many legends have been woven, and even he sent a letter to him by the negroes, which, needless to say, never arrived. , Some time during seventeen hundred a very clever man called Kango came to the King of S6gou and begged for the loan of an army to help him defeat a troublesome enemy. His followers had brought with them an ostrich that, during its visit, laid an egg. Kango told the King, who had never seen an ostrich before, that the bird was a chicken, and that all the chickens and their eggs in his country were equally large. The story made a great impression, and when, later, by his powers as a magician, he had himself sealed up in a large earthenware jar, from which he

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU emerged at the end of a week alive and flourishing, his reputation was established, and he got his army and everything else that he asked for. Segou, like most Soudanese towns, has its mascot, a bird called diougo, that is esteemed sacred, and is protected in every way. Sometimes the mascot is some animal that is believed to have rendered the early inhabitants some good service. We left S6gou the following morning, and had a day fairly free from sandbanks. As we ran towards the Sahara, though the days grew hotter, the nights, mercifully, became correspondingly cooler. Indeed, one of the last remaining passengers on the barges behind used to complain of the violent drop in the temperature. It is amazing how sun-baked and sensitive the West African becomes; at the faintest suspicion of a draught or cooling breeze he shivers. Personally, I found the nights- about the temperature, I should say, of an average English warm summer's night-a blessed respite, enabling one to endure the days. For the days were torrid! From midday to five one simply lay and gasped, only moving to try fretfully whether it were cooler with the door open or shut, or whether one could catch a draught. But even a draught was like a breath from a furnace. Tin Lizzie was all of metal, without shade or awning, and a few hours' sunshine made of her an oven one could have cooked a joint in. All one's possessions became demoralised. Everything that ought to be hard melted, and everything that ought to be soft dried up. Literally I had to break my loaf of bread with a hammer, my cold cream was a sloppy liquid, and slabs of chocolate crumbled to powder. Actually, in spite of discomfort, I stood the heat pretty well for a tender-foot, except that I grew terribly thin. It is a curious effect that the E SEGOU TO SANSANDING African climate has on people, expanding those who are plump by nature and shrinking those who are already thin. After a day or two I lost the first two trying symptoms-an almost intolerable thirst and grotesquely swollen feet, that gave me an air of having at least elephantiasis. Even in my shelter it was necessary to wear coloured goggles with side-flaps, besides, of course, a helmet, for the glare off the water was intense, and sunstroke can be caught as easily through the eyes as anywhere else. I have known many suns as hot as that of the Soudan and the Coast in February, but never one whose " violet rays " are as much to be feared. At first I was inclined to be sceptical, but soon I learnt wisdom. Once I saw a man I had just been talking to, standing with uncovered head on a cloudy, not unduly hot day, go down as if he had been shot-a most unpleasant sight. The sensation, I believe, is like that of a kick from a horse, and then unconsciousness for many days. The sun is the supreme despot of the Niger. Soon after I landed at Dakar I heard an old resident say that the sun was the enemy of man, and mentally I contradicted him, so much have I loved, almost worshipped, the sun in all his moods, in his fiercest and most violent strength. Soon in the Soudan I learnt to fear him. As in some countries he gives life and the joy of life and prosperity, so in others he can breed madness and disease and desolation and death. The Niger flows calmly and serenely between yellow banks into the arms of the sun, and the world seems one broad, golden laugh. And as long as one takes precautions it may remain so; but neglect those precautions and one goes down. If one takes any exercise, as in Europe one understands exercise, or exerts oneself to any extent, one

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU realises, through attacks of violent headache or nausea, that one has made a mistake. No white man can do regular manual labour in the Soudan, except the Portuguese, and native labour is unreliable and intermittent. The negro simply will not work unless he is in pressing need of money. One cannot help a sneaking and unregenerate sympathy with him. His needs are extremely simple and his country automatically supplies them, so why work ? A man who for eighteen months had been trying to get a tworoomed mud house built complained that he could only get labourers once a year, before the dreaded date of tax-paying was due, and that he wished the Government would collect its dues four times a year, so that he could have a house to live in. This labour problem, combined with the lack of cheap and quick transport, is why the Soudan, with all its riches, is so comparatively backward in trade. Cotton, which is the great produce of the country, costs in all very nearly as much to get down to the Coast as it will fetch when it gets there. Quite the most interesting companions of my journey were the laptots of the boat, who every few minutes used to make some excuse to come and investigate the curious specimen that I must have seemed to them. Sometimes they wanted to know the time, sometimes they begged a cigarette, or asked me to bandage a cut finger or scratched leg. Sometimes they used to render me some small service, such as hammering in a nail, or mending a broken calabash. The negro has little of the reserve of the Arab, and will chatter by the hour about his personal affairs, though how truthfully, of course, one cannot say. His lingo takes some learning. It is a kind of pidginFrench based on a literal translation of his own

S SEGOU TO SANSANDING language, mixed with catchwords, slang, and not always pretty phrases he has picked up from his superiors. Two or three words in particular serve him for any and every purpose. One is bon, which means anything good or fortunate or pleasant or beautiful, and pas bon, which naturally means the reverse, preceded by y a (from the French il y a). " Moi y a bon " may mean " I am good, or pleased, or happy, or beautiful." Another ubiquitous word is the verb gagner (in French " to win " or " to earn "), which they will use even when they mean the exact opposite. " Toi y a gagng argent perdu" will mean, "You have lost your money." Or they will say, "Moi y a gagng petit," meaning, " I have had a baby," or "Moiy a gagng ceufs," meaning, " I have brought you some eggs." They have a vivid if childish imagination, and a deeply rooted belief in legends and stories of the supernatural. They have woven a little legend round the sun and fire and water. They say that fire and water are mortal enemies, and that the sun is the fetish of fire, and that the rivers run swiftly to escape him. As an example they will quote the fire over which you cook your food. To keep the fire from eating your food you have to put water between them. The water also wants your food, and between them they make great palabre (talk or noise, in this case the hiss of boiling water), so that when you want to take your food you will have to be very careful not to touch either of them, because both are angry and will bite you if they can. They believe that clouds and the mists that rise from the ground are the souls of dead men, and that fogs and the clouds that race across the sky are souls that are travelling. They have invented fanciful names for various European

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU commodities. Bateau-la-brousse is their name for a train, and feu fteint their name for gold. They have a great love of elaborate and high-sounding phrases, and often their letters, written in French (generally by a public letter-writer), are the quaintest effusions imaginable. The Mahommadans of the Soudan have evolved their own version of the history of the world. First of all, they say, God made a Paradise called Ares, and a thousand years later another called Koursiou. During the course of the next few thousand years He made the archangels, then heaven and earth, and, a thousand years later still, water. Like us, they believe Him to have created the world in seven days. On the first day He created the devils and djins, on the second the angels, on the third the Seven Heavens, on the fourth all the animals, on the fifth the rivers and seas and all the live things therein, on the sixth people and birds, and on the seventh He rested. Then He created Adam, and a hundred years later Eve, and placed them in Paradise near the tree of Forbidden Fruit (Iakhouba). The Devil, wondering how he could upset their happiness, decided to attack Eve in her characteristic feminine weakness of jealousy. Waiting till he found her alone, he said to her: " Are you not lonely while Adam is away disporting himself with his new playmate?" " What do you mean? " asked Eve. " Why, the new and lovely woman that he has found in Paradise." Eve, though troubled, denied this allegation against her spouse, but the Devil, leading her to a pool, showed her her own reflection in the still water. Eve knew nothing about mirrors, and believed it to be a portrait of her rival.

S SEGOU TO SANSANDING " She is very beautiful," she said, and burst into tears. The Devil, while consoling her, suggested a subtle bit of revenge. He pointed out that if she should eat of the Forbidden Fruit Adam and his new friend would be lost. Eve did so, and subsequently made a scene of jealousy when Adam returned. Adam gratified a sudden curiosity to taste also of the fruit, and immediately the disobedient pair were cast by the Archangel Gabriel upon the wind that blew them down to the earth. Adam fell somewhere to the north of Mecca, and Eve near Babylon. Adam, who seems to have been of a placid temperament, remained where he was, praying throughout eighty years, while Eve, weeping, searched the earth for him. But before they were allowed to rejoin each other, God, in the form of a mighty voice from heaven, enjoined on them the Mahommadan faith. During the next three years forty children were born to them, two at a time, of which the elder sons were Cain and Abel. Cain fell in love with his own twin sister, though she had been promised in marriage to Abel, and the two quarrelled over her. In the course of the fight Abel was killed, though for a long time Cain did not realise it, for this was the first time that death had been seen in the world. Adam lived for nearly a thousand years, and -rather an inauspicious end for so important a man-died of a cold in the head. He was buried by the angels in Arabia, and it is by his tomb that the Last Judgment will be held. Eve, dying soon after, was buried at Jeddah, on the Red Sea. Noah, according to the Soudanese divines,

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU was the grandson of Adam through Sita, and his three sons were Sama (Shem), the ancestor of the Arabs and of the white races, Hama (Ham), ancestor of the negroes, and Iafissa (Japhet), father of Iadjoudj (Gog) and Madjoudj (Magog), from whom some of the Berbers of Africa claim descent. According to their chronology, 3,260 years elapsed between Noah and the birth of Christ, and between Christ and Mahommad I,oii years. After the time of Noah their Biblical or Koranic history is a haphazard mixture of dates, but the tenth day of Ramadan was considered the lucky day of all the prophets and holy men; of Adam and Noah and Abraham and Jonah and Moses and Jesus Christ and Mahommad. Soudanese ethnology is simple. Formerly all the inhabitants of the world were white of skin, speaking the same language. But when Nimrod had built the Tower of Babel, two hundred and fifty miles high, a storm blew it down, scattering its occupants all over the world. Those who fell into the sea became Europeans, those who fell in desert places Bambaras. The Sonink6s were those who fell into rivers and marshes, and the Arabs into Egypt and Morocco. The herald of the end of the world will be a monster having the eyes of a man, the neck of a donkey, the hump of a camel, the feet of a horse, and the claws of a cat, and sounds like the modem conception of Anti-Christ. Then the world will be plunged into chaos, with Gog and Magog at its head. The courses of the sun and the moon will be reversed, men will be ruled by women, wealth will be the end of every man's desire, religion will be trampled underfoot, and anarchy will reign supreme. A terrific storm of wind will sweep the world, and at the end of seven years everything living will be exterminated.

F SEGOU TO SANSANDING 79 Apropos of the foregoing legend of black and white skins, and reversing it, I discovered in the Soudan a version of the old " Uncle Remus" story, which, in case anyone doesn't know it, I will repeat. Those who have American blood in their veins are sure to have been told it in their early childhood. Once upon a time all the people of the world were black, and they were told that by bathing in a certain far-off pool they would become white. There was a great rush to the pool, and those that reached it first emerged white all over. But they had used up most of the water, and those who had been slower on the way were only able to splash themselves. These came out mulattoes. By this time there was only an inch or two of water left, and those who had been crowded out could only moisten the soles of their feet and the palms of their hands. This, " Uncle Remus " says, is why the soles of a negro's feet and the palms of his hands are white. The slightly different version, told me by Saghair, has come up to the Niger from the south-Congo way, I think-and I have been told since that, not a very old story, it has grown through the teachings of the missionaries. The fetishists believe in some kind of mystic association between men and animals. Each tribe has some forest animal that is its symbol, in some way its protector. It may be a lion or a panther or a wild boar, and of that animal the men of its adoptive tribe are not, or say they are not, afraid. One old negro assured me as a solemn fact that big monkeys of the bush, of which I at no time saw any trace, sometimes come into the villages at night and carry off women, returning them at the end of a few months. Propriety forbids me to go into details as he THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU related them, but they were very interesting, and the whole story is characteristic of the stories held out to confiding travellers. And there is another story told of some tribes in the south who at certain seasons send a young girl to join the monkeys in the forest as a sacrifice to one or other of their gods. And yet another alleged institution is the hommes panthres, or leopard men, in the hinterland of Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast-men who are reputed to wear the skins of leopards, and the claws of leopards on their hands, who rip up the stomachs of their victims and offer up portions of their insides as sacrifice. Stories of these men keep on cropping up, but always at second or third hand. All African stories have to be taken with a large grain of salt. The inner beliefs and religious rites of the negro are practically impossible for an outsider to obtain with any degree of certainty. It is a subject on which he is intensely reserved. And of his customs as much as of his beliefs, it is often hard to know, in speaking of them, whether to use the past or present tense. In the near vicinity of the Niger, especially, civilisation has spread its tentacles, bringing scepticism and enlightenment in its wake. But, at the same time, only a few miles away from a centre of civilisation one will sometimes find natives almost untouched by the latter, and undergoing the same processes of mentality as a hundred or five hundred years ago. Where white men have passed the negro acquires, at any rate superficially, a scepticism and agnosticism as pronounced as our own. But I say superficially advisedly, for between the minds of white and black there is a great gulf fixed, and I doubt if we know, any more of their

SEGOU TO SANSANDING mental or emotional processes than they can of ours, if as much. Even one's own boy, when he has shed the manners of servitude and carefully packed away the remnants of our cast-off clothing, who can know what lays at the back of his heart and head while he squats once more round the fire in the case of his own people ? An officer who had lived many years in the Soudan once told me that no race reverts to primitivism so quickly as the West African negro, when set free from the obligations of civilisation; that a private of a Colonial regiment, who may have done years of soldiering, and, during the war visited half the capitals of Europe, two or three years after he has returned to his home may go back to precisely where he started; will have exchanged European clothing for the native bou-bou, have forgotten how to speak French, and have no ambition but to squat on his haunches all day, smoking tobacco leaf and chewing kola. The negroes in the bush have a curiously effective kind of wireless telegraphy that spreads news throughout a very wide area of country. Sometimes when one turns up at a village or town one is surprised to find that one's visit has been anticipated by hours, or even days. When a stranger appears anywhere in the wilds the news is--or used to be-immediately carried by a runner to the next village several kilometres distant, and from that village is again carried by another runner, and so on indefinitely. It is a relic of the old days when the advent of a stranger probably meant danger. I am told that along the Coast one can still sometimes hear the old cry of "Hogh, Hogh, Hogi ! " when a boat appears on the horizon. The origin of this comes from the slave days, when the cry was FT

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU sent to the woods or plantations, warning those who heard it to take shelter and hide. They are passionately fond of music and dancing. Any heavy piece of work they have to do, such as poling a boat, is done to the accompaniment of chanting, and in a deserted street or under a tree one will often find a huge, almost naked, negro strolling or sitting, pensively playing to himself on a tiny stringed instrument made of wood and skin. They have a variety of musical instruments, varying in size from a thing about the size of a man's fist to one as large as a 'cello, sometimes immensely complicated, and eked out with all sorts of objects never meant for music-making. Often on Tin Lizzie I was lured out from under my mosquito-net late at night by the sound of music outside on the deck, to see, in the moonlight, two or three of the passengers or crew dancing with the precision and deliberate grace of a leader of Russian ballet. Sometimes a friend lying flat on his back accompanied them with a little whining tune on his balafon. Sometimes they accompanied themselves with a kind of nasal chanting, or with short, rhythmic grunts and squeals. Their steps were really clever, quite in the manner of, only more complicated and better executed than, our stage rag-time and jazz. For a small reward they preferred, even to a cigarette or money, a couple of kola- nuts. Kola, exported for the making of cocoa or tonic wine, is their greatest luxury, and is rather expensive at two for fifty centimes. It has strong pick-me-up qualities, and is something of an aphrodisiac. It is reputed a better tonic than quinine, but to a European palate is exceedingly bitter and nasty. The tree is something like a plum-tree, with a white, poly-petalus flower, and the nut is purplish-brown,

SEGOU TO SANSANDING about the size of a chestnut. It is not a native of the Soudan but of French Guinea. Speaking of musical instruments; the Bambara belief was that the tom-tom originally belonged to the hyenas, and that, hearing it one night in the forest, a young man stole it from them by craft. In the old days they used to kill a chicken as offering to the tree from which the tom-tom was made, in the hope that the spirit of the tree might come and inhabit the instrument. Before cutting down a tree to make a dounnou, or very big tom-tom, a sheep was sacrificed, and before making a tadounnou, a war tom-tom, it was considered necessary to destroy the whole village which contained the tree. Hyenas were considered as especially susceptible to music, and there is a village near S6gou called N'Goye where men were said to live in unity with hyenas, and every Friday to present them with a bull. The hyena is not despised in the Soudan, as in most countries, and only figures in their legends and stories as a creature of great cunning; so much so that it is said that "A man who is cunning enough to deceive a hyena can keep a wife," and a legend is quoted to prove it. The marriage customs of the West African negroes are essentially the same, though varying in detail according to locality. The Mahommadans, of course, are allowed four wives, but those of the fetishists are only limited by their incomes. There are various reasons for this, some physiological, but chiefly economic and practical. Large families of children mean riches to the negro, especially boys, who at an early age can work and make good money, a portion of which is appropriated by their parents. Then, too, a negro wife has a great deal of hard work, and a poor man

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU cannot afford to pay for slaves to assist her. The cooking is very elaborate, and the arrangements for it primitive and slow. There are many hours a day to be spent in the grinding of millet or rice, the preparation of many vegetable oils and much farinaceous food. There is water to be fetched, often from a considerable distance, also the care of the children. A plurality of wives and a kind of communal system of living, with a fair division of labour, makes life much easier, and more comfortable for everyone. The women themselves advocate polygamy, though they like a say in the choice of co-partners, and are generally allowed it by their husbands, with a wisely prophetic view to domestic peace! There are roughly four systems of arranging a marriage. There is the arrangement made in infancy, or even before birth, and this is mostly practised in important families, or where the prospective bridegroom is rich. A man will say to another: " If your next child is a daughter I will marry her," and the two friends will haggle over the amount of her dowry. This kind of engagement a girl cannot break away from, though she has generally little hesitation in bestowing her favours beforehand upon any young man she may fancy. Then there is the marriage arranged by both parents when the girl becomes of marriageable age. In a few tribes, and usually among a humble class, the young people become engaged by mutual consent, generally after they have had a trial and unofficial honeymoon ; but these cases are rare. The fourth and most usual arrangement is the marriage by purchase. The girls are considered marriageable from about the age of eleven, and have little to say in the choice of their husbands. The men marry when they can afford to, for it is

I SEGOU TO SANSANDING an expensive matter. A prospective bridegroom has to pay out to the value of two to six hundred francs, and often more in the larger and richer towns-that is to say, in the regions where civilisation has brought in the use of money; in others he pays in sheep or cattle. He has to give her innumerable garments and jewellery, besides tobacco and kola to all the members of her family, for the standing of a man is expressed in the magnificence of his wife, and he will sometimes buy her gew-gaws before he buys himself tobacco or snuff. He is usually an affectionate father. Negroes love children, and I have often seen a tiny white child with a six- foot tattooed giant for nurse, and no mother could be more devoted or tender. He is usually a fairly kind husband, according to his own lights; more, I am afraid, because a wife represents a certain value to him than for any other reason. Sometimes he marries from sentiment, but more often from family and practical considerations. I came across a case of a wife who a few years previously had run away from her husband with another man. The husband had troubled himself little about the matter until, after a lapse of two years, he heard that she had given birth to a son. Now a daughter is rather a nuisance, for even if she marries well the sum paid for her by no means covers the cost of her upbringing, but a son is an asset and a prospective wage-earner. This baby obviously could not belong to the husband, but it was a boy, and therefore an object of future value and not to be let slip. So the husband simply went and fetched his erring wife, and, in spite of her objections and the objections of her lover, forced her to return to him, with the child! Fidelity is very rare among negroes. The women in particular have hearts that are more

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU than generous, and divorce, though existing in principle, is rarely carried out in practice, a wronged husband generally contenting himself with scolding or, in extreme cases, beating his wife. Theft is considered a heinous crime, and in the rare cases of divorce the co- respondent is arraigned, not on moral grounds, but on charge of theft. He has stolen something that does not belong to him-another man's wife. During the divorce proceedings the original dowry of the wife is ascertained, and the co- respondent is ordered to hand over the amount to her husband. In other words, he has to buy his partner in sin. If he refuses he is punished, either corporally or by imprisonment, in the same degree as if he had stolen another man's cattle or money. The character of the negro is essentially irresponsible and pleasure loving. He loves a joke or a bit of fun more than anything in the world. Usually in each village there is a griot, a kind of public entertainer, whose position is much the same as that of the court jester or the troubadour of old. It is his duty to entertain the dignitaries of the place, and to improvise chants and ballads on special occasions. Sometimes he wears eccentric clothes, and carries a species of drum or little stringed instrument. His jests are not always in the best taste, but his gift of improvisation is amazing. He is not much respected, but is held in some awe, for his influence under the rose is considerable, and sometimes he is a bit of a sorcerer as well. Griots or dielis are to be found especially among the Peuhis and Bambaras, and form part of the same caste as niamkala, or dependants, such as blacksmiths, shoemakers, and other manual workers. It is said that in the old days all the griots came from the region of the Niger, hence its

SEGOU TO SANSANDING name of Djoliba, which, as I have said before, means " The River of Griots." The origin of the caste is said to date from the time when two Peuhl brothers, travelling across the desert, found themselves succumbing to hunger and thirst. The younger one, at the end of his strength, implored his brother to push on and leave him to die, and the elder, pretending to obey him, left him and hid behind a palm-tree. Here, lighting a fire, he cut a piece of flesh from his thigh, and, roasting it, took it to his brother, who devoured it greedily. That night rain fell, and they were able to continue their journey. It was only in the morning, as they approached a village, that the boy noticed blood on his brother's leg, and after repeated questioning, he learnt the sacrifice that had caused it. He was so touched that, bursting into tears, he declared: " Not in a lifetime can I hope to repay such devotion. From henceforward I shall be called dieli" (which means at the same time "blood" and "griot"), "and I shall obey all your commands, and my descendants shall obey yours."

CHAPTER VII SANSANDING TO MOPTI THE days passed as in a drugged dream. Nothing relieved the vast monotony of grey bush, of dazzling water that struck upon sore eyes like a sheet of flame, of a sky burnt out to strange pallor. Not a sound broke the immense silence, save the chugging of our engine and the voices of the latots, not a ripple broke the surface of the water. One lived, spoke, and had one's being in a dream, a torpor too heavy for words. One moved as in a dream where the muscles take their will without any conscious action of the brain; like a dream, too, were the little grey villages on mud-banks, sleeping under the fierce sun. Nothing seemed real; it seemed impossible that one had ever been really alive, that one had lived life fully, that one had laughed and talked and made a noise. Tin Lizzie, with her great black shadows following behind, was like a phantom ship hanging between sky and land, like Coleridge's ship, a" painted ship upon a painted ocean." The immensity dazed one, stultified and smothered one. There was something monstrous about it, something almost subnormal. Combined with physical discomfort, it frayed the nerves, making one feel sometimes that one wanted to cry about nothing at all. One longed weakly for something to happen, for something to break the monstrous monotony, for the sight of something green and cool. The Niger seemed like a great beast, patiently waiting to 68

SANSANDING TO MOPTI smother its helpless prey. It grew, to a tired mind, to have a personality, a conscious personality, a sinister one, whose emblems were the crocodiles that skulked beneath its glittering surface, and the vultures that hung above in the pale dome of the sky, hovering grimly, waiting and watching, with their keen, unclean eyes, for something to die. At sixty kilometres from Segou we reached Sansanding, where, to the joy of the Tirailleurs, we encamped for the night. Sansanding is one of the largest and most important of the purely native towns along that reach of the Niger. It is the headquarters of the king of the region, a highly important personage, whose position is one of the happiest results of the French scheme of development of the native. Above all, they wish to encourage the initiative of their black subjects grafted on to European ideals and civilisation. To this end they have established in Senegal schools or colleges where the sons of reigning black potentates may learn these things. The first King of Sansanding, the Fama Mademba, started civilised life, I believe, in a humble capacity under the French in the early days of their occupation, and, greatly aiding them in their Big Push into the interior, was granted the kingship of a large tract of country of which Sansanding is the capital. He was a very enlightened man, Europeanised in all his ways but one, for he was reputed to have nearly two hundred wives, official and unofficial. The royal palace is, for the Niger, an immense building, forty yards long, facing a big square, and a fine example of Soudanese architecture. Old men in Sansanding still deplore the past glories of their country before the Peuhl invasion from the north, spreading as far west as Segou, ravaged and pillaged and conquered.

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU At Sansanding I heard a local legend which is told as a warning to capricious girls. A beautiful Peuhl maiden, much sought by the young warriors, vowed that she would never marry until she found a man without a cicatriced face. This was virtually asking an impossibility, for it is doubtful if a man exists in the Soudan who has not his face scored with cicatrices, varying in pattern according to his tribe. However, one at last turned up, and she straightway married him. Now this man was really a lion with magical powers, who had seen and become enamoured of her as she gathered wood in the forest. On the morning after the wedding the young wife, waking suddenly, saw the huge shaggy head of a lion bending over her and offering to embrace her. Terrified, she shrieked aloud her horror and disgust, which so incensed the lion, and so wounded his feelings, that he promptly ate her up. The following day we made slow going. It was a highly social day, for we stopped in the afternoon to make long Palabre with a barge crossing ours, carrying up-river the late Administrator of Timbuktu, and in the evening, when we encamped, we found the tents of three Frenchmen on a geographical survey. It was Friday, and near by in the village I heard for the first time since I landed the muezzin call the sunset prayer from the doorway of the little mosque. Later on I attended an infants' school-a tiny courtyard, lit, in spite of the intense heat, by a huge bonfire of straw, round which squatted a score of small black gnomes, shrieking at the tops of their shrill voices verses of the Koran from flat slabs of wood scribbed all over and shaped like tombstones. We passed a good many villages along that reach of the Niger-little gems in mud, some of

PALACE OF THE FAMA MADEMBA, OF SANSANDING A VILLAGE ON THE BANKS OF THE NIGER Face p. 90

SANSANDING TO MOPTI them, little blurs of light and shade against the sky. The inhabitants of many of them were Peuhls, a good-looking, fine-featured race, whose women have a singularly picturesque style of hairdressing quite different to that of all the other races. They do not shave their heads, but pull the main part of their hair into a chignon at the back, placed rather high, and the front hair, in a multitude of tiny plaits, hangs over either cheek in the manner of early Victorian ringlets. The effect is absolutely "Empire," and admirably suits their slim, oval faces and broad, high foreheads. Sometimes among them I noticed a girl with her hair bound back with a broad " headache band," standing out fuzzily at the back, much in the fashion one used to see in England, especially at night clubs. These were the vassals or serfs of the Peuhls. The Peuhls have a legend that accounts for the wearing of clothes as follows. Once, long ago, the king of the country had an only son, 'who, accompanying his sister one day to the stream while she bathed, was seized with an unholy love for her, so intense that, though bitterly ashamed, he pined away, and as the days passed was at the point of death. When the king learnt of this he was very wrath, though to save the life of his son the sister was given to him in marriage. But from that day he decreed that, in the interests of morality, all men and women, when in each other's presence, must wear covering. According to the Peuhls, Dyarahilou (which is a deformation of Azrahilou, from Azrael), Angel of Death, used in the old days to be visible when he walked abroad on the earth, seeking for men to carry off to Paradise. But one day a young man made friends with him by flattery

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU and soft speaking, and, during a moment of absent-mindedness on the part of the Dark Angel, entered into Paradise while yet alive. To prevent this occurring again Dyarahilou begged God to render him invisible, and now he is only to be seen for one fleeting second by men or women on the verge of death. At Kouakourou we ran into the worst of the mosquito region-tormenting myriads that no net could keep at bay, and that made the hours round sunset, and the nights, an agony of scratching, till the blood ran from every inch of my body. As for the various insecticides that I trustingly had brought out from England, they simply gorged on them and asked for more. Many people wear mosquito boots, but I gave them up after a first experiment. The mosquitoes got inside them, and, irritated by their restricted quarters, bit the harder and more fiercely, depriving me of even the feeble consolation of scratching. At Kouakourou Saghair fell from grace badly, and for me expensively. Usually he was of quiet and early-retiring habits, but that night he disappeared in the direction of the village, only reappearing just in time to bring me my breakfast of bitter coffee and arid bread. Ten minutes later appeared a brace of angry parents, followed in the distance by a sheepish-looking girl. This latter was Saghair's great sin, and the parents, incoherently wrathful, expatiating on her previous purity of driven snow, seemed to think I had something to do with it. Feeling vaguely apologetic, I proffered a goat and a handful of kola-nuts, which, judging from their triumphant mien and profuse thanks, was considered a generous price for a Soudanese maiden's honour. When they had all departed, the girl casting a coy backward glance at her gallant, I pointed

WOMAN POUNDING MILLET, KOUAKOUROU " TIN LIZZIE, SENIOR

SANSANDING TO MOPTI out to Saghair that this sort of behaviour could not possibly continue, on financial as well as on moral grounds, and that if it did, the goat and the kola-nuts would come out of his wages. Saghair, like Adam in the garden, shifted all responsibility. " Elle pas bon. Elle m'a cherche," he said. Each day as we forged eastward did the civilised world recede. It was over a month since I had landed at Dakar, and over six weeks since I had heard any news of England'or the English. One scarcely knew if the place still existed, and, I am ashamed to say, scarcely cared. It is a curious effect that the big spaces have on one, seeming to absorb one utterly. I have often been home-sick in big cities, even though busy, amused, surrounded by friends and acquaintances. In the big places of the earth I have never been homesick, never lonely. The busy, over- crowded life of the old continents seem to one's introspective, solitude-fed mind like the absurd, grovelling animation of an ant-heap. One wonders why and what one fussed about. All the everyday problems and interests, little joys and little sorrows of civilised life, seem trivial and superfluous. The problems of the moment are so very much more important-what one can scratch up to eat, how many beasties one will find in one's bed, the quality of the going, and the degree of the temperature. One becomes just a healthy animal. One lives in a kind of dream, vivid yet profound. Occasionally, though, there are moments of uncomfortable reality, and one of these overtook me the night after we had left Kouakourou. I had gone ashore at sundown to have a look at a little almost-abandoned village that stood a kilometre or so back from the river. At the outset I had crossed a creek in a native Pirogue, and

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU when, an hour later, by which time night had almost fallen, I returned, I found no natives, no pirogue, no nothing. No shouting produced any result, so I prospected along the creek till I found a spot that looked tolerably shallow, and, taking off my cotton frock, wrapping it turban-wise round my head, I started to wade. Arrived on the opposite bank, I prospected again. From a slight eminence I could see afar off the glow of our camp fires, but, horror of horrors! another creek, broad and deep, between me and them. By now it was entirely dark, and every mosquito in the district was furiously attacking my bare legs. Dripping wet, stumbling in the darkness and calling, I wandered through the scrub, wondering if I was stranded in the African bush for the rest of my life, for it was quite probable that no one would miss me, and that Tin Lizzie would be many miles downstream before my absence would be missed, unless I made her by sunrise. At last, to my great satisfaction, I literally stumbled over a negro asleep by the embers of a dead fire in front of his hut. With frantic gestures and my two words of Bambara I tried to convey to him my plight. He had a white heart even if his face was black, for when at last he understood he picked me up suddenly and silently, throwing me across his shoulders in the way that natives carry sheep, and striding to the edge of the creek, carried me across, half wading, half swimming. On the other side he unearthed a pirogue from somewhere among the bushes and paddled me over to Tin Lizzie. It was only half-way across that I realised I had forgotten to resume my frock and that it was still wrapped round my head. One cannot move a finger or a toe in a pirogue, so easily do they upset, and I was obliged to make a dignified re-entry, luckily unobserved by anyone

SANSANDING TO MOPTI of importance, attired in an inadequate and sopping wet suit of pink underclothes. Speaking of clothes, my shelter all that afternoon had been the centre of an admiring throng of laptots. Having come away with an insufficiency of cotton frocks, I had bought a length of trade cotton at Segou, and, rather inconvenienced by the lack of necessary accessories, especially hooks and eyes, was making myself a frock. Saghair had apparently told his friends all about it, and they, recognising the striped stuff which their own women twist round their plump waists, were for some reason immensely tickled. One by one they would peer in at my door. " Toiy a gagng bou-bou ?" they would ask. And when I nodded would laugh Homerically. And later, whenever I appeared in the garment they would gravely say : "dd( yabonbou-bou!" and again go off into bursts of friendly laughter. There was a general air of excitement all over the convoy as we approached Mopti, a big outpost some five hundred kilometres from our startingpoint, where we should probably wait quite twentyfour or thirty-six hours, and maybe hear some news of the outside world. Personally I was immensely looking forward to a temporary respite from Tin Lizzie, to stretching my legs, to (perhaps, if I were lucky) eating a decent meal, and sitting in the shade of someone's verandah, and talking in a civilised tongue. I was very tired, and at times Tin Lizzie was a veritable little travelling inferno. The things that had first amused one had begun to jar one's nerves-the constant noise that never ceased day or night, the jolting and vibration, the dirt, and, above all, the smells. Never have I ever known anything like the smells outside my shelter at cooking-time-that is to say, at all

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU hours of the day and night. In particular one little ebony princess, a daughter, I was told, of the Fama of Sansanding, made such smells as I didn't know could exist! There were quite two hundred of them-natives, I mean, not smells; of them there were at least two thousand-living every phase of their lives upon that narrow strip of deck. And every day, as the season advanced, it grew hotter and hotter, till even one layer of cotton clothing seemed a burden too great to be borne. Long ago my hair had gone, somewhat raggedly, with the aid of a pair of nail scissors and six inches of mirror, and my back had "skinned" twice, leaving it so sore that I had to sleep on my chest like a monkey. At Charlottesville, a small European built conglomeration, we left the Niger, travelling to the right up the River Bani, its great tributary from the south. On the left, joining Charlottesville to Mopti, ran a long digue, along which passed a never-ending stream of black figures outlined against the sky, looking like a frieze of figures round an Etruscan vase. Mopti, where I was very courteously received by some functionaries of the Administration, is a modem town with an architecture semi-European and banale. But it is interesting for its cosmopolitanism, as a meeting-ground of all races, of Mossis, and Malinkes, and Bambaras, and Peuhls, and Moors, who come from very long distances to exchange and sell their merchandise. At the back of the town runs another long digue, planted with trees, that leads to the native town. Here everything is life and animation and colour, though, most regrettably, the white inhabitants are beginning to construct necessary buildings of an ugliness past words. The market-place is enormous-as big as that

SANSANDING TO MOPTI of Bamako and as busy. Everywhere are huge piles of rock salt from Mauritania, hewn into coffin-like shapes and covered with cabalistic signs. In the broad avenue leading up to the village sit negroes plying their trade-baking their graceful earthenware jars, stitching at brightlycoloured shoes, and embroidering casas, white woollen garments made from a straight piece of material folded in two and, embroidered in red and brown, the speciality of the district where wool is the principal commodity. These three towns stand on slight eminences in the middle of a vast plain flat as the back of your hand, and in the rainy season, when the rivers overflow, they stand like storks in a great sheet of water. During the course of the afternoon I was made acquainted with a large proportion of the forty white inhabitants. They are mostly meridionals, and, like all meridionals, warm hearted, hospitable, and feverishly animated, with a broad accent difficult to English ears, but that I find rather attractive. Towards sundown I was taken to the club, which from six-thirty to eight or thereabouts, under comforting punkahs, is the centre of fashionable life. It is a church-like building, where a great deal of enterprise has installed a library of five or six hundred books, a gramophone, a bar Americain, and many copies of La Vie Parisienne not more than three or four weeks old. There are six or seven women in the little colony who have introduced an element of fashion and formality. At the hour of the aperitif they forgather in each other's houses to sew, to gossip, to drink cool drinks; also the hardier sex play tennis on a hard court in the European marketplace. In fact, as one little lady said to me: On ne s'ennuiefias." They are rather wonderful things, these little GT

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU colonies. At first one is inclined to smile at the childishness of them, to deplore the travesty of society that seems out of the picture, but soon one realises that such a sentiment is cheap sophistication, and is impressed, even touched, by the gallantry of these exiles of a civilisation that, with its sports, its games, its unquenchable optimism, flings a tiny defiance at the untamed immensities. I remember once, at a military outpost in the hinterland of Tunisia, on the Tripolitan frontier, feeling peevish and irritable at being constrained to play tennis in riding-boots, under a broiling sun, on a baked mud court, with balls perished by the heat and chewed by jackals, when I wanted to be prowling undisturbed, absorbing local colour ; and then in the jardin potager of the Commandant, literally forced out of the aridity, being moved almost to tears at the sight of a solitary wilted geranium raising its draggled head in a feeble protest at being asked to grow in a soil of sand and stones. Next day I lunched with the Administrator. I suppose it was a simple enough meal-some eggs with macaroni, a stew of mutton and tinned beans, some cheese and fresh bread, washed down by red vin ordinaire-but to me it seemed a feast of Lucullus. It was a luxury to sit up at a table covered with a white cloth, to be waited on, to have a clean knife and fork for each course, after many days of taking my meals sitting on a camp bed, with a tin cup, a jack knife, and a collapsible fork that had to do for everything, fishing out one's' drink from under the bed, and sorting out the sheep's milk butter from among one's boots. After lunch I was taken by one of the fonctionnaires in a pirogue across the Bani to see the Mahommadan cemetery. That is to say, I never saw it; we got half-way across, but the wind was

SANSANDING TO MOPTI very high, the pirogue bounced like a Russian dancer, and, water-logged and baling, we had to turn back. But cemeteries of some kind are considered inevitable fare for a tourist, so I was taken a long walk through fields of rice grass to see the fetishist one. The fetishists apparently have not the reverence for their dead that have the Mahommadans. This was a great, desolate plain of rank, tangled grass, with half- concealed holes where the graves had fallen in. The latter were marked by nothing, save an occasional draggled white rag, placed there to frighten away the hyenas. The bodies were so lightly interred that, where the ground had fallen away, the skeletons were partially uncovered. Here and there a skull grinned up at one from the tangle of grass, or a hand stretched out, as if to clutch one. A faint wind quivered through the low bushes, moaning eerily. The only live and wholesome things were the little gendarmes (small birds so called because of their grey-green plumage) wheeling round their queer circular nests that hung downwards from the twigs of low bushes. Truly it was a sinister spot in the half- light, surrounded by a bleak, ragged plain-a place where one could well imagine, as the natives declare, the guineas, the poris, and all the other djins forgathering at night to hold unholy revel. At Mopti for the first time in my life I met a lion otherwise than in a cage. I was walking down the main street when I saw a fairly large specimen, about a year old, gambolling alone on the side-walk, playing with a bit of paper after the manner of a puppy. Catching sight of me, it frolicked towards me, with its great jaw open. Actually, as I learnt later, it was merely overjoyed at finding someone to play with, but how was I

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU to know that? I pelted down two streets with the creature frisking after me, till I cannoned off a friend, who explained that it was the pet of his neighbour, and effected a formal introduction. Two or three of the inhabitants keep young lions as pets successfully enough till they are fully grown, when they usually have to be disposed of. The lions of West Africa, even wild and in the bush, are but weak-spirited beasts. Also at Mopti I saw a white baby, the only one I ever saw in the Soudan. It was about two years old, a bonny little thing. Someone's wife, greatly daring, had borne it into that burning fiery furnace, which, contrary to accepted ideas, it seemed to survive a good deal better than its elders. Three or four hours' motor drive from Mopti, along an atrocious road, in the hills near Bandiagara, live a tribe of troglodytic negroes in caves hewn out of the cliff- sides. These habitations, that from below look impossible to attain, are reached by perilous paths up the surface of the cliff, that men, women, and tiny children climb with the swiftness and agility of cats. Mopti marks the end of overland transport. The road-such as it is-from Segou and Bamako ends there. It is the last outpost of any size. Of quite recent growth, one day it will be an important commercial centre, a vast exchange and mart, standing, as it does, at the junction of the Niger, bearing it civilisation from the west, and of the Bani, its great tributary, bringing up the merchandise of the south. Such places, uninteresting enough to the superficial tourist, overlie a good deal of romance-the romance of progress, of growth. They stand, frail barriers, between civilisation and savagery. Past them and from them flow into the great empty spaces all that the I0

FRIENDS WITH CUB, MOPTI SOUDANESE STREET VENDORS Face p. 100

SANSANDING TO MOPTI IoI scattered units of white humanity can know of in the way of comforts, small luxuries, necessities, even-books, clothes, food, medicine. They are the sentinels of the world's progress, the seed sown on stony ground of a great harvest of wealth and trade, and eventually of art and letters and a new civilisation. Like them many hundreds of years ago were London and Paris and Berlin and New York. And their inhabitants, leading their hard and barren lives, without the glory and thrill of pioneers, are the masters of romance, the makers of new epochs.

CHAPTER VIII MOPTI TO TIMBUKTU FOR no particular reason that anyone knew we remained at Mopti for nearly three days. Just before leaving I met a representative from the Petit Parisien who had just come down from Timbuktu, where he had been sent to greet the arrival of the chenilles-the caterpillar cars invented by M. Andre CitroEn that had successfully negotiated their trial trip from Algeria across the heart of the Sahara. A highly intelligent man, he carried with him, even in la brousse, a breath of the busy editorial world, an embodied French Fleet Street, alert, masterful, a trifle captious, and raging-as in Africa one learns the futility of raging-at the casual Allah-will- provide methods of African travel. I was disappointed to hear that the main body of the chenilles had already started on their return journey, for I had cherished a sneaking, and an utterly unreasonable, hope of returning with them, a hope that had also been thwarted in the case of my brother of the pen. At Mopti we left behind all but two of the barges of white passengers, and I was shifted on to another tug, Tin Lizzie's little sister, the smallest thing I have ever seen, with just room for the engine and me. The former was quite out of proportion to the size of its owner, for we trailed behind another convoy of enormous barges carrying the black Tirailleurs and the cages and much cargo. Tin Lizzie, Junior, may not have been 102

MOPTI TO TIMBUKTU much to look at, and it was said she was so aged and overworked that we should be lucky if we reached Kabara, the port of Timbuktu, without mishap, but she had a great heart, with none of the dilatoriness of her elder sister, and chugged manfully away night and day, only stopping now and then, with a purposeful hoot, to load wood, and vibrating so in her ardour that one's teeth rattled in one's head, and every bone felt as if it were shaking against the others. In less than twenty-four hours we reached Lake Dhebo, great reservoir that makes the Niger navigable, even at this time of year, for many miles upstream. Considering its importance, the great lake arrives upon one without flourish of trumpets. Two tiny hills, exactly alike, arise as if by magic out of the flatness on either side, and suddenly one is dancing in a great expanse of water that, were it windy, would give one a perfectly good excuse for being seasick. In this region the Niger forms a kind of triple delta, irrigating and fertilising the neighbourhood of three lakes, Dh6bo, Fagubine, and Daouna, which are believed to be supplemented by subterranean springs or infiltrations, and are fairly deep, their beds being about ten yards below the ordinary bed of the Niger. I believe Lake Dhebo is larger than the Lake of Geneva; at any rate, we ran along one shore for nearly four hours with never a sight of the other, and at sundown we picked up the Niger again at Aka. We were in the cercle of Isser Ber, whose capital is Niafunke, and which, curiously enough, is almost entirely fetishist. Here it seemed as if the Niger had given up its desire to conquer the Sahara, and was content to run between calm banks. Heretofore it had always seemed as if fierce contest raged between the arid, inviolable 103

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU desert and the great river. Sometimes the river gained a little ground, in a big curve to the north, leaving a green expanse of fertility in its wake, and sometimes the desert encroached, golden, secretive, disdainful, with its fierce reverberations and scorching breath. Now there seemed some kind of tacit understanding between them as they lay side by side, sharply defined. In the villages we passed I noticed a few Touaregs, men of that fierce, fanatical nomad race that stretches across the Sahara from Tripoli to Mauritania. Otherwise the inhabitants, besides Sonhrais, were mostly Bozos, who survive, like a handful of dust from the far-off days of the negro empires. Their women, like the women of the Sonhrais, wear their heads shaved all over, with the exception of a number of little round tufts of hair sticking up like balls of wool. The girls wear only three tufts, in a line down the middle of the head. When they become engaged they add another tuft over one ear, and after marriage yet another over the other ear, and at the nape of the neck, and a widow again rearranges her tufts, pulling the front one down over her forehead. In some of the villages, too, one saw men with their teeth filed to long, sharp points-relations of the cannibals who still survive in small numbers far to south of the Great Bend. Personally, my only encounter with one of these redoubtable gentlemen decided me never to be frightened of them again. I was taking a stroll through the bush a mile or two away from a small village when a black form in a scanty white bou-bou appeared from nowhere and started to walk near me. I said " Good-evening " in my best Bambara, but he did not answer. He was an unattractive-looking 104

MOPTI TO TIMBUKTU creature, enormously tall, and his long, pointed teeth and barbaric ornaments gave him an unpleasantly ferocious appearance. He kept his right hand to his side, where, under his bou-bou I noticed a slight protuberance indicating a knife. He did not walk beside me, but at an uncomfortable angle, where I could not see him properly without turning my head, but could just catch a fleeting glimpse of him out of the tail of my eye. No one was within sight or hailing distance. Bush paths are always vague, and I didn't know whether the one I was on led towards or away from the village, but did not like to appear in doubt. I addressed him in Arabic, and the two words of Bambara, and various other negro dialects I had acquired, but he gave no glimmer of intelligence. I smiled at him encouragingly, but in vain. I beckoned him to walk beside me, but he simply would not be "matey." He just continued to walk at that uncomfortable angle where I could not keep an eye on him without obviousness, staring at me unblinkingly. It got on my nerves. I tried to look calm and composed and nonchalant. Occasionally I tried turning down paths that looked as if they led somewhere, but every time they showed the same monotonous, unpopulous vista of scrub. I could feel the man's unblinking stare on the nape of my neck, and increasingly it got on my nerves. If he meant mischief of any kind I knew that on no account must I show apprehension or suspicion, but it required an effort of will not to hasten my pace. The sun grew hotter and hotter. I had been walking for nearly an hour, and the perspiration poured down my face, and I longed for a sight of that smelly mud village as I have never longed for London, Paris, or New York. I told myself that the district was perfectly safe, that in any case I was far too 105

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU thin to be an inviting meal for any self-respecting cannibal: But every time, out of the tail of my eye I caught a glimpse of that silent, stealthy, stalking figure, with its hand to its side, its pointed teeth and staring eyes, I shivered. We walked so for hours, or so it seemed-I suppose it was actually scarcely forty minutes-and the pad-pad of his bare feet seemed to chant all the cannibal stories I had ever heard or read. At last the pad-pad grew fainter, and, turning my head, I found to my unutterable relief that he had fallen behind, and while I looked he disappeared into the bushes. Evidently he had thought better of me as a prospective meal! Thanking Allah, I hastened my pace, if not to a run, at least to a dignified trot. From the position of the sun I guessed that this time I was on the right path. I felt reassured, happy. I began to hum. Again I heard behind me the familiar pad-pad of bare feet, and this time they were running to overtake me. Then I knew no fear. When death or any other calamity seems inevitable one is no longer afraid! I only hoped that in the pause he had been sharpening his knife, and that he would get it over quickly, that I should meet death as an Englishwoman should, and that a few people would be sorry and that somebody would pay my bills. As the footsteps came up with me I turned gallantly. The man halted abruptly, holding out his right hand. In it was a big bunch of reddish-brown shum-shum berries, which, with a guttural exclamation and an infectious ear-to-ear grin that set his double row of pointed teeth gleaming gaily, he thrust into my nerveless hand, and, still grinning, disappeared into the bush as silently as he had come. Half a minute later I was sitting in the dust roaring with laughter. Five minutes later, as I lO6

MOPTI TO TIMBUKTU carried the shum-shum berries carefully home for my supper, I was cursing myself that I-who had always flattered myself that, as a woman and a novelist, I could recognise a man's intentionshad lost a most wonderful opportunity of taking some photographs. At Niafunke, where we touched for an hour one midday to gather wood, we saw no sign of the half-dozen white inhabitants, who were doubtless taking their siesta, except for one lady in a smart pair of orange pyjamas, whose appearance intrigued me greatly, but who fled at our approach. During a second visit to Niafunk6, on the return journey, I made the acquaintance of a very engaging young lion, the property of a trader. Though kept on a chain to prevent him from wandering too far afield, he was bosom friends with a small brown dog, and had the gentlest nature imaginable-until he saw a sheep. Chance had it that I was buying a sheep that day for the supper of myself and crew, and I happened to be playing with the lion when one was brought in for my inspection. Talk of the Call of the Wild, inherited instincts, atavism, or what you will! The lion, at the sight of his natural prey, forgot his r6le of pet, his civilisation, forgot everything, and crouched, straining at the end of his long rope, with waving tail and staring eyes, the epitome of savagery. The sheep, even though its sheltered life had held no fear of lions even if it knew of their existence, was paralysed with fear. It was quite pitiful to watch. For a few minutes they dodged and stalked each other, till the sheep, suddenly spotting the exit, with a frantic bleat, disappeared from sight, racing the horizon at twenty miles an hour. It gave one to think, to philosophise quite a lot, about civilisation and what lies beneath. 107

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU We were now barely a hundred miles from Timbuktu, on the last lap of that great old waterroad of the centuries that only during the last fifty years has been opened up to white man. Much romance has gone to the making of that road, much bloodshed, much suffering bravely borne, many trials and hardships, and many gallant lives lost. Long and mercilessly has Timbuktu clung to her inviolability; now gravely shaken, soon it will be altogether shattered. Already an aeroplane service is in process of formation, and a railway is contemplated to Segou and beyond. And the railway in time will extend to Chad, and from there to the eastern coast, and there will be embranchments to north and south, and in due course Messrs. Lunn and Cook will take a pernicious grip on things, with restaurant cars, circular tickets, mosquito-proof cars, and a variety of luxuries we haven't invented yet, and the great sentinels of the Sahara will be so many junctions (" All change at Timbuktu !"), and their inhabitants will sell genuine native curios made in Birmingham and Berlin, and Africa, that great sphinx without a secret, will be assessed as so much dubious scenery at so much a day, tips included. For once in a way I am glad I was not born a century later. I echoed that sentiment even more forcibly at Dire", which we reached two days after we left Dh~bo. When, awakened by the usual racket of loading wood, I first put out a sleepy head, it seemed nothing but the usual little native village, picturesque and somnolent. Half an hour later I was dragged out of bed, and, half dressed, taken for a walk of inspection by the Director of Cotton. The place is not marked on the map, and less than three years ago nothing existed but a conglomeration of mud huts, and lions prowled lO8

MOPTI TO TIMBUKTU undisturbed. Now there are rows of powerhouses, and, as far as eye can see, fields of cotton are under cultivation, employing two thousand natives, and in the ugly little buildings the cotton is undergoing the various processes to fit it for transportation by the river to the Coast, and from thence to Europe. Ten kilometres of road are in construction, and already one of the tiny colony of fourteen has given orders for a Ford car to be delivered. The colony is entirely self-supporting as far as its cotton is concerned, making and mending everything as it goes along. It is mostly the enterprise of the Director that has evolved this mushroom of civilisation from the wilderness, and it is a heroic effort. The labouring element of this region, as at Timbuktu itself, is almost entirely composed of Sonhrais, a fairly industrious people not despising manual labour, and the picturesque element is furnished by the Touaregs, veiled princes of the desert, who in remote regions still hold aloof from French supremacy. The chief source of wealth seems to be cattle, and at some of the larger villages one will see several hundreds of them being driven in at sundown. They are generally of the species called Zebus, strong, intelligentlooking creatures with a curious big hump on the neck. The hump spoils the market value of the skin, as no amount of treatment will make it lie flat. Though slow movers and bad tempered, they are much used for transport of merchandise in the arid country of the north, as they have almost the capacity of a camel for going without water for days at a time. According to Herodotus and Pliny, they were used in the Sahara before the importation of camels, and I have seen very old mural engravings on rocks in the Sud-Orannais that would seem to 1o9

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU bear out this contention, for one of the many fictions current about the Sahara is that camels are anything like its oldest inhabitants. They were certainly not imported till during the era of the great Numidian kings, and probably came from the south-west of Asia, possibly Arabia, and, domesticated by the Berbers, came into general use some time during the fourth century. The camels of the Southern Sahara are subject to many diseases, and are not nearly as strong as the fine, powerful camels of Algeria. The Touaregs have the best of them-meharis, or trotting camels, preferring the white ones. They use and ride them from the age of twelve to fifteen months, though they are not completely trained till the age of three years, or used for breeding purposes till even older, and are generally past work at fifteen years. After a long fast their drinking capacity is amazing, and a fairly thirsty camel will put away seventy pints in a quarter of an hour. Farther along the Boucle of the Niger is the site of the old mythical elephants' " burying ground." I say mythical, because, in truth, such a place never existed. The legend is due to imperishability of the elephants' spongy bones, and to a sort of superstitious wonder with which the negroes regarded these great beasts. In a little village not far from Dire I stumbled across a real live magician, much more picturesque and impressive than the gentlemen who feature in Bond Street. I use the word stumble literally. Accompanied by Saghair, on housewifely intent, I was looking for eggs to buy, and, following a good lady through her mud parlour, I nearly took a toss over a very old black gentleman crouching inert in the semi- darkness. In front of him on the ground was a small heap of odds and ends of II0

MOPTI TO TIMBUKTU broken things-a veritable jackdaw's hoard. Being something of a jackdaw myself, I left Saghair to cope with the egg question and squatted on the floor beside my human bunker. He let me paw over his little treasures; there were bits of sticks and stones and beads and broken shells, clippings of leather, a leopard's claw, and-that I cast acquisitive eyes on-a little amulet in black leather of a pattern that I had long been looking for. I asked him " How much? " in all the dialects that I knew, for a negro will generally sell you anything for cash down, and when he seemed not to understand I made the gesture of putting the amulet in my pocket with one hand, and holding out money in the other. Whereat he set up a crowing and a cackling like that of a whole farmyard of agitated roosters, that brought my hostess, his daughter, and Saghair hurriedly back from their monetary transactions outside. It was then explained to me what a dreadful solecism I had committed. He was a wizard, and the jackdaw things were his " properties." I was apologetic, and he silently forgiving. In fact, he was more than forgiving, for, taking a calabash of dust from under his bou-bou, he started strewing it over my feet. Hoping he was not revenging my impoliteness by a bad ju-ju, I waited in silence, while Saghair and the lady hung breathlessly over my shoulder. He placed the leopard's claw in my left hand, and divided the sand into three little piles. These he heaped together, and again separated them, two, three times. Then he threw little bits of stick into the heaps at random, picking them up and throwing them back. His face had become quite fixed, and his eyeballs protruded slightly. Scarcely moving his lips, he kept up a low muttering, which, at an admonishing pinch from me, Saghair III

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU translated in his execrable French, which I must reproduce in English. "Thou...fromafar.... Water... Water....Bad....Bad....Not yet. Allah! . . . Gold . . . bad men .... Not yet .. The rest was unintelligible. When the muttering had ceased the seer swept his properties carelessly into a heap, and sank back into his former inertia. A little foam hung at the corners of his mouth. I have sometimes wondered since what he meant, if anything, and why, although a fetishist, he invoked the name of Allah. At any rate he told me as much as do the seers of Bond Street, and when I asked the daughter what he would most appreciate as payment, he woke up just sufficiently to ask for some kola and a piece of sugar. We were approaching very near to Timbuktu, end of that great road that first laid tracks before me on that wet winter afternoon in Liverpool, that had called in divers tongues from the desolate regions of the north, though the great road is fairly travel-worn now, and the mystery of Timbuktu is tabulated and assured compared with the days when the old travellers braved its dangers. With the perversity of human nature, as we chugged down the last lap of it at four miles an hour I was chiefly concerned with what I should get to eat. It is a depressing fact that so many of the long-anticipated moments of life are obscured by the sordid insistence of one's vile body. I remember that my first visit to Vesuvius at the impressionable age of nineteen-an event that I had been anticipating with awed reverence for many moons-was completely spoilt for me II2

MOPTI TO TIMBUKTU because I was wearing high-heeled shoes that the sand and lava made short and uncomfortable work of. In this case what to eat and how to get it had overshadowed my horizon for many days. My whole being breathed a sickness of stringy chicken and tinned food, and bread that, when existent, had to be soaked in river water for twelve hours to make it chewable. By the way, I should like to tender a vote of thanks, gratis, to whoever invented the Worcester Sauce that alone disguised the various stalenesses and the ten days old eggs, that got eggier every day. Also, my body longed for immunity from every variety of many-footed beasts that crawled and bit, and from the rigours of a collapsible bed that overdid its r~le of collapsing, and craved for the sleep that the wood-loading and bucketings of Tin Lizzie, Junior, denied it for any consecutive hour in the twentyfour. A combination of the latter announced arrival in the very early hours one morning at Kabara, that from time immemorial has been the commercial port of Timbuktu, the place where the pirogues of the Niger unloaded the wealth of the negro countries and bore off in exchange, precious merchandise of the north. It stands on a slight elevation and is merely a conglomeration of small mud buildings. At one end rises a small square fort, where waves a French flag, and at the other, silhouetted against the sky, a tall roughly made cross. This cross was raised in memory of the naval lieutenant, Leon Aube, who was killed a mile or two away in the early days of the French occupation. His boat was anchored at Kabara, and one evening the veiled men of the desert made a sudden attack. Foolishly brave, he and his nineteen companions went in pursuit, and, falling into HT 113

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU an ambuscade, were killed, all of them, at Our' Oumaira, half-way along the bridle-path to Timbuktu. Our' Oumaira is a name as sinister as the place. Roughly it translates as " No one hears," meaning that no one on the wide horizon may hear the cries of its victims. Here, where the young lieutenant fell, a stone monument replaces the original cross, bearing a small brass tablet with the following inscription: OUR' OUMAIRA: On n'entend pas perirent en attaquant -1 de Touaregs et d'Arabes Aube IUon. Enseigne de vaisseau Le Dautec. 2me Mtre de Tisonnerie et les laptots fideles Isaac N'Dudye Cantata Taraouere Diakoula Souinare et quinze autres encore partis de Kabara Tombouctou entendit accourut les vengea aussitot. One often sees such little monuments, roughly made from whatever material the country affords -from wood or stone or plastered mud-in these outposts; little tragic reminders of the price of civilisation. I had been rather hoping that they would have sent horses from Timbuktu for me, for the remaining seven or eight kilometres could have been done in under half an hour; I was sick of boats and water, and the luggage could have looked after itself. But the powers that be had arranged for a barge, and for nearly four hours I sweltered and groaned along the never-ending series of marigots that reach Timbuktu after a detour of over eighteen kilometres. The scenery was bush and yet more bush, shrivelled by a sun that beat down pitilessly, mercilessly. Sometimes the channel was so narrow that the barge almost brushed the sides, I This word was too defaced for me to decipher. I14

MOPTI TO TIMBUKTU sometimes it became wide and shallow, and we bumped against the bottom. Sometimes we crossed a ford, where a long string of bumpylooking homed cattle swam sedately one behind the other, not seeming to mind if the nose of a barge bumped their ribs. Not so very many years ago the journey from Kabara to Timbuktu was none too safe, and only to be effected in large bands, with eyes and ears alert, for the Touaregs found rich booty in the cumbersome, heavily-laden convoys of merchandise. But now the veiled men have a wholesome fear of their white conquerors, and those who cannot or will not bow their stiff and treacherous necks keep themselves far to the north. The laptots who punted the barge with long bamboo poles were lazy, and the journey seemed never-ending. But half-way we were met by a fresh batch, in charge of a magnificent garde de cercle, sent ahead by the courtesy of the Commandant of Timbuktu. They were super-laptots, experts at their trade. They propelled the barge along at a rattling speed, with a rhythmical stamping of feet and a hoarse chanting to which their feet and their poles kept time. Every other minute the garde incited them to further efforts with loud yells, and if the barge had looked rather less like a hencoop we should have presented a most imposing sight. Sharply turning a comer, a narrow canal of water, some two hundred yards long, lay ahead, and at the end of it, silhouetted against the sky, stood Timbuktu. 115

CHAPTER 1X THE VOICE OF TIMBUKTU To describe my first impression of Timbuktu I can do no better than to quote Rene Caill6, almost the first European to survive and describe a similar experience. He writes as follows: " On entering this mysterious city, which is an object of curidsity and research to the civilised nations of Europe, I experienced an indescribable emotion. I never before felt a similar emotion, and my transport was extreme. . . . I looked round and found that the sight before me did not answer my expectations. I had formed a totally different idea of the grandeur and wealth of Timbuktu. The city presented at first sight nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses built of earth. Nothing was to be seen in all directions but immense plains of quicksand of a yellowish grey colour." Later on he says: "Still, though I cannot account for the impression, there was something imposing in the aspect of a great city raised, in the midst of sands." And to Rne Caill]6's impressions written nearly a hundred years ago, must be added the vulgarising touch of modernity, though I disagree with his expression " at first sight." I would rather say second impression. At the end of the narrow canal I have mentioned runs upwards a bank of pale amber sand, and beyond, silhouetted against the skyline, the old town, "The Eyes of the zz6

THE VOICE OF TIMBUKTU Desert," walled, grey, crumbling, lies like some animal, aged yet imbued with dormant fierceness that, crouching, waits to spring. I was greeted with the most charming cordiality by the Commandant of the region, a smart military figure in spotless white, and walking up the sandy slope, as Rene Caill6 expressed it, I "looked round" ; and my second impression by no means came up to my first. To the right was a small, ugly fort and one or two military-looking constructions; to the left the beginnings of an avenue, with a massive grey building that was the house of the Commandant; and, beyond that, another that was the residence of the Administrator. Then came the Place Joffre, a big square with a horrid little attempt at a garden in the middle of it, a large galleried building facing us, the intendance beside it, and a trading-house a little farther on. Beyond all these one glimpsed, and vaguely thrilled at, a labyrinth of grey streets, tortuous and crumbling, with nothing of the obviousness of the little negro towns I had seen so far, but with a suggestion of mystery, a hint of reticence, that one only finds in the towns of the Sahara-the mystery, the reticence of Islam. I was given lunch at the Commandant's house and shown my accommodation in the big, galleried building, two rooms, high and cool, furnished with a real bed and a real washstand. Thd sand came up to my ankles, and from the labyrinth of streets came a very faint and familiar smell, the smell of burning wood and incense. And then and there, with diabolic perversity considering the place and the temperature, within an hour of arrival at the place that I had travelled three thousand five hundred weary miles to see, that had called to me from the immensities of the north, that had led me from my home and duties 117

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU and pleasures, I went down with an attack of influenza that laid me by the heels, raging and miserable, for nearly a week. What I had done to displease Allah I can't think. I had taken hardly any photographs of his mosques, and had given many francs' worth of kola-nuts to all and sundry of his people, but he also arranged a heat wave dating from my arrival; and a heat wave at Timbuktu is not an empty phrase! Everyone in the place was the soul of kindness except Saghair, who at this juncture proved himself to have a heart as black as his face, and seized the opportunity to go on a prolonged "bust " round the town of his forefathers, leaving me helpless and unnursed. It was a curious feeling, but after a few days, as I lay in bed, I felt as if I knew Timbuktu intimately. I felt as if I knew her by her voiceor, rather, the multitude of voices that together make up the voice of Timbuktu, of the Sahara, of Africa herself. Not by sight, for I had seen nothing of her but one quick walk round the famous market-place soon after my arrival, and the long expanse of flat, roughly ornamented roofs that I could see through my open door as I lay in bed, backed by a sky so fiercely burnt by the sun that it was no longer blue, but a pale neutral colour, like a garment that has been bleached in the laundry. The voice ceased not day or night. Sometimes in the very early hours of the morning, when it sank almost to silence, it was most eloquent of the past, the great past of Timbuktu, and seemed to whisper and insinuate itself through the crumbling walls and air of wanton decay. Life, as I lay flat on an aching back, was a kaleidoscope of tiny pictures, oral or visible. There was no possibility of sleeping after the

THE VOICE OF TIMBUKTU "19 sunrise, for then is African vitality at its highest. At five-thirty the crowing of tiny but deepthroated cocks from every little courtyard filled in the time till at six the military bugles brayed out the " Soldat, leve-toi" with nerve-wracking emphasis and punctuality. They played something every half-hour or more, it seemed to me, but they sounded less emphatic, more remote, for shrill voices and guttural ones rose in a crescendo from the meat-market on the other side of the Place Joffre. In imagination I could see the swarming black figures-ebony Sonhrais with their thick, strong lips and cicatriced faces, men such as manned the barges of the Serpent of Old Nile; pretty Belah women with the gentle air of willing captives; tall Touaregs in effeminate draperies, carrying long swords, who wear their mouths covered from modesty, whose fierce black eyes belie their slender, tapering hands with muscles like steel cords; unkempt Moors, who have the eyes of men who see visions; Arabs, languidly graceful, a mixture of fatalism and dirt. Small naked boys and girls run in and out of the legs of their elders, tiny babies whine like sick kittens as they bounce and bump in the small of the maternal back, sometimes to be pacified by an abrupt, jerky juxtaposition, where, finding their breakfast, they are content. The souls of everyone but the babies and a few poor dears without even a sou in the recesses of their bou-bous are concentrated in the little heaps of unpleasantlooking meat cut into small cubes that make recreation ground for innumerable flies. I used not to dwell too long in imagination on those piles of meat, for there in a few days, when I should be given respite from spoon- food, would be Saghair, choosing my lunch. A little later, escorted by a garde de cercle

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU magnificent in chechia and scarlet tunic, a bit of the desert would walk right into my room-a shaggy Touareg, with veiled mouth and loose blue draperies staining his skin and girded up round his thighs, carrying effortlessly on his head a huge goatskin of water, from which he filled the great earthenware jar in the corner of my room. The skin, complete outside as to head, hair, and legs, used to quiver and subside and gurgle in a horribly lifelike way as he lowered it. Other Berbers, Moors of the north, with sly, refined faces, used to drift in and out of my room without knocking. They had things to sellfringed leather bags, cushions from Hombori and Goundam, rugs from Gao, bunches of ostrich feathers, Touareg lances, or pretty coloured straw mats. Their voices were gentle and sympathetic, and they never seemed to mind if I did not feel well enough to barter for, or examine, their goods. " Toi beaucoup malade un Peu ?" they would murmur. To which I invariably answered: " Moi beaucoup malade." " Ah 1 " they would reply pityingly, and drift out with a grave salutation. Sometimes a bronze-limbed lady would peer timidly round the door, giggling if I smiled at her, and eventually summoning courage to tiptoe to my bedside and draw an inquisitive finger along my arms or hair, and cast a shrewd, all-the- worldover feminine scrutiny over the texture and trimming of my nightdress. One of these ladiesa beauty, if a trifle overplump-after her second visit announced proudly: " Moi femme de ," mentioning a highly placed white member of society at Timbuktu. And at my air of polite interest she added: "Et I'annie derni~re moi femme du ggniral & ," 120

THE VOICE OF TIMBUKTU mentioning a town a good many hundred kilometres away. It struck me that the lady was a trifle indiscreet, but nobody else seemed to think so. The French, in any case, are infinitely broadminded on the subject of " colour." At midday a heavy hush used to settle down over the town, where the heat and the glare beat down, reflecting so fiercely that the flat roofs, the sky, and the narrow bands of sand between seemed to merge into a quivering, molten mass that it hurt the eyes to rest on. Sometimes it seemed to me in my fever that a shaft of sunlight gleaming off a wall was a mighty conflagration bursting from out of the bowels of the earth. Sometimes a house or a minaret would tower up in the air; or the whole of the city, as if a monstrous toy town of djins, would shift and change its forms into the turrets and walls and bridges of the mirage cities conjured up by men dying of thirst in the desert. Those perhaps were the worst hours in the twentyfour. Even when the sun sank lower the heat, if anything, increased, for the mud walls and the sand just held it dry and dead, incubating it, disseminating it. It just withered one till one felt as if one's body were shrinking, as if the sap of one's bones were drying up. And through it all, with scarcely diminished regularity, rose from the little courtyards the sound of pounding millet, surely the most characteristic sound of West Africa. As the smell of karity to my dying day-if by chance I should ever again smell it-will lay before me a vision of Africa, so also will the sound of pounded corn or anything else that has to be pounded in a big wooden bowl with a wooden pestle. The rhythm and tempo became as familiar to me as a wellknown piece of music; half a dozen regular thuds, then an imperceptible pause, as the worker changed 121

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU hands or stopped to straighten his or her back. At night it used to mingle with my dreams, and sometimes, when the fever was high, it wove itself into the undercurrent of a nightmare, and the heavy thud-thud seemed ominous, in some way threatening, unbearable, till I would wake and realise that it was only the beating of my own heart. By four in the afternoon the voices of humanity rose, polyglot and guttural-the shrill giggle of women, the crying of babies, the deep-throated murmur of men, and a low hum reached me even from the big market-place nearly a kilometre away. Then the ostrich who lived in the courtyard opposite my door used to climb solemnly and with dignity to the roof, and stand preening himself and admiring the view, every day wearing the same air of offended surprise when the sun withdrew from the roof-top, leaving him in shadow. As the hum of humanity lssened the military bugles announcing supper or something became more insistent, and every day I was just as offended as the ostrich when they interrupted or obscured the sunset prayer of the muezzin from the big mosque. Sometimes a tiny spiral of smoke meandered towards the sky; someone was having a rich cous-cous for supper. I had been told much concerning the chilliness of the nights at Timbuktu. I never noticed it, and can only say that sometimes the temperature at night was endurable and sometimes not. They were not pleasant, those nights, with a temperature of my own that I never mastered, for it was told me in centigrade, and was considerably and uncomfortably over a hundred, my perspiring person wrapped in three army blankets, with every aperture hermetically closed by orders of a military doctor with a morbid horror of courants 122

THE VOICE OF TIMBUKTU d'air and no sort of understanding of the amount of fresh air necessary to an English constitution. That order, I am afraid, was not obeyed, and through the half-open door every night I heard music, Arab music that sent my soul wandering through the oases of Southern Algeria and to dreaming of the love- music of the Ouled Nails. It went on till the small hours. I soon learnt who gave that party every night, though nothing would induce me to tell. Anyway, it was not, after repetition, very interesting. There was too great a suggestion of mere revelry, of la bombe. It was not so interesting as another kind of music that reached me from another angle when the party had broken up-a faint, sad little air played on a balafon, that sounded absurdly, plaintively babyish when evoked by great black fingers. It was negro music, and I imagined the player, a huge, bearded Sonhrais, thick lipped, sitting in the sand at his doorway in a narrow street, cajoling an unkind love, or dreaming of the past glories of his city, when he himself was the son of a king, with gold and ivory upon his wrists and ankles, and curly-headed slaves for the asking. His music was quaintly restful, and, mingling with the flap-flap of the great bats that fluttered circling, past my door, often towards morning brought me sleep. X23

CHAPTER X TIMBUKTU TO-DAY CERTAINLY Allah did not love me this trip, for no sooner recovered from the flu than I developed an inflammation of the right ear-drum, which, though it did not keep me in bed except during the worst attacks, was agonisingly painful, besides making me completely deaf on one side, a deafness that lasted for a whole month. These various ailments, to my indescribable wrath, put an end to a big trip I had planned up to the east into the Haoussa country. However, Timbuktu, even if rather obscured by an atmosphere of injections, boracic, and cotton wool, absorbed me, absorbed me to my puzzlement, for never did a town cater less for the tourist palate. Timbuktu to the ordinary senses of sight and sound is frankly disappointing. She is not beautiful; her architecture, of the usual Soudanese type, with its ever so faint and coarsened Egyptian flavour, is for the most part little finer than in many of the simple little towns along the Niger. She is in bad repair. There is little of the pageantry of the streets that one learns to love in the Northern Sahara. The inhabitants lead simple, fairly cheerful, unquarrelsome, uneventful lives, busy with commerce, without mystery or violence, or light and shadow. There is little or no outdoor social life, as in Arab towns ; no coffee drinking or flnerie. The negroes, when they have finished their day's work, go home and to

TIMBUKTU TO-DAY sleep. Sometimes, perhaps, they will sit in the privacy of their houses telling interminable tales of djins and sorcerers and " spooks " in general, but as these tales are told in the native Sonhrais one is none the wiser. Even music, of which they are passionately fond, is not a social diversion. Each man plays his absurd little stringed instrument to himself, sitting in his doorway, and no one listens. One's first impression of Timbuktu-a physical one-is of sand. Not the coarse gold or silver sand of the north, but fine, impalpable, grey, dusty sand that reaches almost ankle high as one walks, to one's acute discomfort, that follows one into one's room, into one's bed, into one's meals, and that, when a faint wind blows from the north, blots out the horizon, the sunset even, not painfully or violently, but none the less irrevocably. One's second impression-a mental, or, rather, an emotional one-is that of decay-the decay of inertia, of lack of interest, of vitality. Hardly a house is in really good repair. The most prosperous ones have been hastily and rather clumsily patched, evidently recently, and under the impulsion of French suggestion. These houses, or, rather, their air of decay, give one the impression of a woman once beautiful, now aged and fading, who, without much interest, to repair the ravages of time has daubed on a little make-up. As one enters the town either by the " port " or by the bridle-path one strikes the European quarter that I first described, the Place Joffre, that speaks much for the enterprise of the French, but is extremely ugly. Once past it one enters a labyrinth of little tortuous streets, narrow, mudwalled, haphazard, seemingly thrown together without any sense of direction, where one wades through the sand, twisting sharply to right and to 125

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU left, till, more from instinct than from any geographical plan, one finds oneself in the famous market-place. And the market-place, at first sight, is a bitter disappointment. Though fairly large, it has no outline ; it is a blur of inconspicuous detail. Its middle space is cut up and bisected by a collection of ugly little arcaded buildings, where, as one finds later, the tailors and the shoemakers and the jewellers ply their trade. And all the buildings have the same air of having been hastily patched, badly "made up." Later one learns that the market is a thrilling place in which to prowl, in which to study, not architecture, but life and trade and colour, especially colour. Round the little kiosks hang white or bright blue bou-bous, and brilliant red and yellow leather slippers, and strings of gaudy beads, and before them their owners squat in front of little trays and baskets of more beads, and strings of dyed bass, and silver and bead and leather bracelets, and collections of every sort and kind of brightly- coloured junk. Beyond is the market of the groceries. Shrivelled women and handsome girls, draped in every colour under the sun, with orange twisted headdresses, crouch before trays of green melons, slices of golden pumpkin, of purplish-red kola-nuts, of red and orange spices, of all sorts of revolting compounds rolled into balls, of karity, that pervades the air with its sickly smell, of goats' milk in calabashes, of butter almost white, made from the milk of sheep. Sometimes, with the sun low at one's back, the colours seem to mix and shift and blend, forming a patchwork of brightness that dazzles the eyes, like a sheet of prismatic flate or a rainbow that has been set on fire. On the outskirts of the crowd squat, as they have squatted throughout the centuries, little 126

3 ~ U THE MARKET PLACE, TIMBUKTU THE MARKET PLACE, TIMBUKTU Face p. 126 *ok-

TIMBUKTU TO-DAY circles of unkempt, blue-skinned Moors, with their curious air of mixed wildness, mixed sublimity. Sometimes through the shifting mass a blackdraped Targui stalks, with the alert, supple walk of a forest beast, of a panther, glancing sideways at the rare apparition of a white woman, with eyes that one can never decide whether they are fierce or merely inquisitive. Beyond the market-place lies another raggletaggle of little streets, less important, more tumble down, and beyond them the Mosque of Sankor6, the oldest mosque, seat of all learning and greatness and culture, with its sloping minaret studded with jutting wooden pegs. On a sandy elevation stands a French fort, ugly but commanding, and beyond, to the north, lies the Sahara, illimitly, in its least inviting aspect, dotted with thorn bushes and mark-mark, looking rather leprous. Nor are the interiors of the houses beautiful. Though generally in better repair, they are plain, undecorated, and very dusty. Sometimes in the houses of rich men brightly coloured carpets from Gao lie on the floor, but for the most part all the arts of furnishing and house decoration are represented by a simple supply of cooking utensils and one small wooden chest containing the family wardrobe. The impression of decay, half-heartedly repaired, follows one into every corner and angle of the town. In the burning light of the midday sun, especially, Timbuktu reminds one, as I have said, of a woman once beautiful and courted and admired, who has grown old and neglected, who, having lost those she loved, has lost also interest and the dignity of age, and has let herself go to pieces for want of an incentive to preserve her youth and beauty. And yet, also, like a woman 127

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU who has personality, who has had charm and power, she intrigues one. Some faint aroma, as saint as the breath of incense, that hangs about her streets suggests the past, brings back an echo of lost greatness. This impression grows the stronger as one's eye, from force of habit, overlooks the abandon and decay. One begins to thrill ever so slightly to the undercurrent of mystery that for years has earned Timbuktu her name of " The Mysterious." One begins to feel the glamour of her personality, to understand the impelling lure of her voice that has called men of all nations to their undoing throughout the ages. If a town can have a sex, Timbuktu is very essentially a woman. And, like all women, she has her moments of beauty-sheer beauty. The aspect of her that I most loved was in the very early mornings, when I had ridden out many kilometres over the desert, and turned, looking back on the face that for illimitable years she has presented to her treacherous and dangerous lover and enemy, the north. With the sun just above the horizon, all the fierceness and the harshness were gone from her. The early desert mornings are always very beautiful : one learns for the first time that the expression " pearly" in reference to light is a real and not merely a literary descriptive term. It is as if the light, the fierce quivering air that a few hours later will scorch and burn, were wrapped in velvet, in thick soft silk, vivid yet translucent, softening every angle, etherealising all that is commonplace. In such a light Timbuktu lays like a soft, gracious creature, almost feline, purely, translucently grey, against a background of the same tone into which she so merges that one cannot say which are her walls or which the sand of her bed. Behind, giving tone to her paleness, are the dark trees of 3128

TIMBUKTU TO-DAY the Kabara trail, and beyond, to the east, are glittering threads, the marigots that, broadening into pools, are as blue as blue eyes. At sunset, too, Timbuktu is very beautiful, especially so down by the port at the end of the marigot, where the big rush-covered pirogues bring their merchandise, where the water carriers come to fill their skins, and the women wash their bright clothes, looking, with their bare brown and black bodies, like goddesses of glad Paganism. But most beautiful of all, perhaps, is Timbuktu at night. I had always been told that one simply must see her by moonlight, but unfortunately Allah, in his persistent grudge against me, had arranged throughout most of my visit that there should be no moon, and the distant desert stars, sharp as the tips of daggers though they were, could not penetrate the darkness of the tiny streets. But a day or two before I turned west a crescent moon, slender as a girl, poised as if hesitant over the great mosque, turning the town to a glamorous patchwork of light and shadow, then, as she grew stronger, turning the grey of the walls to white, shimmering and gleaming like a fairy city of pearls floating in a silver sea. And that crescent moon showed me, too, a subdued reminder of the old gaiety of Timbuktu, for one night I was taken to a party, and for the umpteenth time in my life I was impressed with the way in which everything repeats itself everywhere, even the spirit of kill-joy! For all white population Timbuktu has a few soldiers in command of black troops, and a handful of traders, and yet she holds the modern spirit of kill-joy, as badly as does dear old London itself. The party--or tom-tom, to give its right namewas in celebration of a wedding. In parentheses, the bride was thirteen years old and very lovely IT 129

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU in the manner of the country, with thick lips parted over the whitest teeth in the world, woolly hair shaved close to her head except for four little fuzzy pompoms, just like a poodle, and a sculpturesque body like a Tanagra statuette in black marble, and she had cost her husband five cows, and many yards of trade cotton, and a great quantity of kola-nuts. The party, an evening one, was being held in and out most of the streets of the eastern suburb of Timbuktu, and most particularly in front of the house to which the newly married couple had retired an hour or two before. The crescent moon hung above the grey mud houses, for no negro cares to dance except by moonlight. From two groups of men and women in circular formation came a most terrific din. The first group was composed of Sonhrais, clapping their hands and stamping in a wonderfully infectious rhythm, while alternately a man and a woman sang in a nasal whine. In the centre, a halfnaked black figure danced like a creature possessed, leaping and turning and whirling like a bat. The other group was of Belahs, the captives of the Touaregs, and their dance was different -a violent jumping up and down, with a lightning shifting of feet that scattered the sand, making it hang over our heads like a thick, smothering cloud. The air was heavy with excitement, but an excitement not quite easy-in some way restrained. From time to time I noticed a negro, who seemed to be some kind of Master of Ceremonies, censure, or even throw out some dancer whose movements had a tendency to become overdemonstrative. The whole party, though lighthearted, was orderly enough. It was like the romping of excitable young animals. There was a certain amount of horse-play, and, inspired by 130

TIMBUKTU TO-DAY 13' the sentimental suggestion of the occasion, a lad would sometimes lay roughly caressing hands on some giggling maiden that pleased his eye. But the Timbuktu damsels are well able to take care of themselves if they want to, and are as quick and effective with their fists as any boy. The growing undercurrent of suppressed excitement puzzled me, gave me a sense of something missing, something spoilt. The Master of Ceremonies was finding it harder to restrain the wedding guests, was becoming worried, even cross about it, laying about him lustily with a long, heavy stick. On the outskirts of the crowd, held on a string, wandered an unhappy looking sheep that knew perfectly well that later in the evening he was going to be killed and devoured by the friends and relations. It was a tall young negro, an ex-Tirailleur who could talk a little French, who enlightened me. Left to itself, the tom-tom would have gone on all night, and there would have been a tom-tom every night, and not necessarily a very orderly one, for negroes love tom-toms, and are apt to take them very vigorously. But the French have forbidden tom-toms except when they have given permission, and in any case the tom-tom must cease when the clairon, or military bugle, sounds at nine o'clock. And by nine o'clock the normal tom-tom only begins to wake up. The embargo laid down by the French spoils the whole thing, and Timbuktu, from having been a by-word for gaiety in all the negro and Arab countries, is now a city of sober dullness. While the Tirailleur talked to me the clairon sounded on the still air. The dancers and the singers redoubled their efforts, defiantly, desperately, but the Master of Ceremonies was a born " chucker-out," and in a few minutes the party

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU had trickled disconsolately away. It reminded me exactly of closing-time at a supper place or dance-club in London. " Pas moyen de s'amuser," my Tirailleur friend told me. Though black as boot polish, he was the complete man of the world, a native of St. Louis, who could talk of Siki, who had seen service in France, and considered Timbuktu very provincial. He pointed out to me the beauty of the quarter, a little Belah widow, sixteen years old. The Belah women, he told me, were pretty, but ",bas civilisges" ; the Sonhrais women were more civilised, but not pretty. The Touareg women, he said, though one saw them but rarely, were very beautiful, " very white and fat." He told me that he had heard the old men say that in the days before the French came Timbuktu was very gay, with tom-toms all and every night. I am afraid, under the influence of the moonlight and the dancing and the singing, I was inclined to dub Ibn Batouta, Leo Africanus, and the old chroniclers of the Tarikh as prigs, though no doubt in the interests of the community they were perfectly right. Timbuktu in the past must have been a queer mixture of dissipation and religion, and the orgies that took place in the streets must have awakened echoes in the most unsuitable places, for, like all the towns and villages in her region, she abounds in mosques and tombs and places of learning. She always has, and does still, send out more pilgrims to Mecca than almost any town of the A.O.F. ; twenty at least in the year, so I was told. The pilgrims have two main routes to choose from. The most direct one, which goes north-east through the heart of the desert via Ghadames and Ghat, is usually chosen by the poorer pilgrims, for though it holds much hardship and some 132

TIMBUKTU TO-DAY 133 danger from hostile people, it is simple and costs comparatively little. The other, by the Niger, the one I had taken, is generally used by the richer and more sophisticated ones, with their dependants, who are travelled and cosmopolitan enough not to be frightened by the complication of boats and trains. Formerly there were many mosques in Timbuktu; now there are but three, properly speaking. Dyinguere-ber, that gives its name to the quarter in which it stands, is the largest, and was built originally in 1323 by the King of the Malis, Kankan Moussa, on his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca, after the designs, so the story runs, of a Spanish-Arab poet whom he had brought back with him. But it was enlarged and so completely " restored" in about 157o by the then Caid of the town that but little of the original remains, and it again underwent restoration as late as 1709. At the top of the tall minaret it is said, Rene Caillk, the French explorer, took refuge to write his diary, and make drawings of the town unperceived by the inhabitants, who assuredly would have made short work of him if they had known. In appearance the mosque differs but little, except in size, from the other mosques of the Soudan. It has the same mud-built walls and sloping minaret studded with out- jutting logs. The Mosque of Sankor6 was probably built in 1581 by the same Caid al Aquib who restored the Great Mosque, with money supplied by a rich and holy woman. Though not so large as Dyinguereber, Sankor6 boasts an even greater sanctity and renown. It has always been the seat of intellectuality in Timbuktu, and in the quarter surrounding it lived the men of learning and letters who made the name of Timbuktu famous. It formed a kind of university, where young men

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU used to come from all parts of Africa to study. It has been written: "The holy men of Sankor6 are only second in piety to the Companions of the Prophet," and they were called " Oualiou" (saints). The word Sankor6 means in Sonhrais " White Master." Some say that it was so called because the quarter in which it stands was the halting-place of the white pilgrims who came from the north, others because from its very early days its imam, or high priest, was a white man. White, I should add, in this part of the world is used in a relative sense, meaning Arab or Moor, or otherwise " brown," as opposed to the native black. The third mosque of Timbuktu, the Mosque of Sidi Yahia, early in fourteen hundred was built by Mahommed Nadda, especially, the old chroniclers say, for Sidi Yahia el Tadelsi, a very holy man who became the patron of Timbuktu. About a hundred and fifty years later it also was practically rebuilt by the Caid Al Aquib, who seems to have had a perfect passion for restoring churches. This mosque used to be considered the protector of the city, and during their many vicissitudes the inhabitants used to fly to it for sanctuary. Even to-day men make pilgrimage to it from many miles away, and a little hole has been made in the outer wall so that in the event of the mosque being closed no chance pilgrim should be deprived of at least a glimpse of the tomb of the saint and miracle- maker, Sidi Yahia, that stands inside. Besides mosques there are in Timbuktu and all the region round other places of prayer called barem-barem. They consist of a small walled enclosure with a roof, built generally round the tomb of a saint, and form a kind of oratory, where men of the neighbourhood come to meditate or to say their prayers. The three principal are :134

THE OLD MOSQUE, TIMBUKTU A TYPICAL SOUDANESE MOSQUE Face p. 134

TIMBUKTU TO-DAY '35 the barem-barem of the Kounta, a famous old family who have made much of the history of Timbuktu and that stands in the precincts of Sankore itself, the barem- barem of the marabout Sidi Ahmed El Bakkai, and that of the Alfa Chekou, a marabout who came from Dienn6. It is rather a speciality of the people of Timbuktu and its region to pray, not at a mosque or a barembarem, but near the tomb of a favourite saint. Some say it is the influence of the white Mahommadans, the Arabs and Berbers, who hold their dead in great reverence, in contrast to the negroes of the south, who do not. Certain it is that they have a great respect for their dead saints, making pilgrimages to their tombs, and bringing little offerings of kola and corn. Also they have a veneration for cemeteries. Almost every day I used to ride past the cemetery of Haouiobongou, which is quite five miles from the town, a desolate spot with the graves almost obliterated by the shifting sand, and there was scarcely a day that I did not see one or two men or women of the humbler class crouching on the ground for hours at a time and praying. Timbuktu is completely and thoroughly Mahommadan, and nowhere in the Soudan has the influence of Islam, social and religious, taken stronger hold. Schools are numerous, called tirahu, which, translated literally, means, " Place where one writes." They are attended by boys and girls up to the age of about ten years. Lessons are the quaintest things to watch-twenty or thirty almost naked little black gnomes, each with a wooden tablet covered with writing almost as big as itself, shrieking verses of the Koran at the tops of their voices, producing such a jumble of sound that one wonders that the alfa, or schoolmaster, can make head or tail of it. For primary

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU education the Koran is the beginning, and the end, and the middle, as Mahommad, with wise prescience, left little of importance in the way of law, philosophy, and theology out of his inspired writings. After the primary schools come the Koranic schools, where youths and young men take haphazard courses in the works of old masters, and study grammar, history, and law. They follow the age-old tradition of learning everything by heart, and, remembering one's old childhood's education, one wonders how much of it " sticks." About fifteen years ago, through the efforts of a French Governor, Monsieur Clozel, a medersa was inaugurated on the lines of the medersas of the north of Africa, which it became more and more the fashion for young natives to attend. A medersa is something on the lines of the old abbeys of England in the Middle Ages, and at the one formed in Timbuktu, besides all the original subjects the pupils learn French, and little by little, with great tact, are being made to understand something of European ideals. In almost all cases, if attending a school out of reach of his own family or relations, a poor pupil is supported in part by his schoolmaster and in part by the asking of alms in the street, or, rather, not so much alms as food. This latter is a timehonoured custom, those students who are well to do taking part in it, and sharing the proceeds with their poorer comrades. As I have said, the Sonhrais, natives of Timbuktu, are assiduous in their prayers, and, as in all Mahommadan countries, the " Salaam" is made five times a day; at sunrise (Alfedyar dyinger; dyinger means prayer); at midday (Aloule); in the afternoon (Alasara) ; at sunset (Fitirou); and in the evening (Safa). 136

TIMBUKTU TO-DAY '37 Equally assiduous are they in keeping the five sacred feasts, which are as follows: Tyibi, the Feast of the Sheep, when every man must kill a sheep, and share it with his entire family and with his poorer neighbours, if he has any. Ferme, the end of the Fast of Ramadan, which is celebrated much the same as Tyibi. Dedow, or Feast of the New Year (Mahommadan), when, besides the usual feast- day purifications, the devotees undergo the purification by fire, and indulge freely in almsgiving. Alnoudou, the celebration of the birthday of the Prophet, which seems to be a feast especially celebrated by women. Koteme, the twenty-seventh night of Ramadan, which is the anniversary of the Koran, and a time when Allah is in especially close relationship with the affairs of his servants, and not only the powers of good but the powers of evil are let loose, and must be carefully guarded against and exorcised. Though the brilliance of Timbuktu is past, though externally she is but the grey, pale ghost of her old self, one learns, in studying her, to realise that the vicissitudes of her chequered existence have not entirely devitalised her or her people. And, again in this she reminds one of a woman-one kind of woman, that is, who, though her youth and beauty and power and all her superficial attributes have left her, still retains her brains and her heart.

CHAPTER XI THE PAST OF TIMBUKTU DURING the dreary week that I lay in bed, learning to know the city of mystery through her myriad voices, I learnt, too, a little of her past, of her history, from the lips of white men and brown who came to visit me, and, as I grew better, from the old books and papers they brought me. It is a history of wars and rumours of wars. Every principality in its day coveted Timbuktu, and in its turn won her. And as each in its turn proved a cruel master, so she called to others to help her, finding each time disillusion, but never finding peace. Of what might be called the Dark Ages of Timbuktu little is known. Ibn Chauldoun, the great historian of his day, says: "All Africa, down to the country of the blacks, has been inhabited by the Berber race, and that since an epoch of which one knows neither what went before or what came after." These Berbers pushed farther and farther to the south through the colonisation of the Romans and Carthaginians in the north, encroached on and beyond the Niger. About 1100 A.D. a tribe of the Touaregs, then called Kaksara, now forming part of the family of Tengheregifs, settled at a little village, Amtagh, to-day known as Hamtagel, and formed near by a dep6t of all their more cumbersome belongings. When the time came for them again to go off nomadising they left the dep6t in the charge of

THE PAST OF TIM3tJKTU '39 an old woman called Tombouctou, which means "The mother with the big numbril." All the African races love nicknames, and this nickname stuck to the town as well as to the mother of it. Soon the market-place formed, and trade came, and, the situation of the village being good, and water and game plentiful, it grew rapidly and prospered. It was aptly described by the ancients as "The place where meet those who travel by pirogue and those who travel by camel." Its growth was hastened when traders came from Dienn6 in the west and taught them how to build houses of mud bricks. Neglected by the Touaregs, Timbuktu was voluntarily taken possession of by the Mandingoes, whose great Emperor, Kankan Moussa, reigning from 1307 to 1332, holy man as well as warrior, brought greatness and learning to all that part of the continent. Later on, as the Mandingo influence declined, the Touaregs, her old masters, again held sway in Timbuktu. Towards the end of the fifteenth century Suuni Ali, King of the Sonhrais, cast eyes of envy on her, and, aided by the treachery of Amar, a deposed governor of the Touaregs, was enabled to effect an entry into the city. The Touaregs fled, taking refuge at Oulata, to the north, and Timbuktu was established, and throughout 1599 was at the height of her glory, a fabulous city, a by-word throughout Africa for her brilliance, learning, and prosperity. But such richness attracted the glances of covetous eyes, and in 1591 an army of three thousand men, sent by Moulay Ahmed from Morocco under the command of Pasha Djouder, fighting and destroying every inch of the way, took first Gao, and then Timbuktu. The conquest of the new colony was one long story of bloodshed

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU and pillage and looting, and when the Moors had satisfied their rapacity they proceeded to organise it on their own lines. They established a Pasha to control civil law, and a Caid to superintend the military garrisons that they formed everywhere. Timbuktu was made the capital, with two Emirs, or lieutenants, at Gao. But, beset with troubles at home, they soon lost control of things, and then the Touaregs came down in mass from the north. By 173o all Moorish supremacy in Timbuktu had ceased, and she settled down to sleep for over a hundred years. For the first time in many centuries she lay forgotten, almost unknown, on the fringe of her great ally, the Sahara, staring with her thousand eyes over the waste of sand, dreaming of past glories. And then, in 1894, Timbuktu was awakened from her long sleep, and this time, and for the first time, by men of a white race. By 1893 the French, in their slow but effective advance inland under Colonel Archimard, were in possession of Dienn6. From there three columns were concentrated on Timbuktu. One, under Colonel Bonnier, followed the left bank of the Niger; another, under Colonel (now Field-Marshal) Joffre, of international fame, went by the river itself, with Lieutenant Boiteux in command of a flotilla. The rumour of all this reached Timbuktu and created something like panic. The Touaregs beat their war-drum and called upon the negroes to support them. The latter scarcely knew which they most feared, the French or the Touaregs. While everything was still in a state of chaos the French arrived at Kabara and took possession of it without difficulty. During all the night that followed, and for several succeeding days, the chiefs of Timbuktu sat in conference, unable to decide T40

THE PAST OF TIMBUKTU whether to give in or whether to defend themselves. Finally Lieutenant Boiteux took a small force in boats up the marigot and quietly took possession. It is rather unique, I think, that a town over thirteen hundred miles inland should have first been captured by sailors. The palabres among the chiefs still continued, and a treaty was made. The Touaregs outside the town made all the trouble they could, including the murder of the poor Ensign Aube, but were defeated, and in a few days Colonel Bonnier forcibly entered and took formal possession of the town. His residence there was of short duration. The Touaregs, massing together, fell upon his column that had sallied forth to reconnoitre the surrounding country, and in one dark, terrible night killed the Colonel, eight officers, three non- commissioned officers, and sixty-eight black Tirailleurs. Three weeks later Colonel Joffre, at the head of the second column, arrived, and buried the remains of his thirteen compatriots, in whose memory a stone cross still stands near the port, and, following the traitors almost to Goundam, took a swift and terrible revenge. Since which the Touaregs have kept to the desert, their natural heritage, and the inhabitants of Timbuktu have remained faithful to their white conquerors. In spite of all these vicissitudes Timbuktu for many hundred years was the centre of civilisation of Africa; partly owing to her fortuitous position on the Bend of the Niger and partly from the fact that she was the chief nucleus of the Mahommadan religion, and consequently attracted students and pilgrims and visitors of wealth and learning. She was the junction of all commerce, the central point where the caravans of merchandise from the north and the boatloads of merchandise from 14t

142 THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU the south effected an exchange. In very remote times, some centuries before the Christian era as well as after, long before Timbuktu came into being, the Soudan provided the Mediterranean countries with slaves and gold dust in exchange for the products of civilisation. The method of exchange is not quite clear. Herodotus writes that the Carthaginians iysed to set sail to a country "situated beyond the Pillars of Hercules," probably the coast of Mauritania, but it would appear that there was no social interchange, or even exchange of speech. According to the old traditions, the Carthaginians never went more than a few yards from their ships, but used to deposit their merchandise on the seashore, and, returning to their ships, lit fires to announce their arrival. Shortly the natives would advance and deposit by each bale of merchandise a packet of gold dust, retiring in their turn. The Carthaginians then descended and examined the gold dust, and, if satisfied as to its quantity and quality, set sail and departed. If not satisfied, they settled themselves on their ships and waited till more gold dust was left. This went on till both sides were satisfied, and the proceedings speak well for the honesty of both the Carthaginians and the natives, for apparently neither of them ever tried to defraud the other. The Soudan was never very much affected by the chances and changes of the north. The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Medes, the Persians, and the Phoenicians, and Greeks, and Romans, had their eras of rise and decline, but their echoes scarcely reached the black countries except by hearsay. The chief clients of Timbuktu from the north were from Morocco by Mogador, Fez, Marrakech, and the Tafilalet, Algeria by Touat, and Tunis and

THE PAST OF TIMBUKTU Tripolitania by Ghadames, the Touareg capital. The caravans brought cotton and a few silks (rare luxury), arms and powder, cutlery, mirrors, beads of all sorts, especially amber and coral, coffee, tobacco, dates, carpets, burnous and various kinds of clothing. But these caravans started, as they still start, only half loaded. They stopped halfway at El Juf, and made up the rest of their freight with rock salt. The headquarters of the salt trade was and is Taoudeni, and white men and brown who have seen it tell me it is the most desolate place in the whole world-no water, no trees, nothing but rock salt. In old days, Malfante, a Genoese traveller and writer of the fifteenth century, who made a trip to Timbuktu, writes : " It never rains here. If it did the houses would crumble away, for they are made of salt." The salt is loaded in slabs of about a yard and a half long and half a yard thick, weighing from fifty to ninety pounds, and it arrives at Timbuktu looking like marble tombstones, decorated with elaborate hieroglyphics in Arabic. The biggest caravan of the year arrives in January, with as many as six thousand camel-loads. All this merchandise is shipped away to various trading centres and markets up and down the Niger, and then the caravans return with their goods from the south- millet, rice, karity, groundnuts, kola, baobab-flour, spices, dried fish, antimony, cotton, and calabashes. These are for the Saharan towns and villages. For the far north, the Mediterranean ports, they carry, or used to carry, a little gold dust, ivory, ostrich feathers, raw leather, wax, incense, indigo, and musk, and until comparatively recently they used to carry very many slaves-muscular giants, many inches over six feet, and plump, sleek, ebony maidens. But the slave-trade has died a 143

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU hard death, officially at any rate, and as far as white men are concerned, for among the Touaregs, and I think also more among some of the other races than their white conquerors would care to admit, there is still a kind of voluntary and mutual exchange and barter in human flesh of which no one more appreciates the advantages than the captives themselves. And, besides trade, Timbuktu, as I have said, was the seat of learning, science, and literature, second only, perhaps, to Cairo and Fez. To its medersas, presided over by marabouts and talebs, the youth of all countries flocked for instruction, and the talebs and philosophers of Fez and Marrakech themselves used to come and imbibe fresh wisdom. So great was the reputation of Timbuktu for learning and intellectualism that one very learned Moor, having been tackled on some abstruse point of law, came to study for several years at Timbuktu before he felt fitted to unravel it. In fifteen hundred Leo the African, a proteg6 of the Pope of the day, a Moor born in Granada, speaks highly of the teeming commerce and great culture of Timbuktu, though in those days, apparently, with the exception of the mosques and a few big buildings, the houses had roofs of straw, and sounded pretty primitive. Everyone had female slaves in great abundance and of great beauty, who went about with faces uncovered, though the ladies of the nobility were closely veiled. Timbuktu society appeared to have been democratic enough, for Leo writes: " The inhabitants are very wealthy, especially the foreigners who make their residence there, so much so that the king has given his two daughters to two merchant brothers on account of their riches.' The currency of those days was mostly gold dust, 3144

THE PAST OF TIMBUKTU with a small change of cowrie shells imported from Asia. Four hundred cowries represented a ducat, the infrequent local coin, and six and two-third ducats made one Roman ounce. Leo relates that there was continual and great festivity, and that the king never moved without a large escort of men on camels, and was covered with golden jewellery. People craving audience with him had to kneel before him, casting dust upon their garments. In her earlier days Timbuktu was forbidden to the Jews. Since those days three great foreign elements, mixing and fusing, have gone to make up the present cosmopolitan structure of Timbuktu society. Firstly the Arma, descendants of the old Moroccan warriors and adventurers. The name is derived from the Arabic word rouma, which means "shooters," from the fact that their invading ancestors were the first men bearing arms to be seen in that part of the country. Secondly the Chorfa, descendants of the Prophet through a notability of Oulata. And thirdly the Alfa, of an admixture of origins, chiefly of Arabs from the north and Peuhls from the Bend of the Niger. They have always been considered the salt of the Soudanese earth, and at Timbuktu the chief sponsors of learning and letters, and in very early days were paid, as such, a retaining fee by the king. Also was Timbuktu a city of pleasure, the ville lumigre of the Sahara, if one is to believe Leo and Ibn Batouta, the old Arab historian. Leo, writing for the Vatican, expresses himself with veiled sarcasm. He says: " The inhabitants of Timbuktu are of an amiable nature, and from evening to a very late hour of the night they dance in the city." The other is more outspoken, but both write in strong denunciation of the laxity and loose living of those days-of the wantonness of KT 145

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU the married women and the complaisance of the husbands, and of the boldness of the young girls, who, even the king's daughters, used to go naked in the streets of Timbuktu, laughing into the eyes of men. The Fethach, speaking of the country between Gao and Timbuktu, describes its moral standards as" The extreme limit of immorality. The gravest crimes, the most disagreeable acts, are committed openly, and the worst turpitudes are spread out in the light of day." The Tarik es Soudan, describing the last days of the Sonhrais, says: " They drank wine, they gave themselves up to unnatural sin; and as for adultery, it had become so frequent that its practice seems to have become so that without it there was no elegance, no glory." In fact, it all sounded rather like the best London society of to-day! The rest of what the worthy chronicler has to relate on the matter is not repeatable. Whether or not these grave divines exaggerated somewhat, of course, one cannot say, but they wrote as heatedly as do our scribes of the " Silly Season," and with a good deal more outspokenness even than "Disgusted " or " Father of a Family." In any case, the negroes from the south and the Arabs from the north used undoubtedly to make pleasure-trips to Timbuktu as nowadays men do to Paris or any other big capital, and many a trader and northern trader, losing their heads in the midst of so much pleasure, spent everything, down to their last ounce of gold dust, on loose living, and were unable to return to their homes. Often they remained, sponging on the kindness of their friends, for, as in all Mahommadan countries, hospitality is the strongest instinct, a tenet of religion even, and they have a pretty proverb 146

THE PAST OF TIMBUKTU which, being translated, runs: "A guest is a present from God." Murder, rape, and pillage, gaiety, culture, and commerce, slaves and perfume, all these made up the personality of the faded beauty who lies brooding, half sleeping under the intent eyes of her last and faithful lover, the sun. Sometimes at dusk, in the narrow, tortuous streets, the elusive scent of incense that tantalises one's nostrils seems to bring back, not a memory, but a sensation of having known her in her hey-day; conjures up a vision of her proud youth, of the grave talebs, of the caravan-loads of precious merchandise, of gorgeously apparelled, ebonyblack kings, of laughing, naked women, of songs and dancing, of learned discussions and brisk bartering. The so-called mystery of Timbuktu, like a cerement, hangs faintly about her yet. Beauty never quite dies, nor does power. Both le-ave a flavour that, after many years, has still the power to thrill, to intrigue. So it is with Timbuktu, syren, dying queen without a throne, sphinx without a secret. For, whether or not one admits the " mystery" of Timbuktu, it is certain that her voice has called with a siren's note to many men of alien races since the days when amberskinned warriors of the north and ebony giants from the south wooed, and fought for, and won her. From the time of the Middle Ages almost Timbuktu has excited the interest and curiosity of white men. Little was known of her save from the writings of the old cosmographer Edriss, and of Ibn Batouta and Leo the African. If one counts out the Portuguese, concerning the extents of whose travels there is a good deal of uncertainty, the first white man known to have visited 147

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU her was Francis Paul Imbert, of Sables d'Olonne, in about 1650, who escorted his master, a Portuguese, on a mission from Tafilalet, to the south of the Oran district, to Timbuktu. The next European, as far as is known, was an American sailor called Robert Adams, who, shipwrecked upon the shores of Mauritania, was captured by the Moors and carried by them as a slave to Timbuktu. He claims to have been her first white visitor, but his accounts of the people and the surrounding country are vague and incorrect, which has given rise to the belief that he was never there at all. In any case, he did not leave behind him any records of his experiences. In 18o5 Mungo Park passed Kabara on his second great journey east, with only four survivors left out of the original company of forty with which he had started from the Gambia. After a long overland journey he embarked by birogue from Sansanding, and disappeared from the knowledge of man. Five years later an ex- servant of his was sent to make enquiries, and brought back news that the party of five had passed Kabara, though it was believed that owing to the hostility of the Touaregs he had not been able to penetrate Timbuktu. Farther on, at Gao, the party had been attacked by Touaregs and three more of their number killed. Down in the Haoussa country, while negotiating the great rapids of Boussa, Park and his last surviving comrade, a young soldier named Martyr, were attacked by negroes ambushed behind the rocks, and (this part of the story sounds rather improbable), to save themselves a worse fate, threw themselves out of their pirogues and were drowned. The next European to reach Timbuktu, in 1826, was also an Englishman, Major Gordon Laing. He came by one of the northern routes-a hard 148

THE PAST OF TIMBUKTU one-from Tripoli, via Ghadames, Touat, Oulata, and Arouan. Within a few miles of his objective he was attacked by Touaregs, and, when they discovered him to be a Christian, was robbed and beaten with a club and left for dead. Luckily the Moors who had joined his caravan remained faithful, and, tying him on to his camel, brought him to Timbuktu, where, lodged in the house of a friendly Moor, he slowly recovered from his wounds. He had to put up with a good deal of persecution on account of his religion, but he seemed to have been possessed of a pluck incarnate, amounting almost to foolhardiness, and after a time was left in peace. Turned back by the illwill of the Peuhls along the river, he made his departure by Arouan, but after five days' journey he was seized by a fanatic chief, Sheik Hamed ouled Habib. Refusing to deny his religion, he was strangled by the negro slaves of the sheik, and his body left to the vultures. Two years later Timbuktu was reached by Ren6 Caill6, the first European visitor to return alive! He came by the Niger route, wearing native dress, and he passed himself off as an Arab who had been brought up in Egypt. He spread the story that he had been taken prisoner and made slave by the French, and that, liberated, he was returning to his home in Egypt. This fiction saved his life a hundred times, and after a two years' journey of appalling hardships, of illness and privation, he made his return by Morocco. In 1853 the famous German explorer, Barth, also attained Timbuktu. He left Tripoli with Oberweg and Richardson, who both died on the road. Barth spent seven months in Timbuktu under the protection of a friendly chief, the Sheik El Bakay, of the family of Kounta. Every day on my way to the market-place I used to pass the 149

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU house where he lodged, marked with a tablet. Later on, turning to the east, he joined forces with a fellow-countryman, Vogel, who had been sent to replace Richardson, but the latter was assassinated shortly afterwards. Barth, who seemed to bear a charmed life, succeeded in regaining Tripoli after an absence of four years. In 188o the Austrian explorer, Lentz, coming from Morocco, visited and wrote a book about Timbuktu. But by that time she was virtually a place charted and mapped, her mystery dispelled, in her ears the first clank of manacles that were to fetter her. And now white men walk in Timbuktu, and through her still air comes the blast of a military bugle, and white traders barter with her servants for her riches. Now she is but a city of decay, of lost power, of envy, of Dead Sea fruit; a moderate French military outpost, chiefly spoken of for the inconvenience of reaching her, and for the intractability and treachery of the Touaregs who hem her round. But still, I think, she sleeps, as she has slept for over a hundred years, dreaming of her salad days, of the wealth that lay in her brown hands, of the jewels and fine raiment that decked her, of the life and love and laughter that filled her streets. Sometimes she turned in her long sleep, and lazily crushed or brushed aside some importunate traveller who sought to penetrate her mystery, to waken her from her slumber, who called to her in an alien tongue. To me all towns have a personality, as definite, if not more so, than those of human persons, and it seems to me that the personality of Timbuktu lies dormant, lies waiting for its real development. Railroads may come, and aeroplanes, and "caterpillar" cars, with their loadsof northern humanity, but the sleeping soul 150

THE PAST OF TIMBUKTU 151 of the city ignores them. I like to think that one day, when rested from the centuries of turbulence of her brown and white aspirants, she will awaken with a mighty gesture, as an empress awakes from sleep, and will gather round her her real lovers, the black people who first cradled her.

CHAPTER XII BLACK AND WHITE IN TIMBUKTU THOUGH Timbuktu is one of the most cosmopolitan places in Africa, the Sonhrais, strictly speaking, are her only resident race. The men of other races who fill her streets are birds of passage only, traders or nomads. Of the Sonhrais, no one knows much concerning their remote origin, but probably they come from the Nile, and a certain amount of legendary history is given about them in the Tarik-esSoudan, a book of chronicles written by an oldtime savant overblessed in the names of Abderrahman - Ben - Abdullah - Ben - Amran - Ben - Amr Sadi. The unpronounceable one lived in Timbuktu towards the end of fifteen hundred, and states that the first king of the Sonhrais was called Dialliaman, from the Arab phrase "Diamin el Yemen" (" He comes from Jemen "). Jemen is a town near the valley of the Nile, and the story goes that Dialliaman and his brother, after a long journey, arrived at Kokia, a town situated on " the borders of a river, and very old," presumably the Nile. They were in such a state of exhaustion that they could not even tell their names, only the name of their birthplace, so the Sonhrais gave the elder the nickname " He comes from Jemen," which, like most nicknames, stuck to him through life and after. The god of the Sonhrais was a fish, that on certain occasions condescended to show itself on

BLACK AND WHITE the surface of the water wearing a gold ring through its nose, and submit to the worship of its subjects. While at Kokia, Dialliaman assisted at one of these celebrations, and, declaring himself disgusted with the impiety of it all, cast his lance at the fish, killing it with the first shot. Disabused of the divinity of their god, the Sonhrais rose up and declared Dialliaman king. By the way, it was said to be from Kokia that one of the Pharaohs summoned magicians to back him up in his dispute with Moses. The adoration of a fish has a flavour distinctly Egyptian, and presents a marked contrast with the idolatry of the negroes of West African origin, whose gods, one and all, are inanimate, such as stones and trees, etc. The exodus of the Sonhrais from the Nile to the Niger was probably about the end of the seventh century, for Dienn6, their first great city and their farthest point west, was built in the hundred and fiftieth year of the Hegira (about 765 A.D.). They are divided into three categories, the Sorko, the Da, and the Gabidi. The Sorko, whose tastes generally lead them into professions connected with the river, such as fishermen, laptots, etc., claim a legendary descent from the five female slaves of Noah, who, becoming the unofficial wives of one Oudj, gave birth to twins apiece. Sorko, one of these twins, according to the story, was the founder of the present race, and the tribal legends have much in common with the legends of old Nile. Indeed, the mediaeval confusion that, as I have said, existed about the Nile and the Niger, makes stories that have "the "River," as the old writers call it, as their mise en scine difficult to "place." The Da, who would appear to be an earlier branch of the Sonhrais to settle on the Niger, also trace a romantic descent from an Arab woman 153

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU of Medina and a Christian blacksmith. The son of this couple, seeking for a relation who had fled from the law in Medina, found him, after many years, at Gao, on the Niger, where the family then established themselves. They rose to great eminence, so the story goes, by the aid of a talisman, with which they killed a monstrous fish that had hitherto held the neighbourhood in thrall. It is from the Da that come the big families of chiefs and marabouts. The Gabidi, whose name, being translated, means " black body," are supposed to be descendants of slaves, and form the lower classes of the Sonhrais population. They are a fine people, the Sonhrais, intelligent, muscular, handsome in a more negroid way than some of the tribes on the fringe of the Sahara. Their women have set the fashion in jewels and queer hairdressing for many miles round, and among a variety of lesser races. I have already described their hairdressing of pompoms, which the ladies of Timbuktu finish off with a broad " headache band" of yellow ribbon. In general, the clothing is a mingling of the bou-bou, universal garment of the blacks all over West Africa, and the fashions of the Arabs of the north, who have brought in the use of the burnous, and yellow leather heelless shoes for the men, and similar ones in red for the women. The men either go bareheaded, with their kinky hair shaved close, or wear an absurd little white cotton bonnet not unlike the traditional chef's cap, and both sexes wear all the jewellery they can afford, bands of metal, beads, gri-gris, amulets of good luck, and the height of elegance among the women is jewellery of Moroccan manufacture. The lower and middle class women enjoy a wide freedom, but the wives of big men live, and that 154 BLACK AND WHITE '55 voluntarily, in an almost cloisteral seclusion. Indeed, the wife and sister-in-law of the Caid, very great ladies, told me that except to visit some relations they had not left their house for many years. When I asked them if they did not get bored, and, in answer to their questioning, told them something of the busy lives of European women, they stared at me blankly, and evidently thought with disparagement of women, not obliged by necessity, who gallivanted round the streets and countryside and mingled with the lower orders. But I have noticed that trait among all women of semi-civilised races. The great luxury of a "lady," and that every good husband tries to give his wife, is the luxury of inertia. To think, to work, to take exercise, is the unpleasant necessity of the poor! That a woman not absolutely obliged to should do any of these things is madness, and speaks badly for her husband. I remember trying to tell a great Arab lady once about our motor-buses. She was quite horrified, and evidently thought I was not a person suitable for her to know. Apart from the Touaregs, who are an anomaly among Oriental or southern races, I only met one feminist throughout the length and breadth of West Africa. She was a little Peuhl lady who worked for a family near Mopti. She had a husband who had started married life by beating her and being stingy with the Peuhl equivalent of housekeeping and pin money. Being a person of spirit, disregarding his wishes she went into service, and made considerably more money than he. " And now he dares not beat me," she said, "nor deceive me, for if he did I should leave him, and take our three children with me. And he

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU would have no money for kola and tobacco; and he would have to work. And he does not like work, therefore he is kind to me." In Timbuktu, as everywhere in West Africa, black women, unlike brown ones, seem to take extremely little interest in, or feel very little curiosity about, a white one. The general attitude of the unenlightened black about all things and people white seemed to me to be very like that of an intelligent white in front of a subject of which he or she has no knowledge. The thing is extraordinary, bizarre, too much so to be understood and not particularly attractive. When you have seen one specimen, you have seen the lot, so why bother your head about it or its eccentricites ? An offshoot from the Sonhrais are the Belahs, or Rimaib6. They are the descendants of captives, and have an admixture of black blood and brown in their veins. Little by little they are making a position for themselves, and, not yet quite a race, are the nucleus of one. They are a cheerful people, loving tom-toms and laughter with all the negro's light-heartedness and irresponsibility. There is little negroid in their appearance except for the darkness of their skins. Their features are small and straight, and some of the women would be really pretty if only they were a little cleaner and tidier. They wear garments of the same blue guinee as the Moors, and their hair looks as if it were not done very often. When it is done, however, it is an event. One whole morning I sprawled in a straw hut watching the hairdressing of a young Belah bride, and by lunch-time it was only a quarter done. The lady lay face downwards on the ground, her chin propped on her hands, with a dozen of her friends gathered round, gossiping and brushing the flies ir56

BLACK AND WHITE '57 off her legs. With a kind of skewer the professional coiffeuse, a withered crone who looked at least a hundred and fifty years old, straightened and untangled the frizzy mop. The process must have been exceedingly painful, for the whole construction was cemented with 'congealed karity butter many weeks old, but the lady never flinched. No attempt was made to remove the accumulation of dirt and karity, but a fresh supply of the latter was liberally applied, and the hair arranged in tiny plaits band-wise round the head, with a coronal of even smaller plaits in the centre, decorated with finishing-touches of gri-gris and bits of coral and shells. All these people, with their cheerful obviousness and naive animality, make a striking foil to their nomad visitors, the Touaregs who have come down from the desert to trade. To see a Touareg among a crowd of Sonhrais reminds one of a greyhound surrounded by bull terriers. With his figure like whipcord, his slim grace, and his veil that leaves one to guess at features like the silhouettes on old Roman coins, he brings with him a breath of the desert itself, with its aloofness, its fierceness, its mystery-the mystery of emptiness. Always the negroes have a laugh at the back of them somewhere. I do not remember ever having seen a Touareg laugh. His eyes, like the eyes of a bird of prey, smile rarely, but when they do the smile is immeasurably sweet. Whatever his origin may be, his personality is not African, it is Asiatic; and his walk alone brings back half- remembered memories of dim corners of the East. Much of the trading element of Timbuktu is represented by the Moors, identical in every respect with those that I described in Mauritania. The Moor is one of the few people in the world who,

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU however much his life and circumstances may vary, never seems to alter in the least respect. Here, many miles from his own country, he is the same shaggy, wild-eyed star-gazer, the same bit of biblical silhouette. Apart from the exigences of their trade, the Moors do not mingle with the other brown and black folk of Timbuktu. They sit in the market-place in little groups, silent and self-centred. Never do they look prosperous or well fed; they appear to have no pleasures, no recreations. Sometimes they beg shamelessly and persistently. Their women hold aloof, drawing their blue garments across their faces against the glance of a stranger. They will not do manual labour, but each family owns a few goats, and the skins of these they sell in Timbuktu for a few sous, which provide them with all the money they need, for a few chickens and the milk and the flesh of goats keep them in fatness and plenty according to their own ideas. Besides all these races, various nomads from remote parts of the region are beginning to establish for themselves small agricultural properties near Timbuktu. Among them are the Tormez, the Deilouba, a fair number of Peuhls from the west, and the Coueaboro. They are not altogether welcome, for the nomad is always a nomad, and has all the disadvantages of an absentee landlord, many sending their captives and servants at seedtime and harvest to do the necessary work and transact their business. Also, being, so to speak, self-contained, they no longer need to trade with the natives of the region, who have in consequence to go far afield to sell their grain. Though for seven centuries Islam has held its own in Timbuktu, many of the poorer people are monogamous, more for economic reasons than from inclination, but the wealthy men have as 158

BLACK AND WHITE '59 many wives, regular and irregular, as their religion allows and their income will run to. Divorce is a luxury only permitted to the well-to-do, as a man who divorces his wife has to refund her dowry. Morals, as a rule, are regrettably lax, and a native of Timbuktu told me, with a jovial grin, that, whatever the number of a woman's children, not more than two of them at most knew their own father. Marriage usually takes place at about the age of eleven to thirteen years for the girls, and about eighteen or later for a boy. The marriage celebration, or perhaps it would be more correct to say honeymoon, lasts seven days, and is a time of great festivity, all the friends of the young couple coming to visit them, bringing their own food and eating it with them. The Timbuktians, like most of their brothers, are quite amazingly superstitious, which goes queerly side by side with their religion. It is doubtful which is most held in awe, the marabout or the sorcerer. It is believed that every physical and moral ill has its occult signification, and that it has a corresponding gri-gri, or charm. Most of the jewellery they wear, especially the women, is a preventive against something or other-against skin trouble or stomach-ache, against death in battle or treachery, against miscarriage or djins. The sorcerer (tyerkow) is the chief sponsor and runner-up of superstitions, but to save his reputation the marabout is obliged to follow his lead. Any sorcerer worth his salt can foretell the future, can bring rain or exorcise an evil spirit from a house or a tree, and a really potent one can undo the spells of another sorcerer, or will a victim to death. This he does with a kind of astral body which wanders where it wills at the dead of night, probably to drink the blood of the victim. But you must never call a sorcerer a sorcerer, or you

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU will probably die within the year. In the history of Timbuktu and its region there have been sorcerers and marabouts with reputations as miracle-makers really brilliant, and with careers to match. Among minor superstitions it is believed that it is extremely unlucky to have a house that opens to the east. Some birds and animals are considered unlucky, either in mass or to individual families. To members of some tribes or subdivisions of tribes it is unlucky to work or to wash on a certain day. To the Sorkos and Hab~s it is unlucky to see each other's blood, so that in consequence they may not fight each other. But if there is a great deal of mediavalism in Timbuktu there is also the influence of the twentieth century. Timbuktu already has the nucleus of a local Savile Row. In a little mud house on the way to the market-place a gentleman has hung the following sign, hand-painted, over his door: "Mamadou, Machine Tailleur, civile et militaire." Give him the material and a model to copy and he will turn out a very wearable drill suit for about forty or fifty francs. Sometimes his artistic ideals run away with him. While I was there a Frenchman ordered a white coat. In a few days it came back, and on one side, under the arm, printed in large blue letters, were the figures 438, and on the other side was " mtres 4o." These were the ends of the bale of linen, with the trade memoranda, that Mamadou evidently considered made a tasteful relief to the monotony of dead white. The leading dignitaries of Timbuktu are charming gentlemen, hospitable and courteous, in particular the Caid, a very portly gentleman in a richly embroidered blue bou-bou, who gives one innumerable cups of Arab tea, and pays one, 16o

BLACK AND WHITE through an interpreter, nost polished compliments, and presents one with a profusion of ostrich feathers and coloured grass mats. Of white men in Timbuktu there are the Administrator, whose territory extends almost as far as Lake Chad, the Commandant of the Cercle, a few officers and non-commissioned officers over black troops, and a few traders, or commerpants. While I was there I was lucky enough to see the arrival of the first civil Administrator of the region. Hitherto the Administration had always been in military hands, and this was a definite step in the march of civilisation. All the chiefs of the neighbouring tribes had come in from the desert several days previously, flags had been strung up on all the European buildings, and from early dawn there had been an excited crowd buzzing to and fro in the Place Joffre, facing the bridle-path from Kabara. In one corner a tom-tom was being held, exclusively of women, a nucleus of shrill singing, stamping feet, much encouraging laughter, and a whirlwind of dust. The European population strolled to and fro in its best uniform or immaculate white. Between nine and ten the chattering and excitement of the crowd rose in a shrill crescendo. On the horizon appeared a cloud of dust, no bigger than a man's hand, and a mounted Garde in a red chechia, very martial and important, rode to and fro, beating back the people. The sun beat down fiercely, making the dust seem alive, turning the world to a cauldron of noise and colour. The cloud on the horizon grew bigger, came nearer, and details detached themselves; splashes of colour on the uniforms, the gleam of a lance, the fluttering of a Targui's cloak. In a few minutes the cavalcade dashed past the LT Ii

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU fort, some officers leading, then the new Administrator, in khaki, accompanied by the Commandant and a cohort of Touareg chiefs on camels, with floating cloaks, lances, and bucklers, and a host of other natives on small, spirited horses. Though the pageant lasted but a few minutes there was something impressive about it, something barbaric-a blur of heat and colour and the clatter of accoutrements, wrapped in a veil of dust that rose high into the air. The crowd disintegrated and formed again opposite the house, while the great man dismounted and went up the winding steps. Personally, disdaining the flat roof-tops where the other Europeans had assembled, I was dodging frantically in and out of the crowd with a couple of cameras, narrowly escaping being pounded flat under the feet of horses and camels, or being bitten by the latter, trying out my elbows against the elbows of the crowd, suffocated with the dust, the smell of karity, and of hot black flesh. When the Administrator had finally and definitely disappeared from view we all dispersed, crowding for relaxation round the tom-tom, that was still proceeding with unabated fervour. A dozen women were beating little drums and singing in a high, cracked treble. All of them were old, veritable witches, withered and shrivelled. So, too, were the old women who danced as lightly and energetically as young girls, egged on by the cheers and good-natured " ragging " of the crowd. One of the most interesting white personalities of Timbuktu is " Jacouba." Jacouba, who in reality bears a well-known French name, used to be a priest, a Pre Blanc, who worked--and worked wonders-in the French Soudan from his early youth. Early in 19oo he gave up holy orders, established himself in Timbuktu, and married an Arab woman. Despite the emissaries sent him by :r62

ARRIVAL OF THE NEW ADMINISTRATOR, MONSIEUR LEONCE JACQUIER TOUAREG CHIEF, OUTSIDE THE RESIDENCE, TIMBUKTU Face p. 162

BLACK AND WHITE his old companions he refused to return to them, hiding himself, it is said, among the natives of the place when they came to plead with him. Now his official title is Monsieur l'Adjoint des Affaires Indig~nes, and he is director of the medersa. Added to the erudition of the white, he has an experience and understanding of native mentality and customs probably unequalled by any white man, and an entree into their most sacred rites and institutions, and as liaison between the conquerors and their subject races his services are irreplaceable. One of his most recent works is a Sonhrais dictionary. In his private life he lives with his Arab wife, a plump, smiling lady who speaks but a few words of French, and their family of amber-skinned children, next to the building where R~ne Caill6 lodged on his first visit of exploration. His house purely and simply is a native one. His own " den," on the upper story, looking out on to a flat roof, is a veritable warren of books, papers, photos, and all the paraphernalia of a man who has led a busy intellectual life. He has the manners of a courtier, a face where kindliness mingles with intelligence, and the head of a thinker. Visitors sometimes come to Timbuktu, generally interesting ones, for the roads to Timbuktu are not such as to encourage the merely curious or purposeless tourist ! In the rooms below me lodged two gentlemen of the Citroen Mission. The chenilles, as by now everyone knows, are the queer little " caterpillar" cars, with tank-like wheels, designed by Monsieur Andre Citroen, the great French carmaker, who bids fair to make Henry Ford look to his laurels. I had seen two of the creatures early last year at Touggourt, in South Algeria, waiting to make their great trial trip. At that time, I remember, 163

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU great doubt was expressed, especially by other motor-makers and owners, as to their ability to live up to their boast of going "wherever a camel. could go." But they have amply proved themselves, covering a hard road in the space of three weeks, that for centuries it has taken the camel caravans nearly as many months to traverse. To my great regret, I missed the first contingent of them by over a week at Timbuktu, and the last news was that they had retraced their steps on the return journey to Algeria as far as Tameracet. But during my visit three more of them- the original models, so I was given to understandarrived. It was curious to hear them come, in that land of sand where not even a hand-cart goes on wheels, and where the only sound of transport in the streets is the clank of horses' trappings or the soft pad-pad of camels' feet. Ugly, efficient, ultra-modern, they struck one's eyes as something almost unnatural, weirdly anachronistic. They seemed to stand for progress, for ugliness, for utilitarianism. It is curious how it is almost always the ugliness of progress, and never its beauty, that strikes one in the midst of nature. In our civilised countries, where beauty is largely artificial and three parts deliberate, the ugly side of it passes unnoticed by the accustomed eye. In savage countries, where nature and the children of nature achieve, without effort, beauty and a certain dignity, the accoutrements of civilisation stand out stark and inharmonious, almost obscene. Out of their rightful settings a Rolls-Royce, a Paris frock, or even a beautiful woman, can look the most grotesque things on earth! I was surprised to notice that the natives, who most of them had never seen a wheeled vehicle of any kind in their lives, took very little interest in, and showed very little curiosity about, the 164

BLACK AND WHITE " caterpillars." Apparently that vehicles should propel themselves without any visible motivepower does not surprise them. It is just another example of the manieres des blancs, whose every action and appurtenance is incomprehensible, and without apparent reason. The only thing that really puzzles and often frightens them is the aeroplane. Anything on solid ground is to be swallowed in a country where white people have passed, but a thing that comes swiftly through the air, after the manner of nothing human, must assuredly have some unholy connection, some diabolical agency. According to those who know the Sahara, it is not the " caterpillars," or anything on wheels, that will ever have the power in any great degree to open up the Sahara, to revolutionise transport or trade. Though the chenilles have solved the problem of eating up the miles, they also eat up money. The lack of water and petrol supplies, of facilities for reprovisioning, and the cumbersomeness and expense of supplying these deficiencies, make landroutes for the present more bother than they are worth. During the last few years great strides have been made in coping with the various difficulties of aerial transport across the Sahara caused by the intense heat, the prevalence of air-pockets, etc., and I am assured that it is the aeroplane that is going to supersede the great cruel roads of the centuries, to wrest their birthright from the sons of Ishmael, to violate that great, arid virgin, the Sahara, grand sphinx qui nous attire la-bas, as Isabelle Eberhardt has called her, to blot out the old romance of North Africa. 165

CHAPTER XIII THE ROADS TO TIMBUKTU I HAVE said that all roads lead to Timbuktu. That was a slight poetic exaggeration, but certainly four out of the seven great routes of the Sahara do. These roads have existed since the days of the Carthaginians, and longer still, and have been the main channels spreading Moslemism all over Africa. In the Middle Ages the Sahara, broadly speaking, was explored by the Genoese over the western area and by the Venetians on the east. Then all the roads ran, roughly, from north to south, none from east to west. And even now, if you want to cross a portion of the Saharan map sideways you have to make the most amazing d6tours to strike the roads that inevitably seem to run up-and-downways. Short cuts are beyond the Arab's comprehension. Time, great tyrant of civilisation, means nothing to him. When he wants to reach any given point he finds it quite obvious and natural to do double the necessary amount of miles, and to keep to the conservative routes that time, tradition, and the minimum of effort have made for him. Somewhere, some time, those roads would arrive, if Allah willed, and all things are in the hands of Allah. Those old roads were the roads of romance, cruel, unpitiful, insatiable in their greed for the lives of men and beasts. Faintly blazed and burning, they ran through unending desolation, r66

THE ROADS TO TIMBUKTU led into he arms of those twin tyrants of the desert, the sand and the sun, who send hunger and thirst, madness and death, to those who defy them. Those who travelled them travelled painfully, enduring many things, and many of them left their bones in the sand, a little shining pile, picked clean by the vulture and the jackal, a landmark for passing caravans. That is all death means in that land of fatalism, and perhaps, if sufficiently philosophical, one might find some anticipatory consolation in feeling that one's bare bones were going to be of some use to somebody. I remember once seeing a man die in the north-western Sahara. He was a negro, so not very important in the eyes of the brown men whose caravan he followed. We left him, where and as he died, poor exile, his black face seeming to stare blindly up to the heaven that had not helped him. Certainly the ground was chebka, very hard, and covered with small, sharp rocks, and it would have taken a long time to dig a jackal-proof grave, and the little caravan was tired and short of food, and in a hurry to reach its destination. Two minutes after we had left him I looked back. Two vultures had materialised out of the blue, and while I looked one of them swooped. I felt rather sick. " By to-morrow he will make an excellent landmark," said Ahmed, my guide. "We needed one here." I reproached him for his heartlessness, and he replied: "What would you, madame? It is the will of Allah, and to-morrow it might be you or I! I Soon, maybe, the romance of those old roads will be dead; already it is threatened. Sooner or later the French will realise their cherished dream 167

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU of joining up their northern and southern possessions by a trans-Saharan railway. I am told, by the way, that at the moment the scheme is in abeyance. Aeroplanes and Citroen cars have already shown what they can do. When machinery comes in at the window romance flies out at the door, and in a few years it is probable that the old trade-routes will be as banal as the Brighton road. There are four great roads that lead to Timbuktu from the north; roughly speaking, from Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli; besides the water-way west from Senegal, the road by which I had come, the easy road; and those roads to the north have various branches. The north-western road runs to Oulata, and from there one branch of it goes through Mauritania to the coast. This, or part of it, was the route used by the old- time caravans, of which Herodotus speaks, for exchanging gold dust from the south with the civilised merchandise brought in ships by the Carthaginians. From Taoudeni, where the caravans making a detour paused, the road runs north, skirting the dreaded Tanezruft, in the middle of which stands Bel Abbes, which was described to me by a military doctor of the Foreign Legion who had been quartered there as " the place that both God and the Devil had frowned upon." The road runs on through the Touat country, with its several hundred oases, of which the chief and most easterly is Tamentit, that since man can remember has been a great junction for caravans, a little walled and jealously guarded city. Less than four weeks' journey from the great northern and southern kingdoms, it was the point of exchange and rest and reprovisionment for all the central Sahara. Five hundred years ago, in the days of :c68

THE ROADS TO TIMBUKTU her prosperity, it was a great centre of Jews. In fact, the latter race spread throughout the length and breadth of the Sahara, rich and prosperous, making much money as middlemen, and then, as now, disliked by the natives, who, however, could not, and cannot, do without them. One of their writers, Eldad, of the tribe of Dan, whose ancestors were reputed to have emigrated from Palestine after the death of Solomon, boasted that the country of his Emperor, Tloutan Ben Tiklan, stretched for two hundred days of march. A few years later a Moor, Mohammed Ben Abd el Kerim el Maghili, came down and made a holy war against the Israelites, putting to various unpleasant deaths those who would not turn Mahommadan. Though there was not much love lost between them, the Arabs and the Jews made common cause against the Touaregs, or " Philistines," as many called them, believing them to be the descendants of Goliath. Whether the latter fact be true or not, there seems to have been a natural disaffection, as of cat and dog, between the Touaregs and the Semitic races, of which the Arabs are one. From the description of an old writer the Touaregs throughout the ages do not seem to have altered in the least degree. " From Egypt . . . to Morocco," he writes, "from the ocean to the Niger territories, they reign as masters of the Sahara. Of superb race and haughty demeanour, these white men are incomparable horsemen who ride without stirrups. Some of their camels, white in colour, are so rapid that in one day they cover a distance that would take a horseman four days. . . . They are warriors who make war ceaselessly among themselves." Then, as now, they intrigued the world by wearing the litham, or veil. 169

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU From here a fork of the road runs to Morocco, and this was the road that Ren6 Caill6 trod painfully. The main road from Bel Abbes runs on through the Igidi, country of sandhills, and the Gour, where in many places the ground is of a brilliant red clay that, with the sun shining on it, looks as if the world were molten, transparent with the fierceness of some fire burning within. In the midst of this flaming desolation stands McMahon, an important garrison of merharists, and near it stands one of those pathetic monuments that one comes across sometimes in the Sahara. It was erected some thirty years ago to the memory of a little band of men of that tragic Bataillon d'Afrique, last and supreme chance of wild men and bad, who may find in the manner of their dying a glory that life has denied them. Beneath the formal inscription kind hearts have engraved the following verse : Chasseurs, nos compagnons de joie et de soufirance, Sous ce pieux ossuaire d vos manes dressi, Dormez en paix ; la mort pour le drapeau de France Eface d tous les yeux les traces du passi. On the other side is engraved the fine words spoken by General Herve to the Bataillon. "Les bons soldats ne font jamais de mauvais hommes." The road approaches civilisation via the Grande Erg, the country of dunes, through a spur of the great Atlas Mountains. It meets at Colomb Bechar the railroad that leads through Figuig and Ain Sefra to Oran and the big Mediterranean ports. I travelled some little way along that road three years ago, and had experiences quaint, and queer, and even a little horrible. At Ain Sefra, among the dunes, is the lonely tomb of Isabelle Eberhardt, that strange pale Russian girl who, 170

THE ROADS TO TIMBUKTU '71 forsaking the bondage and the ways of white men, and traduced by them, lived her brief life among brown men, leading their life, wearing their dress, loved and respected by them, and drawing from them little prismatic gems of brilliant beauty, that, as one reads them, set the spell of the desert that she so loved upon one. I talked once with a mana grotesquely fat Alsatian commercial travellerwho, in company with one of the greatest French soldiers of our day, helplessly watched her die in the debris of her little house, flooded by the Oued. Another road leads from Timbuktu in a northeasterly direction through desert as arid and Godforsaken as the westerly one ; through the Hoggar, country of ill- repute, old stronghold of the fiercest of the Touaregs. The Hoggar is a big range of black mountains about five hundred kilometres long and two hundred wide. Round it is the region of the Tanezruft, where there is no water, corroded by the sun and desolate, except at the foot of the mountains themselves, where a few wells give birth to some stunted, shrunken oases, cultivated by the Soudanese slaves of the Touaregs. It was in the Tanezruft four years ago that the ill-fated General Laperrine, after a forced landing in the aeroplane that had carried him from Algiers, died after a fortnight's ghastly suffering from thirst and hunger. At Biskra, in company with all the rest of the population, I sat in the sand gazing skywards for many hours waiting to see him as he passed through. It is said that he knew that at last the Sahara was going to claim him, and that his last recorded words in life were: " One believes that one knows the desert. . . .I have crossed the Sahara ten times, and the eleventh time I shall remain." Certainly the Hoggar has earned a name haunting, ill-omened, mysterious, and has probably

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU given rise to more legends and strange stories than any other section of the Sahara-stories of death and violence and greed. Now the veil of its mystery has been rent asunder. White men have ventured in-and come out alive. The Citroens passed through in their trip south. Only a few months ago a gallant Englishman emerged with many feet of successful cinema records and many trophies of beasts and birds. It was just to the north of the Hoggar, in a country known to romanticists as" The Country of Fear," that LieutenantColonel Flatters, in 188o, leaving Ouargala, south of Biskra, with a company of Tirailleurs, was greeted by the Amenokal Ahitagel with the words: " You ask us to open the door to you. We will not open!" A few days later the company, except for one survivor who brought back the story to Ouargala, was cut down and killed. Probably the only white man who has ever been more than a bird of passage in the Hoggar was Pere le Foucault, who lived in a rough hut of stones among the mountains. Charitable, greathearted, fluent in the Targui language, he gained the confidence and esteem of the Touaregs and lived alone with his books and good works. But his influence and bravery frightened the Senussis of the Fezzan, whose chief sent out a band of Adzjer Touaregs, saying: "When the great white marabout is dead the power of the Roumis will be destroyed and we shall remain conquerors." By treachery the Adzjers entered the Hoggar, and, falling upon the holy Father as he stood in the door of his hut, killed him with their long swords. His remains were collected and interred at Tamanracet by General Laperrine himself. It was the mystery of the Hoggar that inspired Pierre de Benoit to write his famous novel, L'Atlantide, based, except for what our trade calls 172

THE ROADS TO TIMBUKTU 173 the " sob-stuff," on a real life-story of the madness of the sun many years ago, and the reports of which can be seen by the curious in Paris to-day. It has always been one of the oldest, the most haunting of the Saharan legends, the legend of the lost Atlantis, the lost continent and the lost ocean, and even to-day some quite serious books are compiled about it, and ingenious theories quite seriously put forward in support. The film of L'Atlantide, which scarcely earned the appreciation it deserved in England, gave a real picture of Saharan verisimilitude that lost nothing by the fact that it was filmed at and near Touggourt, the haunt of tourists, and the Gorges de Chiffa, a couple of hours' comfortable motor run from Algiers ! According to the theories of a historian of last century-Donelly, writing in support of PlatoAtlantis was a large island in the Atlantic Ocean, remnant of an Atlantic continent, and that there man first rose from barbarism to a civilisation that spread to the shores of Mexico, the whole coast of South America, and throughout Europe as far as the Black and the Caspian Seas. It was the true antediluvian world, the Garden of Eden, the Garden of the Hesperides, the Elysian Fields, Olympus, and was a Utopian world where men lived in peace and prosperity. It disappeared in a terrific convulsion of nature, when the ocean shifted its course, leaving the Sahara high and dry, and from the lips of the few survivors who escaped rose the legend of the Deluge, that has survived in almost all lands and religions. According to Plato, the gods, when they divided and allotted the earth among their subjects, gave Atlantis to Poseidon, who had ten sons by one of the primaval women, of whom the eldest was Atlas. Poseidon in Libyan mythology was THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU considered identical with Noah. In all the legends Poseidon is associated with the horse, which supports the theory that Atlantis must originally have been connected by land with America, the first home of the horse. It seems to have been a delectable spot, for, according to Plato, everything desirable " that sacred island lying beneath the sunlight brought forth in infinite abundance,' even, as he adds very humanly, " the pleasant kinds of dessert, which console us after dinner when we are full and tired of eating " I The people of this wonderful isle seemed to be well worthy of it, for " they despised everything but virtue, not caring for their present state of life, and thinking lightly on the possession of gold and other property . . . neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtuous dealing with one another, and that by excessive zeal for them, and honour of them, the good is lost and friendship perishes with them." Unfortunately Plato's account of Atlantis ends abruptly in the middle of a sentence. But, like a dog out walking, chasing rabbits in the bushes, we have forgotten the road. Those who are cautious leave the Hoggar on their right, pausing to rest at In Salah, great resting-place and junction of the central Sahara, and after another ten days' march over stony ground the road reaches El Golea, where the first very faint breath of civilisation blows, with its white koubbas built in honour of the family of the Ouled Sidi Cheik, its big French garrison, and its fine oasis. Here the road forks to the north-east and to the north. On the north-east it reaches Ouargala, home of the dark-skinned Arab of which Leo the African spoke, and reaches railhead at Touggourt, 174

THE ROADS TO TIMBUKTU little sister of Biskra, " Queen of the Zibans," and is lost in a welter of smart hotels, excursions, dud curios, and whining guides. To the north, after ten days' march of chebka, abomination of desolation, that seems as if God had frowned on it and withered it, the road touches Ghardaia, headquarters of the Mozabites, strange, reserved, fanatical tribe, probably of Berber descent, who hate their neighbours, and grow rich and fat, because they do not despise work. In a slight depression on the grey desolation stands Ghardaia, with her little sister towns, of which the chief is Beni Isguen, the Holy City, so holy that no stranger may spend the night within its precincts, and no alcohol may pass its gates. Which sounds very well on paper, but the first time I visited Beni Isguen I was startled by the sounds of wild yelling, the battering of a near-by door, and a flow of bad language that even to my limited knowledge of Arabic was fairly comprehensive. After a searching and rather tactless enquiry I found that these sounds proceeded from a hitherto respected inhabitant of the sacred city, who, crossing the valley to Ghardaia, had looked upon the contents of many bottles, and was now indignant at his detention at the local " quod" as a drunk and disorderly ! I'm afraid I laughed when I heard this, and the Caid, to whom I was speaking at the time, never really forgave me. Another hundred miles or thereabouts and one reaches Laghouat, great meeting- place between north and south, between the Tell and the Sahara. It is noisy with trade, with the arrival and departure of caravans and camions, with popular songs from the lusty throats of young Tirailleurs, and at night with the songs and clanking anklets and little stamping feet of large-eyed Ouled Nail maidens, great- great-granddaughters of one Nail, 175

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU who set his female children and children's children to earning their dowry in the oldest way in the world. Some romanticists pretend to believe that these amber- skinned alm~es and their strange hierarchic dances have come down through the centuries from the Temples of Love in the old Egyptian Garden of Eros. Their headquarters are at Djelfa, to the north, where the road meets the Algiers train, jumping-off place for Bou Saada, overlooking the plain of the Hodna, where a hard-working mirage plies diligently for tourists, and the low hills hold the blue and violet reflections so dear to amateur artists. And in the old days, in all these countries, harassed by the Philistines, were the Jews, pursuing their profession of middlemen in the Saharan trade, and demanding, as the old writers pathetically complained, a hundred per cent. on all their deals. They had their own customs, civilisation, legends, and literature, quite distinct from those of the people they lived among. They were famed as stonemasons, and at many places, notably Sidjilmassa and throughout the Touat, and even along the shores of the Niger, ruined monuments of their workmanship still survive. They were great linguists, speaking all the languages of the Sahara, and many European ones besides. In trade and science and literature they were in close touch with France and Spain, and have left behind them some valuable maps. It was in 1892, after the emigration of the Semitic and Berber races from the north, that the Saharan harmony, once and for all, was destroyed, and the Jewish civilisation crumbled to the dust. Many Jews remain, however, throughout the Sahara. In fact, the only country where I have not seen them is in the M'zab. For the Mozabites, besides hating outsiders of all sorts, have the same 176

THE ROADS TO TIMBUKTU 177 financial flair as the Jew. Wherever, in some little Saharan town, you see a flourishing shop, you will inevitably find that it is owned either by a Mozabite or a Jew, and the Arabs say that a Mozabite can always beat a Jew over a business transaction. Another road runs from Timbuktu, by the east of the Hoggar, to Ghat, just on the borders of the Fezzan, and from Ghat due north to Ghadam~s. Three weeks' march of Ghadames and you are over the frontier, among the mountains of southern Tunisia. It was through this country that in 1896 the young Marquis de Mores, handsome, brave, and rich, travelled with a rose-coloured idea of uniting the Mahommadans of North Africa in a combine against foreign influence, notably ours. But there was treachery in his own camp to support that of the Touaregs, whose country he was in, and at last; after two hours' fighting single- handed under a broiling sun, .blinded by his own blood, he fell, surrounded by the dead bodies of his assailants. Twenty years later, during the war, Colonel le Boeuf, Chef de Cabinet at Tunis, in charge of an expedition against the Touaregs of Tripolitania, who, backed by the Turks and the Germans, were making a last frenzied effort to evict their French conquerors, met his death at about the same spot as the Marquis de Mores, after a successful bombardment by aeroplane of Nalout. Six months later his remains were found, with no clue as to the reason or the manner of the death. There never are any clues in the Sahara. She is a sphinx who keeps her secrets. This is the easiest road by which the adventurer may penetrate the hinterland of Tripolitania; it is simply a case of smuggling oneself across the frontier in an area mercifully free of white officialdom. For the Italians, insecurely up against the most fanatical and powerful of the MT

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU Touareg races, have a very comprehensible objection to itinerant tourists and adventure-seekers, and an annoying habit of preventing one from penetrating beyond the town of Tripoli and its oasis. Anyhow, the road through the Tunisian border country is well worth while-a fortress of square black mountains, desolate, faintly sinister, with queer little troglodytic villages, Douirat, Chenini, Guermessa, Gloumaceren, perched like eagles' nests right on the apex of their summits. Their inhabitants, quite unlike the accepted idea of cavemen, are kindly people, and of their hospitality I have the warmest remembrance, except that they overfed me outrageously, and that their women would undress me six times a day to see if I was the same colour all over. Southern Tunisia is full of the queerest little villages-in the mountain-tops, under the ground, or built in heaped-up tubular formation, like rows of short, thick candles piled on top of one another; little goblin villages inhabited by the friendliest people in the world. The road that used to run to Tunis now loses itself at Gabes, the old Tacape of the Romans, where the ships of many dead civilisations came in to collect the riches of the Niger. It is a picture postcard gem of an oasis, a glory of blue and gold, with a jade-green forest running down to an emerald sea. Opposite it lies Djerba, the original Lotus Isle of Tennyson, where Homer, in his great blindness, lived and sang. It was Gabes that featured in the old, nowabandoned schemes, last of all played with by Lesseps, for letting in the Mediterranean through a cut in the coast and flooding the Sahara as far as Eloued and the big Shotts, with a view to deflecting the Tripolitan caravan trade. The fourth great road from Timbuktu runs north-east, through Agad~s and Bilma, to Moursouk, 178

THE ROADS TO TIMBUKTU 179 and is one of the cruellest of the great roads. Agades, as far as can be ascertained, was built in 146o, and, according to Barth, the first Christian to visit it, was said to have been " once as large as Tunis, situated in the midst of lawless tribes, on the border of the desert and of the fertile tracts of an almost unknown continent, established there from ancient times and protected as a place of rendezvous and commerce between nations of the most different characters, and having the most various wants. It is by mere accident that the town has not attracted as much interest in Europe as her sister town, Timbuktu." So says Barth, who apparently was troubled a good deal by the ladies of Agades, who resented his persistent bachelordom. But as he naively remarks: " It is difficult to find a female companion for such journeys." As an antidote he recommends "the greatest austerity of manners with regard to the other sex," but, whether or not he lived up to his theory, one finds him later complaining that " the ladies became so troublesome that I thought it better to remain at home for a few days." Between Bilma and Moursouk there is little water. Twelve waterless days are not an exception, that, if the going be bad, may be stretched to a fortnight or three weeks. But it is the road by which most of the pilgrims of the south reach Mecca, their holy goal-the poorer pilgrims, who, begging their way, do not fear the dangers and difficulties of it; lean, hawk-faced Moors and Arabs, and swarthy negroes from the Soudan. Along this route that runs north of Moursouk, about fifty-five years ago, travelled Miss Tinne, first of the rapidly-growing band of women explorers, though she does not seem to have had anything like their present-day notoriety. She and her mother, something of anomalies in those

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU Victorian days, roamed throughout the length and breadth of the Sahara, spending two years among the Rek cannibals. After the death of her mother, Miss Tinne, accompanied by a faithful Ethiopian retainer, El Hadj Abdullah, visited Egypt, and made an effort to reach Mecca, but was turned back at Jeddah. After much wandering, the " Roumi Princess," as she was nicknamed, outfitted herself with a caravan of two Europeans, some twenty natives, and thirty-five camels, and started south with the intention of passing through Bornou, with its great lake, Chad, and returning by Cairo. She reached Moursouk in safety, and, strange to relate, made friends with the native Touaregs. Here she discovered a shortage of camels, and sent Abdullah north to purchase some, meaning to wait for him at Barguish, in the Fezzan. But the Touaregs she had engaged as escort plotted with Abdullah's understudy against her, and one morning, hearing a disturbance in the camp, she left her tent, and was treacherously fallen upon by them and killed. This road ends at Tripoli, old Tarabolos Gharb, with its houses and minarets of dazzling white, flanked by what it claims are the finest groves of date-palms in the world, and that in the last century was the jumping-off place for most of the great African explorers. 180

CHAPTER XIV THE TOUAREGS AT Timbuktu, and at one or two other places along the Niger, I had opportunities of learning something of the Touaregs, that curious race of veiled men who roam the Sahara from Tripolitania, in the east, to Mauritania, in the west, who in their fastness of sand have been able partially to hold themselves aloof from the jurisdiction of the French. I did not have the opportunities I could have wished, for my illness prevented me from doing a biggish trip I had contemplated to the north, in the country where their big encampments are. I was obliged to content myself with brief visits to smaller encampments, and with a superficial study of them. In Timbuktu itself, and in one or two of the river towns, one can see a few Touaregs of the humbler class, who have sold their birthright, so to speak, who have become partially tolerant of their neighbours, and who come down to the fringe of the negro country to do trade in cattle and leather. But the genuine article has nothing to do with trade. He is nomad irrevocably, offspring of the sand and the sun, master of immensity, corporal soul of the Sahara. I found him, not to mention his womenfolk, intensely interesting. His personality is an anomaly. He is one of the handsomest creatures

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU alive; his grace and slimness, and his loose, fluttering garments, give him a curious superficial air of effeminacy; his hands are as slender as a woman's, with tapering fingers, his feet are the feet of an aristocrat, and his skin the colour of old amber. But he is as fierce as a tiger and as treacherous, sometimes inconceivably cruel, proud beyond description in his own fashion. Work is beneath him and dishonours him, and the only honourable way of living, to his thinking, is by fighting, pillage, and robbery. He is a prince of liars. He lies consistently and as a matter of course, and feels no shame in being found out. It is said that the only time a Targui's word can be relied on is when he makes the gesture of lifting the right hand three times to his forehead. This is called Timmi. And with all this he is a dreamer and a poet. He loves travelling for its own sake, riding often alone, for many days or weeks, through the endless waste of the desert, aimlessly, just for the love of it, and long will he lie in the shelter of his little red tent, dreaming the hours away. The origin of the Touaregs is a bit of a mystery. Most historians believe them to be descendants of the Berber race, who from the quaternary era occupied western and southern Europe and Asia and later spread over North Africa, and that they sprang from the prehistoric tribes of the CroMagnon. Probably they are a cross of the Libyans, themselves descendants of the CroMagnons, and the Garamantes, now inhabitants of the Fezzan, and of the Getulas of the Anti Atlas. A. pretty legend has tried to make them out descendants of the old White Crusaders, from the fact that the hilts of their swords and lances and the peaks of their saddles are always in the form of a cross, But the cross is not necessarily 182

TOUAREGS AT TIMBUKTU GIRLS WASHING CLOTHES IN THE NIGER Face p. 182

THE TOUAREGS an emblem of Christianity. It was used as an ornament by the Greeks and Phoenicians and Chinese, and is found in Egyptian hieroglyphics in the hands of kings, and in Assyrian writing, and engraved on the breasts of idols. Their name of Touareg (singular, Targui) given them by the Arabs is said to be derived from Tarek, meaning " Abandoned by God," from their repeated retrogressions from the Mahommadan faith; others say it comes from Tharague, meaning " Those who assail by night," and which faithfully describes their character! The original Berbers were hunted and harried by the Arabs, who eventually succeeded in imposing on them the Mahommadan faith, with the exception of the Touaregs, who retained, besides their religion, their own writing, which something resembles the old Libyan alphabet. In the early days of the Hegira, Sidi Okba, Companion of the Prophet, famous warrior-saint of North Africa, penetrated the Sahara as far as Adrar, where the richest and most influential of the Touaregs had their territory, and waged a Homeric warfare against Koceilah and Kahena (a Touareg chieftainess), whose exploits are still a proud legend all over the mid-Sahara. Eventually Sidi Okba proved victorious, and imposed Mahommadanism upon them, which in after years they abjured as many as fourteen times. Koceilah revenged himself by repeated massacres and untiring persecution, and finally succeeded in killing Sidi Okba, whose bones were interred a few miles from Biskra, and are a great attraction to tourists and a source of wealth to ubiquitous guides and motor agencies. The Touaregs have always been a blight upon the prosperity of Timbuktu, with their disorderliness and unreasonable extortion. Their subjection to the French will help the Sonhrais to 183

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU regain something of the industry and energy that once made them such a power. As I have said, the Targui is a born nomad, loving travelling for its own sake, especially by night. He uses, or used to use, no firearms, but carries a long lance, steel for the noble and wood for the imrad, a buckler of antelope skin, and a sword with the hilt in the form of a cross, attached by a leather band to his arm. His religion is a tepid affair. He rarely troubles to keep the fast of Ramadan, though he enforces it upon his vassals and slaves. He acknowledges as prophets, besides Mahommad, Ibrahim (Abraham), Moussa (Moses), and Zebreire (Jesus Christ). Even when camping by the Niger, instead of water he uses sand for his ablutions, though this is only permitted by the Koran when water is not attainable. He built no mosques and does not make the pilgrimage to Mecca. All this contradicts the term " fanatic," which has always been applied to the Targui. He is only fanatic in that he hates the Christians, not as Christians, but as conquerors. He hopes one day to regain his freedom and the supremacy of the Sahara. He will say that he has only been beaten once by force of arms, and not definitely. He shares the general belief of the West African native that the French supremacy will be as ephemeral as those of the Mossis, the Bambaras, the Sonhrais, the Moors, and the Peuhls. This opinion was also held by the German explorer, Barth. The Touaregs are divided into three grades, the nobles, the imrads or vassals, and the ekillan, who are slaves and the descendants of slaves. The nobles are exclusively warriors, and are very proud, they live by razzias (raids) and robbery. The title of noble can only be lost by defeat in 184

THE TOUAREGS battle. The chief of either noble or imrad is the Amenokal, and is chosen by public and tribal assembly. The institution is the family, and each member of a family is responsible for the acts of the others. The latter custom is a necessity in a race whose hands are against every man's, and every man's hand against them. The grade of imrad occupies much the same rank as the serf of our own Middle Ages. Or perhaps serf is too strong a word. They are not slaves. They cannot be bought or sold, and they are free to marry whom they please. But they owe service to the nobles, and in turn receive their protection, and are more or less dependent on them. They have to pay a tribute, called tiousse. They accompany their patrons on razzias, and receive a share in the booty, varying in percentage according to tribe. It is a point of honour with the nobles to protect, and to avenge insults done to those who pay them tribute. No one quite knows what makes the inferiority of the imrad, for apparently he comes from the same stock. Whether or not it is the result of many generations of partial servitude, certain it is that an imrad is unmistakably an imrad. He is less handsome, less proud and free in his bearing, though often as well dressed, and less unmistakably a great gentleman. The slaves of both the nobles and the imrads are black, and in this part of the world generally Sonhrais. But slavery in this case has little of the unpleasant significance it has for us. These slaves, or captives, are well treated and cared for, less, perhaps, from a superabundance of philanthropy than because they are objects of value and a source of wealth. They do all the work of their masters, but have no feeling of inferiority. "To work for a master or for a living," they say, 185

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU " what is the difference ? What is liberty ? Does not everything we do depend upon the will of Allah? The right to go hither and thither is less important than the fact that we are provided for and protected by our masters." The nobles have the droit du seigneur over their women, and the admixture, it is said, produces brave men and beautiful women. These negroes and negresses become much attached to their masters, and will often voluntarily risk their lives for them in warfare. Sometimes a slave will become the confidant of his master, and sometimes he is set free. There exists a curious custom among the Touaregs of the north. If a slave is unhappy with his master, and wishes to take service with another, he goes to the tent of the other and ham-strings one of his camels, or wounds a horse, or in some way does damage to the property of the man whose slave he wishes to be. In compensation for the damage done he is given to the aggrieved person. The razzia is the joy, almost the sole objective, of the Targui's life, or, rather, I should say, was, for the repressive influence of the French hems him in on all sides, and there is but a comparatively small area left in which he has any chance of pursuing his favourite sport. Left to himself, he would razzia incessantly, not so much for the sake of spoil, but for the sheer fun of it. Even the Touaregs' recreations among themselves are warlike-lance throwing and mock fighting with swords and bucklers. Apart from this, they love the parties given by their women friends in the soft atmosphere of feminine singing and hamzad playing. The language of the Touaregs, Tifinar, is a species of Arabic, or, rather, it has much the same sound, but the alphabet is somewhat different and 186

THE TOUAREGS the writing is entirely so, rather resembling the old Libyan characters. It has no graceful curves like Arabic, but is all straight lines, squares, and triangles. The following proverb is an example: + I O V ll:I Il. U I 1:.0o+ :o. 111 I JE-: + Ire idjem chelloum der' irrinnit Atiekf yalla ar hast irkeben, (which means, " To him who places a cord round his neck, God gives someone to pull it "). And again: I :v+o: I I v iV+:+ Yakat dedjeddit our tidasen, "Noise and hunting do not go together." All over the Touareg regions can be found, so I am told, drawings of men and animals scratched on rocks, with inscriptions of which no one knows the origin, and that the Touaregs themselves cannot read, as they have little or no resemblance to modem Tifinar. The drawings, to judge by the reproductions of them, resemble those I have seen in southern Algeria that no one can date or place. It is amazing how little is definitely known of north and north-central Africa before the invasion of the Arabs and the Romans. Assuredly Africa, who for so long has been the goal of many men's desire, has cunningly clung to her reputation for " darkness." And with all this the Targui is completely henpecked by his wife! The Touareg women are nearly always good-looking, and nearly almost as often very dirty, for, from preference as well 187

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU as necessity, their most intimate ablutions are made with sand. The Targui woman is a supreme feminist, and her position would promote green envy in the heart of the most pronounced suffragette, the most "modem " woman in England. She has a voice in all public and family conclaves, and she is completely mistress of the tent and her children. Everything she may elect to do is considered good and reasonable. She, unlike Arab women, has the power to dissolve a marriage, and if she is discovered in infidelity the most her husband does is to remonstrate with her, and he may not retaliate on her lover. At meals she eats first, and after her the men and children. She will never dream of remaining with a husband whom she does not love, and, like many of her civilised sisters, she prefers to the warrior a carpet-knight, a man who is handsome and smoothspoken, and skilled in paying compliments and little attentions! No man of her race is allowed by social tradition to make a misalliance, though he has many light loves, but she will often marry a man of inferior rank, or even a freed slave, and retain her own rank and position. She is the centre of Touareg social life. If she is young and attractive she will hold salons, much after the manner of great ladies of old, in her tent, while she plays the hamzad (a kind of one-stringed mandoline), dabbles in politics, is catty about the other women, and flirts with her numerous admirers. Men are freely admitted to these parties, and, whatever jealousies the fair hostess may excite, it is considered the worst of bad form to quarrel in her presence. The moral standard of the Touaregs is not high. Few girls are pure when they marry, nor is it expected of them. If an unmarried girl gives 188

THE TOUAREGS birth to a child she is not dishonoured, but a husband is found for her, who takes her without dowry. Should a married woman, as sometimes happens, give birth to a black child, proving that it is not that of her husband, but probably of some slave, her virtue is not impugned, and the misfortune is ascribed to the machinations of a sorcerer! The Touaregs are monogamous, and there are rarely enough husbands to go round, but with their broad views on life and love the fact does not trouble the enforced old maids! I have said that the Targui woman is handsome. I should have said that from a European standard the middle class ones are, with straight features and delicate limbs. But among the upper classes plumpness amounting to grotesqueness is the quality of beauty prized above all others. The daughters of the nobles from the age of seven or eight are subjected to a fattening process almost cruel in its severity. They are rubbed with oil, and forcibly fed with milk and all kinds of farinaceous food, are permitted to take no exercise, and, in addition, they are rolled in the sand every day to eradicate any possible hollows or angles. Sometimes they cry and beg to be let off, but in vain, for the fatter they are the more they are sought in marriage, and by the time they reach maturity are simply mountains of fat, and cannot move without the assistance of slaves. These opulent beauties are considered by their menfolk to be objects of envy to everyone, and are jealously hidden from the eyes of white men. Blue eyes are occasionally to be seen, and are considered a sign of beauty. My first visit to one of their encampments was at the invitation of a chief friendly to French civilisation. It lay in a large clearing in la brousse, 189

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU dry, greyish scrub that, on a wide rolling plateau, stretched as far as eye could see. There were between twenty and thirty tents, made of little pieces of leather sewn together, comparatively small, for the community was on the march. Most of the tents were divided into two portions, one for the men, the other for the women, and on the ground outside were spread mats. In a circle, sitting on their haunches, were half a dozen men, immobile, staring into space, looking in their takarkast- long draperies so deeply blue as to appear black-like lowering birds of prey. All of them were veiled up to the bridge of the nose, giving them an air of aloofness, of mystery. No one quite knows the origin of the veil, or litham. Probably originated as a protection against the dry, stiffing air of the desert, it has become a superstition, almost a point of modesty, with them never to remove it. Even during courtship it is not removed, so it is said, and should a Targui maiden wish to embrace her lover, he may only lower it a few inches, so as to permit her to kiss his nose ! The chief received me gravely and courteously, and after elaborate salutations and politely formal conversation he led me to the tent where his wife and sister and sister-in-law squatted round a low fire of embers. The young women were rather pretty in a fat way, richly dressed, and covered with rings and bracelets of silver and horn and many amulets, though both their persons and their clothing would have been the better for a good tubbing. The older one, a veritable old witch, looked about seventy, though I learnt in the course of conversation that she was only fifty. After a few minutes' shy and rather sticky silence and constraint, while they eyed me furtively and brewed me some sickly-sweet Igo

THE TOUAREGS '9' tea, their questions poured out so quickly that I had scarcely time to answer them. Was I married? How old was I? Did a man in England have more than one wife ? Did my husband beat me, as did the husbands of the negresses ? Did we have divorce? They made favourable comparisons between the English and the Touaregs when I told them that we, too, were monogamous and not addicted to wife-beating, but they evidently thought it scandalous that in a civilised country a man should be able to divorce his wife, and that on such a triffing ground as unfaithfulness. But, that being so, they were surprised that, having been married nearly seven years, I had not yet been divorced ! Though, as the old lady remarked, rather cattily, I thought: "When a man goes forth to fight, little can he know what passes in the tent! " The little wife wanted to know if my husband was a great man. " Very great, though not so great as yours," I answered tactfully. " When he speaks, his words are carried by road and air throughout the breadth of our land and far beyond the seas." I thought that rather a neat way of describing a fellow- scribbler, and evidently it impressed them. In answer to another question, I said that to the best of my belief my husband loved me. " But," broke in the old crone, who seemed to have a spiteful outlook on life, " he cannot be very rich or you would not be so thin." " What has that got to do with it ? " I asked. "Were he rich, and did he have great regard for you, he would instruct his servants to feed you with rich milk and fattening pastes, and to rub you with oil, so that you should be fat and good to look upon."

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU " But in England men admire thin women," I protested, lying simply to preserve a fragment of my self-respect, but evidently they did not believe me. As I grew to know these ladies better I learnt something of their superstitious and morbid horror of death, and sorcerers, and djins of all sorts. They laughed at me once because I showed symptoms of " wind-up" in the middle of a bunch of stampeding horses, and would scarcely speak to me for a whole day because I admitted to having inspected a newly-made grave, for they consider death to be unnatural, a phenomenon due to the machinations of a sorcerer, and after the funeral feast camp is always raised, and the community shifts to some less ill- omened spot and the name of the deceased is never mentioned. But every imaginable kind of ill is due to an evil spirit. One old gentleman whom I had been fortunate enough to cure of a headache (by the administration of a couple of aspirins, I have to admit, and not by magical powers) gratefully presented me with an amulet in which he had sewn up a powerful gri-gri, which he assured me would keep evil spirits from hampering my travels. On no account, he said, must I open it, or the spell would be lost, and I have obeyed him, though I suspect the gri-gri to be but a bit of giraffe skin, or possibly a leopard's claw, or a twig off a sacred tree. I had always been told that, in spite of their physical courage, the Touaregs were the most superstitious people in the world, but however communicative the women might become in other respects, especially on purely personal feminine matters, I could abstract but little information on the subject of their superstitions. However tactfully I set about it, I was met with the 192

THE TOUAREGS '93 non-responsiveness of a stone wall. Whether it was because they really thought it unlucky to talk about the powers of evil, or because they suspected the motives or intentions of an unbeliever, I never made out, but it was quite obvious that they had a very real belief in, and terror of, spooks of every kind. I have mentioned that they have a horror of death as an unnatural phenomenon, and a calamity not to be mentioned. There is a story of how a white man fell in with a wandering band of Touaregs. In the course of the evening meal he asked after an old friend of his who had married into their tribe, and was surprised at being answered by a stony silence, and an air of embarrassment and constraint. He persisted in his enquiries till he noticed one of the young chiefs, a mere lad, weeping silently and bitterly. On asking the reason he learnt that his friend, the young man's father, had died some years previously, and that the lad was weeping with rage at the insult, and with regret that for fear of the French he could not kill the man who had proffered it. After death each corpse is sewn up in sacks of new white cloth, that is supposed to have the power of keeping off djins, and two stones of polished granatoid, often brought from afar off, are placed at either end of the roughly made grave to frighten off the hyenas. Djins, it would appear, exist everywhere-under the earth, in isolated mountains, inside the tents themselves, and every natural accident is ascribed to them. The Touaregs, after eating, have adopted the Arab phrase of Bissimillahi (" In the name of Allah ") to neutralise the machinations of any djins that might be within hearing. Djins even infest the caravan routes, especially those to the north, in Tripolitania, in the regions NT

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU of Ghat and Ghadames. Many years ago, on the Idinen road, the German, Barth, was abandoned by all his guides, who feared the djins of the neighbourhood, and, to prevent himself dying of hunger and thirst and weakness, was obliged to open a vein and drink his own blood to give him sufficient strength to proceed on his way. Sometimes a djin will fall in love with a human woman, and may have connection with her during sleep, begetting children that will inherit their father's supernatural powers. In one encampment I was pointed out a young woman-a gentle, unhappy looking creature-who was reputed to have an elfin lover. This woman's husband was very ill-it looked to me like a bad case of consumption-and his illness was supposed to be the result of his wife's dark sin. For husbands in these cases, apparently, always waste away and die, and the woman, having tasted elfin kisses, is repelled by human love. This wretched girl was shunned by her family and the whole tribe, and, though the Touaregs are generally kind and generous to their own folk, had to work herself to the bone to provide food for herself and her family. Also she had to walk very many kilometres a day to fetch water, as she was not allowed to use the communal well for fear she might cast the Evil Eye upon it. The akiriko, or sorcerer, is the one human being of whom the Touaregs are afraid. In private life he is generally what the French call a forgeron, though that is scarcely the right term. He is more jeweller than blacksmith, skilled in swordmaking and armoury, and in the fabrication of rough jewellery. Sometimes he is supposed to be of alien race, possibly descendant of a prehistoric people indigenous to Africa. He is the natural enemy of the marabout, and even more powerful. :194

THE TOUAREGS '95 I only ever met one Touareg sorcerer, and he struck me as a highly intelligent man, and the only Targui who, to my knowledge, had done a day's honest work in his life. The rest of the community regarded him with a mingling of hatred and awe. He was quite indifferent, and played on their credulity, making good-luck charms and love philtres, which he sold at high prices. But a sorcerer is said to have the power of drinking the blood of a man, and that without physical contact, but by a kind of will power, so that the victim eventually pines away and dies. He can be detected by his habit of licking his lips when in the presence of men and animals. The Touaregs have a superstition against eating eggs or chickens, and rarely will you find either in their villages. They will not eat the flesh of an animal that has not been killed with religious ritual. For washing purposes they prefer, as I have said, sand in preference to water, believing that the use of the latter gives rise to skin diseases. Also they dislike the dye of their blue garments to be effaced from their skins, believing it to be good for the health. They have a rough idea of medicine, and employ a primitive kind of vaccination. They consider that the most fortunate days on which to start a journey or undertake any kind of enterprise are Friday, after the " Salaam," and Saturday morning, and Monday, and the unlucky days are Sunday and Wednesday. To show how all of us translate the incomprehensible to our own standard of thought, they describe an eclipse of the sun as " the sun making a razzia on the moon! " All these superstitions are probably a survival of their old religion, whatever it may have been, before they were converted to Mahommadanism, for in the pre- Islamic days the Arabs themselves

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU venerated all sorts of djins and demons, and each tribe had its familiar spirit, represented by some inanimate object, such as a rock or a tree, to which all the members of the tribe did honour. The two principal camping-grounds of the Touaregs, in the region of the Niger, are in the Haoussa and the Gourma countries. Apart from pillage, their wealth lies in horses, sheep, and cattle. I was in the encampment one evening when the whole community had forgathered to welcome a chief who had come back from a long journey. Some of the warriors had gone on in advance; the rest were waiting till the cavalcade should appear on the horizon. They made a magnificent sight, in full war kit, veiled and shrouded, and the wind blew their long burnous behind them like banners. The day was lowering and clouded, for a tornado was blowing up, but fitful gleams of sunlight glinted off their long, slim lances and red-scabbarded swords and the embroideries of their huge bucklers of antelope skin. They were mounted on slim, nervous black horses, that, though quivering with the suppressed excitement that pervaded the whole camp, they forced to stand like rocks. In the background squatted a group of shrivelled old women playing feverishly on small musical instruments. Suddenly a murmur rose through the camp. Afar off on the horizon was a tiny cloud of dust. As if at a signal, the waiting group swept forward in a whirlwind of floating draperies and clatter of accoutrements. The cloud on the horizon approached, grew bigger, and mingled with the cloud of the men who rushed to meet it. Nearer and nearer came the big cavalcade, and fierce shouts came down on the wind: " Hia / Hial Hia! Hia !" z96

THE TOUAREGS 197 Behind me the shrill screaming and the music and the voices of the old women rose to a shrill crescendo. In a few minutes the cavalcade swept by, and came to halt before the biggest of the tents. The air was thick with dust and electricity and fierce joy. There was a barbaric thrill about it that gripped one's heart. One wanted, too, to shout, to dig spurs into one's horse, to stampede. I had to ride swiftly home. The tornado that had been blowing up all day was nearly upon us. The going was bad, it was almost dark, and only the sagacity of my wise old troop horse saved me from a variety of nasty tosses. A hot wind from the east teased one's nerves, and the sand stung one's face mercilessly. I was reminded forcibly of that most uncomfortable motor-drive in Mauritania. This time also my guide was frightened, not of anything obvious, but of the djins that he was convinced were fluttering around us. In spite of my discomfort I could not resist turning my head to where the camp still showed behind rocks, through whose fissures the wind shrieked like a tortured soul. A bright flash of lightning showed me a distorted world of livid green. I caught a brief glimpse of much confusion, of hustling camels and closing of tents, of a scurry to rescue cherished possessions. But still a crowd gathered round the tent of the chief, and the lightning glanced off lance and sword and buckler. And it seemed as if the wind still bore down to me the savage cry of" Hia ! Hia ! Hia ! Hia !" Truly children of the storm are the Touaregs, born of the violence of the sun and the sand, queer anomalies in our modern unpicturesque world, vassals of romance, masters of desolation.

CHAPTER XV TURNING BACK I DID the return journey in a chaland. I had spent a fortnight at Timbuktu, more or less invalide, and should have liked to remain longer and to do all the things I perforce had left undone. But it was getting late in the season, and the weather would soon be unbearably hot. There was no overland route, and already there was very little water left in the river higher up. As it was, I had been obliged to miss the last convoy of the year, and all sensible folk up-country who could had gone back to civilisation days or weeks ago. Anyway, what the French of la brousse thought of a woman wandering about in such ungenial country for no visible or reasonable purpose they were much too polite to say, but I imagine it to be a replica of what had already been poured into my unwilling ears on the coast! Before departing I got rid of Saghair. Life in his home town and five weeks of gentle feminine persuasion had completely demoralised him, and he seemed to imagine that he was being overfed and overpaid merely to stroll about the Timbuktu haunts of fashion in the cast-off clothing of former employers, looking the most grotesque caricature of a human being imaginable. It was with a queer regret that I turned west. I had come out on purpose to see Timbuktu. In the days when I had stood on the northern fringes of the Sahara, looking south, Timbuktu had

TURNING BACK 199 represented to me my goal, the end of the road that for three years had tempted me, that had called, sometimes loudly, imperiously, in the triumphant glare of the sun, with the sand of its trail stinging my feet; sometimes gently, insidiously, subconsciously, yet none the less insistently, in incongruous places - in a Paris theatre, in a London ballroom, in the midst of work and of play. It had seemed to me then that the road ended at Timbuktu, that, having reached it, I should be satisfied, that the call of it would be stilled, and that my feet would gladly rest awhile. And now, in spite of obstacles and much discouragement, I had realised my dream, had gratified my pig-headedness. And yet as, under a. grilling sun, in ten feet by five, piled up with packing-cases, I hammered in nails and effected miracles of space economy, there was a queer ache at my heart. For it seemed to me that I had not attained the road's end; that I had but reached a halting-place, a junction where the road forks east and south; that I was turning my back on it, was turning renegade; that still it ran on, triumphantly, clearly, tempting me, beckoning, through the fever-laden rivers of the south, through dark forests, where even the fierce sun of the Equator can scarcely penetrate, where strange people live, over rocks and mountains, through thick, lush vegetation, where the air hangs heavy as a miasma, into the heart of the great Dark Continent, to the nethermost fringe of the Never-Never Land. I felt that farthermuch farther, maybe, or perhaps only round the next bend of it-something still waited for me; something that might be destiny, or merely the lure of the unattainable, laughed at my weakness and indecision, wanted me to live for it, or to die for it; that, even out of sight, promised me

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU things that as yet I did not understand-things beautiful, or fierce, or tragic, things utterly impossible that I did not even know how to sigh for. It is a strange thing, the call of a road, almost a frightening thing. It has a power known only to the nomad, whether he be a natural son of the desert or the mountain, or a clerk on an office stool who blots his pen on his hair as he listens to its voice. It has the power to make an otherwise decent human being do unaccountable things; it is stronger than love, or duty, or tradition, or civilised instincts. Some men in our civilised countries never know they have heard it, never recognise it, and wonder why they are unhappy or restless, why they are failures, or why they beat their wives, or drink, or go to prison. Or they may become philosophers, or dreamers, or poets; then they are lucky. And sometimes a man may hate the road, and attempt to flee it, but if ever he has travelled along but a short way of it he must return. Most men travel for what they are going to gain or enjoy at a given point. It may be the North Pole, or a gold-mine, or a colony, or a forlorn hope, a just cause, a wrong to right; without a precise objective there may be a tangible reward-a column in Who's Who, the ribbon of a society, photographs in the daily papers, or a name to hand down to posterity. In all these there is something tangible, logical, or even splendid. But the call of the road is none of these. It sounds only in the hearts of those who belong to the road, and some men have no home but the road, and for them the road never ends. Sometimes when I have been obliged to turn my back on a road which for weeks or months I have been travelling it has given me a queer 200

TURNING BACK physical pain. Sometimes it has seemed as if the effort were too great for me, that my feet must go travelling on. At such times I have felt that some day, perhaps, I shall not turn back, that the great Dark Gods will be too strong for me, strong enough to beat down civilised instincts, and that I shall go forward, forgetting all things, and shp over the edge of the horizon. By degrees life on the chaland settled itself down to some sort of routine. The first day it represented unadulterated Hades, the second day squalid discomfort, the third day, creatures of habit that we are, it began to seem possible, and by slow stages to seem almost comfortable, almost home-like. The chaland was about the size of a small fishing-boat, the sort of boat that people catch lobsters and codlings from, flat-bottomed and made of iron. About ten feet long of it was mine to eat, sleep, and lve in; in the rest of it, partially screened off by a thin grass mat, the ten black laptots slept, curled up in a mass lke a ltter of puppies. My portion was covered with a homemade contrivance of sticks and bamboo poles and grass mats tied with string, and surmounted with a bit of canvas. This made the ceiling, the dressing-table, wardrobe, and chest of drawers, for the only place to stow clothes or toilet requisites was in the interstices of the mats and the supporting sticks. As time went on it slipped lower and lower. On the first day I could just stand upright in the middle; by the second I was obliged to go about doubled up like an animal in its lair; and soon I began to wonder if I should have to go on all fours. At all times one bumped one's head and every part of one's body most horribly, and only the sun helmet, which even "indoors" one had to wear from sunrise to sunset 201'

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU for fear of chance rays of sun, prevented one from being brained or knocked insensible whenever the craft bumped, which was often. The square yard of deck fore was the communal kitchen for the twelve of us. It held the big wooden mortar in which the men pounded their millet, and a couple of wood fires on tiny native braziers, that sent dense clouds of smoke eddying under the canvas. However, that smoke, though it suffocated one, also partially suffocated the smells proceeding from a variety of food-stuffs, generally the strangelooking " insides" of sheep and chickens that lay about in all their naked hideousness. From the deck to the interior was a drop of about four feet, that Brahima, Saghair's successor, had a genius for falling down, leaving bits of skin on the way, and reducing the vegetables heaped beneath to pulp. It was like a jigsaw puzzle fitting in bed and mosquito-net, luggage and cases of provisions, and preventing them all from getting mixed up with each other. No native "boy," however good, can be relied on to take the smallest interest in questions of cleanliness or hygiene, and one of my lighter duties consisted of chasing all sorts of weirdly shaped, many-footed beasties from the larder, and deciding what eggs, green food, and so on were not too rotten to eat. Through the kindness of friends in Timbuktu vegetables were not lacking this trip, and for the first few days my life was a nightmare of cabbages. There seemed to be nothing but cabbages in the world -in my bed, in my washing utensils, among my clothing, in my dreams. And then one day, as a treat, Brahima opened a tin of treacle, and that was worse than the cabbages. Never in my life did I realise how all-pervasive a small tin of treacle can be, how often it can upset, what a 202

TURNING BACK mess it can make, and what a variety of things and places it can get into. At last, in desperation, in company with a collection of mouldering cabbages, it had to go into that great waste-paper basket, the Niger. The laptots propelled the chaland by means of long poles, in relays of four at a time, walking up and down the narrow six inches of the sides of the boat, that were polished and slippery with the constant friction of their bare feet. The constant tramping, day and night, up and down, within a few inches of one's head, combined with the incessant pounding of their beastly millet, made sleep a thing almost impossible to achieve. When there was a breath of wind from behind they hoisted a ramshackle sail, made, as a spectator once observed, of "holes sewn together," or, more strictly speaking, of a patchwork of arachide sacks. When there was no wind, and for some reason poling was difficult, they lined up in a long string on the shore and towed the chaland at the end of a rope. Progress was not rapid. When conditions were good, which was not often, we did about two and a quarter miles an hour; often it was considerably less. The laptots, on the whole, were quite good fellows, though inclined to be lazy. They had looked forward to rather a soft time, and were disappointed at being kept up to " business as usual." With the increasing heat and decreasing water it was rather essential to travel as quickly as possible, unless I wanted to be permanently stuck on a sandbank till the next rainy season, or do the remaining few hundred miles on foot. Ten laptots, besides my boy, was a generous double equippe, and. it had been agreed that we travelled night and day. But every night about ten o'clock, backed by their patron, a coal black 203

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU but autocratic gentleman with all the attributes of a cross baboon, they made a determined effort to moor by the bank, and every night the same excuses were put forward-that there was no moon, or no wind, or that the going was especially bad and rocky. And every night, I am proud to say, they were worsted. I would rather not say by what methods, and I hate to think of the language I used, in every tongue of which I knew even a few words. Bribery was always a last resource. "A sheep or a couple of kolas apiece if you reach X by sundown"; and it was astounding how we doubled our mileage, and later, full of mutton and good heart, how they worked, stamping and shouting as if they really liked it. It was equally amazing how much they could eat at a sitting. An outsize sheep would disappear like an ice cream, and thereafter for many days its skin would tan itself on the roof of the chaland, smelling most evilly. Buying a sheep was always a great affair. As one's intention thereof spread abroad at a village, every sheep within a hundred miles appeared as if by magic at an exorbitant price. I remember once, at Mopti, sitting in the little club-house, talking on matters of State with the leading dignitaries, being aroused by a terrific din in the street outside. I put my head out of the window, remembering my order for "one small sheep at not more than eight francs." Here was a flock, baa-ing and bleating-twenty at least of them. Next to sheep, kola was the most efficient form of bribery. Kola is the wee, small vice of the country, and one that I fell into with moderation in a few days, after I had spat out the first mouthful in disgust. Though it is about as nasty as can well be imagined, it has the effect-rather milder, 204

TURNING BACK but more enduring-of a cocktail. When deprived of it, some negroes with the physique of a prizefighter and the nerves, one would have said, of a tortoise get as irritable, depressed, and " all-topieces" as a dope-taker. They are the well-todo who can afford twenty or thirty a day. But in a country where, more often than not, one is overtired, hungry, thirsty, and " done," where cigarettes parch one's throat, and alcohol, even in thimblefuls, does not seem to go down the right way, one kola, or even half a one, seems to make the world a better place. Talking of sheep reminds me that negroes are generally kind to animals, in refreshing contrast to the Arabs and Moors of the north, who do not seem to understand why they should not flog an exhausted horse, and whose mules, should one look under the saddle, give one a sick heart. And the afiimals of the negroes, like those of all natives, have a docility and domesticity unknown to European animals. I have often wondered how it was done. I suppose it is that the creatures, through generations of heredity, have grown up with the family and become a part of it. The only creatures that no native has any consideration for are chickens, but after a preliminary squeamishness I really have come to the conclusion that chickens are not sensitive or fussy, and that they are perfectly happy tied by the legs in twos and threes, dangling head downwards from a stick or the peak of a saddle. I have sometimes been obliged to keep chickens under my bed, and in the interests of cleanliness have kept them tied up. They will lie placidly and comfortably on their sides, snatching at any unwary insect that may stray within their reach, and even occasionally, in what must be a very inconvenient attitude, will lay an egg. And in the home circle, in a :205

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU country where life and death is everybody's gamble, they have a finely adventurous life. I am convinced they know that they are eventually destined forthe cooking-pot, and take a certain sporting interest evading Nasib, their fate, as long as possible. Certainly they are as agile as goats and wilier than any old dog fox. I have often been obliged in a negro village to buy a stringy chicken I didn't want because the one I had had my housewifely eye on, after half an hour's stalking defied with diabolic cunning the efforts of myself and the entire family to bag him. While they worked the laptots sang, long, tuneless chants that seemed to have no beginning or ending-or meaning, as far as I was concernedthough from the frequent repetition of the word moussou they seemed to be largely about women. Sometimes, if the singer was a stranger to the district, his chant would be an improvisation extolling the beauties of his own country, village, and people. "I come from - , where the fish are more plentiful than anywhere in the Djoliba. Oh, yes, the fish are plentiful. When our young men assemble on the feast-day there is none in all the country round that can compare with them. Men tremble before their bravery and their daring, and the beauty of Fatimata is greater than that of all maidens. I come from - , where the fish are plentiful, the greatest village of the Macina. It is many days since I left my home, and I would see it again. Now I am a stranger in strange parts. There is none to compare with _." And so on. Almost all the negro songs I heard were to the same effect-panegyrics about the singer's native town or home, and a repeatedly expressed wish to be or to return there. Accustomed to the brown man's songs of amorous or martial 2o6

TURNING BACK adventures, they intrigued me, till I saw in them the fundamental basis of the negro character. He is not at heart a man of war; his emotions are not sufficiently complicated to have made of love a thing worth making songs about. He has no enquiring tourist spirit. His home and all it stands for is good enough for him. The primary instinct of his heart-songs has followed on even into ragtime, when it is expressed by a drummer at a Mayfair dance, who, accompanied by a bottle of champagne and a saxophone, yells his homesickness for his " coal black mammy " or his home in " Alabam." With pathos and poignancy it has survived generations of exile, and is the salient note of the old negro songs of the Southern States of America-the old songs of the slave days, the " Sorrow Songs." Sometimes, when for some reason we had moored for the night, or when, with the sail up, the chaland slipped along of her own accord, they crowded round the tiny fire on the poop over the remnants of supper, and told each other stories. One of them seemed to be an excellent raconteur, and kept them in fits of loud, babyish laughter. Another, it appeared, specialised in ghost-stories. Story-telling is about the only intellectual recreation of negroes. Round the embers of a fire at a street corner, or in the courtyard of a little mud dwelling, one can see them crouching for hours after dark listening with bated breath. The stories are generally interminably long-winded and full of repetition. Their favourites are "spook " stories of all kinds, relating to djins, and poris, and guineas, and all manner of fabulous beasts, and sometimes they are very improper! Adventure-stories run a close second, especially among the northern negroes-tales of kings and chiefs, of rape, and capture, and derring-do. 207

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU Negroes seem to be equally superstitious whether they are Mahommadans or fetishists, and the details of their superstitions seem to be much the same. But, then, there is not the dividing-line between Mahommadanism and paganism that one might imagine, or, rather, in the practical effects of them. For the former has undergone much modification among its black proselytes, and the Koranic law is not very closely followed, not being especially adapted to the country and its people, and the fetishists have adopted from the Mahommadans some kinds of clothing, forms of greeting, manners, and customs, and a certain amount of their ritual, but more as a question of fashion than anything else. Many of their stories are connected with animals, something on the lines of , sop's fables, having some kind of moral, not always a very laudable one, tucked away in the tail. Two of their favourite dramatis persona are the hyena and the hare, and both of them are represented as characters of infinite cunning. Sometimes the story is of a battle of wits between the two, and generally the hare wins. An old favourite of Soninke origin, told with many variations, is of the lion, the panther, and the hyena, who, tortured with hunger on the outskirts of a village, had a bet among themselves as to who could carry off a fat dog from the middle of a group of villagers in front of a great fire. First the lion tried, trusting in his strength to break through the crowd, but the men beat him back with stones and heavy sticks. Next the panther made a sudden rush, but the men threw burning coals at him, singeing his fur and burning him so that he fled howling into the bush. While the attention of the villagers was still distracted by his howling the hyena crept up unperceived, 2o8 TURNING BACK and, hurling himself through the fire, with his light feet scattered the live coals among the surrounding people, who leapt to their feet, crying aloud with pain, and brushing the embers from their garments. In the confusion the hyena quietly picked up the dog and carried him off to his lair, where he devoured him at his leisure. They have another story, which goes on for hours, to prove that a man should take a wife from his own village, not one that lives next door, nor yet from a distant village. For the woman who comes from afar, who can tell what she may be really doing when she says she is visiting her parents? The one from next door will spend all her time gossiping, and will involve you in all sorts of unpleasantness with her relations, besides having infinite opportunities to deceive you with her old admirers. But the wife who comes from the other end of the same village is known to everyone, and consequently will not dare deceive you. They have a riddle that runs: " Who is the man who kills his children? The man who sells his children? And the man who gives away his children? " "The man who kills his children is the man who marries a woman of forty. He sells his children who marries a slave. He who makes love to another man's wife gives away his. children." Naturally, being poled, the chaland ran much closer to the land than did Tin Lizzie, Senior or Junior, and as days went on I began to acquire an intimate acquaintance with the flora and fauna of the Niger's banks. For the first two days after we left Kabara, till we reached the deep waters of Lake Dh~bo, we were pushing through what literally looked like solid ground-thick, high rushes and a tangle of water-lilies. Later we passed forest land, where-not often, for the OT 209

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU sun grew increasingly hot-while the laptots were cutting and loading wood I went ashore and devoured shum-shum berries, a tiny orange-like fruit with a huge pip, that grew on round, evergreen trees. Sometimes I went ashore at some little dream village at the sunset hour, and watched the boys and young men as they played their never-ending game of juga-a game played with sticks and little bits of stone, and that seemed to necessitate the exchange of many cowrie shells. Fragments of real beauty were those fleeting moments of sunset, when the merry, plump black girls laughed with the lads back from work, and flocks of cattle came in from the fields, and the fading light etherealised all that was ugly and commonplace, and the great ball of the setting sun turned the broad horizon to a radiance of amber and gold. Sometimes material needs were uppermost in a search for eggs and chickens. At the smaller villages the people would not take money, and I had to pay in cowries-a lengthy proceeding, for a vast quantity of cowries go to a franc.I never could grasp the exact rate of exchange, for it varied in different places, but the merchants of eggs, etc., were always scrupulously honest. At that time the rate of exchange was about twenty cowries to a sou, though sometimes it goes as low as forty, or as high as fifteen. A few years ago, and even now in remoter places, all purchases were paid in cowries. For example, a wife or a horse or any object of value might cost as much as a hundred and twenty thousand cowries. I have forgotten what this weighs in civilised measures, but it represents two donkey- loads, and is even more unwieldy than shopping in Berlin or Petrograd. The days passed in a nightmare of heat, and thirst, and sandflies. The evenings, with a little 210

TURNING BACK refreshing breeze stroking one's face like a caress, were rather wonderful, as under a high moon we drifted past low banks, where the fireffies glowed, and solitary gum-trees stood waist deep in the water, like white ghosts. Sometimes from the bush came the shrill laugh of a hyena, like the laugh of an hysterical woman, that always made my nerves tingle unpleasantly, and perhaps, farther off, the deep, coughing roar of a lion. Wherever there was a white habitation one stopped, after the manner of the country, to pass the time of day, or to borrow anything one might require. Sometimes it would be a city of half a dozen Europeans running a tract of cotton country, and then we would all drink long drinks out of thick glasses, and exchange the gossip of the Niger-whose chalands had passed, and where; who had shot a lion or a panther; the rise or fall of the next plantation ; our views in general upon Soudanese trade and administration. Sometimes it would be one man living alone, save for a moussou-a wife "in the manner of the country "-- in the midst of nothingness, pursuing some obscure trade of his own that did not seem to bring him much profit. But such men were the most interesting of all to me, for they alone were of the country I travelled in; had touched and knew the heart of it as few white men do; had known Africa in all her moods, and grown to love her, or, rather, grown to be part of her, so that they never could or would return to Europe. These men, sometimes looked askance upon by their more sociable, more progressive compatriots, seemed in some way set apart, not to belong to the rest of us, and their eyes had the expression of men who have seen things that others cannot see, whose words and gestures are an impalpable veil hiding their souls. 211

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU And everywhere everyone was quite amazingly hospitable and kind. Soudanese hospitality is famous, though nowadays people say that since the war it has declined; that the days are gone when at the sight of a strange chaland a man would cry to his servant: " Mamadou, lay another place." Or, should three strangers descend: " Mamadou, lay three more places." If Soudanese hospitality has declined, certainly I saw no sign of it. Everywhere I was offered everything, even to things that I had never thought of needing. Once even a man gave up his last half-loaf of bread which he had been saving for his lunch. But more often than not one saw no human face, and then it was that the birds and beasts on the banks, in no wise frightened by the familiar faces of my black galley-slaves, made good company. The friendliest of all were the bengalis, of all sorts and kinds and colours, generally blue and grey-tiny creatures who love human beings, and build their nests inside the houses. The bengali comes into many negro tales, and is cited as an admirable husband, who builds the nest, and feeds the children, and sings to his wife to amuse her. Next in homeliness was the gendarme, with his yellowish- grey plumage, whose nests hang like clusters of round fruit from every tree. A jolly little bird is the fati, a black, glossy person who sits on the backs of sheep and seems to whisper confidences into their long ears. Sometimes one saw a Pharaoh's chicken, and I'm afraid I took more interest in the pigeons and quails as a possible change of diet than anything else, and in aigrettes (though I never succeeded in getting a glimpse of one) as the nucleus for a new hat. Up in the Boucle of the Niger are a fair number of ostriches, though their feathers are of inferior 212

TURNING BACK quality. But the indigenous birds are, as a rule, small, and not especially interesting, and I think the most characteristic of them all is the vulture, ill- conditioned and sinister scavenger, who hangs above all day, waiting for things to die, and builds his huge, untidy nest, as if defiantly, in the largest, most public tree in the village. Of migratory birds-tourists like myself, so to speak-flying the northern winters, there are no end-eagles, storks, herons, quails, partridges, and ducks ad infinitum. One of them, the spatulus, with flat feet and a cosy sort of look about him, makes himself thoroughly at home. He waddles round villages, picking up stray bits of dead fish, and, naturally white in colour, is generally grey and simply filthy, from grubbing in and out of native houses and rubbing himself against the pots and pans. From East and South Africa comes the sacred ibis, and the goose from Egypt, and the pelican, and the marabout, who has a slow and decrepit walk, like that of an old, rheumaticky man. In the sandy stretches there are sometimes vipers to make one pick one's feet up neatly and apprehensively, and very occasionally a chameleon or a tortoise, and every wall swarms with mudcoloured lizards. And there is a horrid little whitish variety, that sometimes, while one dozes, will run over one's arm or bare ankle, leaving a rash that drives one nearly mad for hours afterwards. Even in March the Niger was too high for many caimans (crocodilis vulgaris). The creatures prefer to deep water the sluggish shallows of the marshes and marigots, where the easiest prey is to be found. Like most sneaks and bullies, the crocodile, once out of his element, on land, is an arrant coward, and will not take the shortest journey 213

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU across country till he has assured himself that there is no living thing about. Nobody loves the crocodile. Everyone regards him as a treacherous, ungrateful fellow. The natives have a story about a crocodile who, left stranded high and dry on the banks of the Niger, was found by a little boy. He implored the child to carry him back into the water, which the latter did. But the crocodile was heavy and progress slow. Each time the child stopped the crocodile said: "The water is not deep enough; carry me farther." When the water was breast high he said: " This is far enough, and now I am going to eat you, but first, according to the Law of the Animals, I will let three others hold judgment on you." The first animal to come to the water to drink was a horse. " Eat him," said the horse, "for one day he will grow to be a man, and men are cruel." The second was a donkey. " Eat him," he also said, "for men are cruel." The third was a hare, who, being full and well fed and having a grudge of his own against crocodiles, was disposed to help the child. But he could not swim. He enquired the facts of the case, and then said: " Crocodile, you lie. This small child could not have carried a heavy creature like you so far." "I swear by Allah that he did." "You must prove it before I can give judgment." So the crocodile let the child carry him back to the place on the bank from whence they had started. " You see? " he told the hare. " Yes, I see," answered the hare, and turned to the child. " Now take your axe, cut off the head of the crocodile, and eat him! " 214

TURNING BACK Sometimes in a village I noticed a house larger than the rest, more ornate and imposing looking. For a long time I thought it must be the house of a chief, till it was explained to me that it was just a kind of club, or communal building, where the young men of the village used to live together when they reached maturity. Here. they were visited by a certain number of young girls, each young man usually inviting the girl of his choice. Every liberty was permitted to the young people, but it was against the rules of the fraternity to have children. I am not sure what the penalty is in these Niger villages, but in some remoter parts of Africa, where the same system exists, the penalty is death. Among the girls, each boy in due course, when he could afford it, chose his bride, but it was never the girl he originally brought there. Most of the queer laws of sex and morals among the negroes, though different or even repugnant to European standards, have a sound basis of common sense. The negro in general has a horror of organised prostitution far exceeding that of the white and brown peoples. They often have the same economic necessity for marrying comparatively late; also in some African tribes the best specimens are set apart as warriors, and as such are not considered eligible as husbands until they have won their laurels, and, in any case, their undivided attention must be given to their profession, and their lives not softened or their attention distracted by the joys and comforts of matrimony. Added to all this the negro, male and female, matures at a very early age, and to avoid the ugly canker that we civilised nations have not known how, or have been too blindly proud, to avoid, they have evolved queer codes of their own, that achieve, if not conventional morality, at any 215

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU rate a fair degree of order and hygiene. Along the Niger countries unfortunately, where the natives have become impregnated with the ideals and standards, as well as the blood, of the brown people of the north, the lack of virtue among the girls and married women has arranged matters in an even less fortuitous manner. I have said that as a rule the black has a distaste for commercialised immorality. There is another popular fiction to be shattered, and that is that the natural black either desires, or is flattered by, relationship with the white in sexual matters. A black girl who " marries " a white man loses caste in a greater or less degree according to the moral or social ethics of her race. Not only does she lose caste, but she is bored and unimpressed. Almost invariably, as I have seen, she infinitely prefers her own menfolk, and she is, as a rule, consistently and unashamedly unfaithful to her white " husband," and only takes on the dubious honour because the money that it earns her enables her afterwards to marry some broadminded and black Prince Charming of her own choice. By now it was only two months off the hot season, and as we progressed it grew more and more torrid. From midday to six o'clock one sat literally in a bath of perspiration, till every layer of clothing was as if it had been wrung out in water. It made one excessively weak and devitalised, and even at sundown, when the heat decreased slightly, and a little breeze had sprung up, one was still taken with violent attacks of perspiration, till one felt as if there was no blood in one's body and every nerve was at tension, and for a nothing-a movement, a jolt, or the sound of a voice-one could have screamed. If, as I was assured by the old-timers, this was still 216

TURNING BACK comparatively the bonne saison, I hate to think what it must be like in May. Of course one got the whole brunt of it in the chaland; with the curtain lowered it was stuffy past belief, and with the curtain raised the strength of the sun and the glare off the water was intolerable, if not dangerous. And the mosquitoes! If I had the power to devise a personal inferno for a pet enemy I would populate it with a comparative handful of the mosquitoes that every evening set me to raging and blaspheming, and, in spite of all my self- control, to scratching till the blood poured down my neck and legs. And in the daytime the flies! The flies that never gave one peace sleeping or waking, that drowned themselves in thousands in one's drink, and made the food taste of nothing but fly. At last I have solved the query propounded so persistently in our music-halls as to the locality for foreign travel selected by flies in the winter-time. They all go up and down the Niger, and most of them last winter were in the chaland! 217

CHAPTER XVI I DIENNE TWELVE hours past Mopti I left the Niger at Kouakourou, a primitive little village standing back among thick trees, surrounded by stagnant water, a very nest of mosquitoes. My objective was Dienne, capital of the cercle of Dienne, a large Mussulman town some thirty-eight kilometres inland, attainable by a marigot, or stream. With the usual pessimism of the country I had been told that there would not be enough water in the inarigot to float the chaland, and, as usual, I found there was plenty, whereat I was mightily pleased, for I was anxious to test the" See-Dienn6and-die" attitude of the Soudan. At the Coast and at railhead whenever a certain amount of discouragement was handed out to me, Dienn6 had always been thrown out as a sop-a highly superior sop. Doubtless the dear things were quite right, but just as well might a visitor from Africa be palmed off with Paris when he had made up his mind to see London ! They are just about as far apart and just about as different. Throughout all one night the chaland bounced over rocks, cannoning occasionally off the banks. After the moon waned we had to tie up, and I let myself be frightened off going ashore by the laptots with tales of a lion prowling in the vicinity. Dienn6 is considered by some people to be superior to Timbuktu, both as to architecture and to local colour, but personally I am not disposed 218

DIENNt2 to agree with them. Certainly it is better laid out, more carefully planned, and the approach to it is charming. It stands at the end of the stream on an island in the middle of the Bani, the tributary of the Niger, that we had left behind at Mopti, that ran shallow and clear as a sheet of glass reflecting the sky. Facing one is a stretch of red-gold sand, and behind it the city is sharply silhouetted, an elaborate, irregular tracery of roofs. There is none of the grey secrecy of Timbuktu, none of its slow, furtive decay. It appeals to the eye but not to the imagination. It has no semitones of mystery, no semi-personal suggestion. Its streets are comparatively broad, and lined with handsome ornate houses. It breathes an air of assured prosperity and comfortable richness. There is no bustle, no flurry, no crowding. One feels that behind the attractive fagades of the houses all is dignified and well ordered. And so it proves when one enters them. There are welldressed women, and handsome rugs and wall hangings, and everything is in good repair. There is a big square, near which stands the fine house of the Administrator, who, with his pretty young wife, throughout my very brief visit was the soul of kindness, providing me with a garde de cercie as guide, not to mention some most welcome meals at a civilised table. Near the Residence is a trading-house and a school, and three other Europeans. There is another great square in front of the big mosque. This mosque is modem; in fact, it was built by the French in 1909, the old one, already crumbling, having been destroyed in the taking of the town. It was rebuilt on the site of its predecessor, celebrated in Soudanese history. In sixteen hundred it had for iman for ten years the famous Abd Er-Rahman Saadi, writer of the 219

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU Tarikh es Soudan. It was destroyed, with a number of other mosques, somewhere about 1830 by the Sheik Hamadou, on the pretext that its sacredness had been profaned by acts of impiety and immorality. After turning the sites of the other mosques into cemeteries, he rebuilt one enormous one, which, as I have said, was destroyed in i909, when the present mosque was rebuilt, on the site where the medersa now stands. Regret was expressed by the Dienniens for the lost sanctity of their tradition, consequently on Fridays the muezzin calls the Faithful to prayer, not from the mosque, but from the corner of the medersa itself. The present mosque, being French built, is the only one in the Soudan that we unbelievers are permitted to enter. It is very handsome, about a hundred and twenty feet long, with a huge courtyard open to the sky. Inside it is dim and cool and lofty, with a forest of huge stone pillars, quite ten feet long and three feet thick. It is quite unfurnished, and thousands of big bats flap wildly through the semi-darkness with a sweeping of wings, like djins or dark, departed spirits. In the walls are niches for candles and little jars of ablutional water. A double stairway leads up to the broad roof terrace, surmounted by a little minaret. The over-arches of the doors are ornamented, as usually in Soudanese architecture, with the tafara gorko, or tube-like decorations, reminiscent of the Phallic symbols of old, dead religions. On the spiky projections of the minaret are stuck ostrich eggs, with an absurdly childish effect, the occult significance of which I have never found anyone able or willing to tell me. From the terrace the surrounding country hes round one like a map-a great plain that to the north the feathery tips of date-palm gave an 220

DIENNt 221 aspeot almost Saharan. In rainy seasons the plain is sometimes almost entirely inundated, with the little villages, built on slight eminences, standing above the water like long-legged birds. Within the precincts of the mosque are the tombs of saints and holy men-of Almany Taraore, the Edrissite, and his slave, Guidi Thiari, whose remains not even Hamadou, the fanatic, dared desecrate, and of Baba Hami, a very holy marabout; and outside the mosque, in the cemetery, are many more, and to those tombs come very many pilgrims on Friday to pray. In the time of the great famine, some ten years ago, I am told that women and young girls came in their hundreds from all over the surrounding country to pray for rain. The religious feasts and fasts are much the same as at Timbuktu, as is the system of education, though perhaps at Dienn6 the girls receive a more thorough education than elsewhere. Once the medersa had to be abandoned, for it was found that its system did not work so well with a negro, comparatively recently, and only partially Islamised population as on its native soil. Dienn6 has seen and made a good deal of history in her day. Her first inhabitants were probably Bozos, one of the primitive native races, who since their earliest origin have been a race of boatmen and fishermen, hard working, unsubtle folk. The Bozos were dispersed by the wave of Mahommadanism that swept down from the north, and notably in the person of Omar Diabi, chief of Dia, who died in 432 of the Hegira. Dienn6 took its name from him, being a diminutive of the word Dia, or Dya. Later, in fourteen and fifteen hundred, came the domination of the Sonhrais, who developed all the countries of the Boucle of the Niger, and established connection between Dienne and Timbuktu. Later still, in

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU rotation, came the Moors of Morocco, who made a general mess of things, the Bambaras, and the Peuhls, till in 186o Dienne severed all connection with Timbuktu. From the admixture of so many races the Diennien proper, like the American, has achieved a definite personality, which is Diennien and nothing else. He is essentially a man of peace. He loves comfort and luxury and dignity, and shows it in his graceful and refined appearance. The Peuhls and Bambaras form the commercial element of the place. The Peuhls are infinitely the superior in intelligence and cunning, and are, besides, hospitable and fervent Mahommadans. But their women are reputed to be ill-tempered, jealous, and unfaithful, and are not in demand by the Dienniens, who take marriage seriously. The Bambaras are coarser, patient, slow, and reserved, and are rather prone to alcoholic excess. But even the upper class Diennien is not as sober as one could wish, his excuse being that he drinks dola, a kind of native beer, and he says that the juice of a native fruit cannot in reason be prohibited by the Prophet. In general he is tolerant in his religion, and, especially when rich, has few children, which accounts for a declining birth-rate as pronounced as in any European country. The tradition of Dienne places a certain number of great families of traders at the top of its social hierarchy. Next them come the freed rimaibis, who in the country are agriculturists and in the towns are tailors, hairdressers, and embroiderers; and a good way beneath them, as all over the Soudan, are the blacksmiths. It is a custom among the chief artisans of Dienne to band together in a kind of association, something like a beneficent trade union. The head of the masons, who gave me a most warm-hearted hospitality. 222

DIENN2 was a very charming gentleman indeed, dignified and courtly, and inhabiting a most palatial house. The women of Dienne are rather pretty, though they disfigure their lips with blue tattooing. Their hairdressing is the same as that of the Sonhrais, and is only done once in three months, and is kept tidy by a daily application of butter. Poor souls, they do not have too happy a time, being considered purely in the light of slaves, though their husbands have to pay an immense amount for them-sometimes as much as eight hundred francs. They revenge themselves by persistent unfaithfulness. Sometimes a widow of the lower classes, with feminist tendencies, will make a few pence by carrying water for the rich, and will travel round the country doing a small trade in salt, preferring a life of hardship and the open ridicule of her friends to subjugation under a man. The marriage customs of Dienn6 and its dependencies differ somewhat from those of Timbuktu. The bride is chosen by the father of the young man, subject, as a rule, to the wishes or suggestions of the latter. Presents are offered, and either accepted or returned according to whether the match is favourably considered. The arranging of the dowry is generally assigned to the local griot, to which the marabout lends an official hand, and the official present, as definite as an engagement ring, is a pagne (the piece of, striped cotton that Soudanese women of all tribes wrap round their waists). Unlike in Timbuktu, the engagement is generally a long one, and there is a great interchange of presents. On the day of the wedding, when the husband goes in to his bride, he is accompanied by his bachelor friends, whose r6le it is to support him should the lady show unwillingness. He remains 223

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU with her three days, though she is supposed to retain her virginity till the end of the third day. At the end of that time the bride has her hair arranged in the amount of tufts that fashion has made the rule for married women, and for a week receives the visits of her friends--the matrons of the town, who are supposed to teach her her domestic duties. At the end of the week the husband makes visits to all those who have given him presents, and at last the couple are able to settle down to everyday life. A woman, if she leaves her husband, has to return the dowry he paid for her, and she has to do the same if actually put away by her husband for unfaithfulness, which acts as something of a deterrent. But less unduly flagrant unfaithfulness is not usually treated very seriously. The first time a man may reproach, or, in extreme cases, beat his wife; the second time the chief of the place is appealed to and a fine imposed of a few kola-nuts or a chicken. Polygamy is customary among the more well-to-do, especially of late years, for, as there is in England, in Dienne there are a quantity of" superfluous " women, and not enough husbands to go round. All the same, the Mahommadan broad-mindedness on the subject of unofficial wives is not often taken advantage of. The rites of circumcision and excision are performed upon all boys and girls between the ages of eight and fifteen, in the months of January, February, and March. The operator in the former cases is the hairdresser, and in the latter the wife of a shoemaker. The latter somewhat barbaric practice has been largely stamped out by French influence, but is firmly held to by the inhabitants of Dienne, although they can give no practical reason for it. An old story goes to the effect that 224

DIENNEt the practice was first invented by Sarah, the wife of Abraham, who, besides slitting her nose and her ears, thus vented her jealousy on Hagar. The penal code of the Dienniens is briefly summed up: "All those who pay the tax are responsible for the price of blood or of wrongs." But the old barbaric forms of punishment have been considerably modified under French influence. The penalty for a murder is, as it always has been, a fine of a hundred head of cattle. Formerly theft was considered the gravest crime of all, and was punishable by the loss of a hand. Now the thief, besides having to give back the goods stolen, must pay a heavy indemnity. If a man violates another man's fiancee, he has to pay the equivalent of her dowry without being able to marry her. If his victim be an unappropriated damsel he must do the same, and, should he marry her, has to pay her dowry all over again. It was in 19o8 that the French made great modifications of the then existent forms of slavery, or serfdom, in which they were little aided or encouraged by the serfs themselves. In countries like the Soudan it is not as easy as it sounds, or, dare I say, as advisable, to stamp out serfdom, at any rate until some practical solution of trade and economic conditions can be instilled and installed in its place, in places like Dienn6, especially, where the free population are averse to manual labour, and for long years almost all agriculture has been done by the semi- captives, or rimaibgs. However, after much Palabre the tax of the serf was exchanged for a species of ground-rent based on the value of the harvest, property rights were given them over certain pieces of ground, and the personal rights of their old masters were abolished. As to the captifs de case, or purely domestic serfs, no drastic PT 225

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU alteration has been, or is likely to be made, until the serfs themselves aid their own cause. The Dienniens used to have a curious habit, now, I believe, abandoned, of calling their slaves by the beginning words of a proverb, to which the latter, when addressed, must answer by its concluding words. For example, should a slave's name be " Djio madgg" (meaning " It is not water that lends lustre to a man "), when called he must answer "Nafolo de bi madg6" (" It is riches "). It is said to have been a Bozo of Poro, a small town in the cercle of Dienne called Yaya Signoto, who first invented the pirogue, which ranks him, on the Niger, with the man who invented trains in England, or the Berber who first brought camels to the Sahara. Though the Dienniens themselves are staunch Mahommadans, there are many fetishists of various cults in the cercle, mostly among the Bambaras to the south- west. One of the leading cults has for its fetish the gna. Gna means equally the incorporate soul of the gna, or the material representation of it, generally a piece of wood. A holy man who wishes to buy a gna chooses among his friends five or six to assist him in serving and interpreting its wishes. He himself is called gnaigui, and his chief acolytes, two in number, waraminaden, who are the intermediaries and spokesmen of the gna. There is also a gnadiali, who composes flattering addresses and sings songs of praise, and a mowraoukalatigui, who offers up sacrifices. The disciples are called gnakoden. On arrival at his new home, the gna is propitiated with sacrifice of a chicken and a hundred and twenty cowries, and in return he protects his people against sorcerers, poison, and the Evil Eye. 226

DIENN2 If a man dies the gna decides, through the voice of the waraminaden, in a state of epilepsy, whether the death was due to natural causes. If not, he discovers the culprit and deals him out a slow death in the form of madness or chronic diarrhoea. From time to time he announces his wishes, but invariably rests Mondays and Thursdays. It is forbidden for laymen to set eyes on him, and on his public appearances he is carefully swathed and hidden from view in a coarse cloth. Fetes are given in his honour, that often develop into orgies of dola. The two principal fetes are at the times of seedtime and harvest, when special drinks are brewed from certain roots found in the ditches round graveyards, and another from a mixture of pepper, chiles, and salt, which may cause death to the profane, and may only be drunk by authorised and holy persons. A gna may be of either sex, and a man, if dissatisfied with his own gna, may go and worship at the shrine of somebody else's. A gna sometimes lives in the goat- skin in which are kept the tom-tom and instruments that were bought with him. If the family who owns the gna should leave their native village, he goes with them, and the village hastens to buy another. The blacksmiths of Bondougou are the chief purveyors of them. The spirit of a gna is a kono, a rag thing made in the form of a bird. Often a gna is appealed to by barren women, and any children born by his magical good-will are dedicated to his service. This sect believes that the souls of the dead enter into the bodies of women and are born again, thus remaining in the family, and should a woman bear two or three dead children in succession (as sometimes happens owing to hard work and lack of hygiene), it is believed that each "time it is 227

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU the same soul. Owing to this belief in the transmigration of souls they hold the dead in great honour and reverence. Should a man die in the prime of life, or in battle, a red cock and a kola are sacrificed, also libations of degue, a concoction of water and flour of millet. In the dassiri form of worship all important decisions are made by a professional spiritualist. By signs traced in the sand the spiritualist chooses the sites of new houses and ascertains the dwellingplace of the genius loci, or presiding spirit, which more often than not is in a tree. This spirit has many powers, including that of sending children to sterile women. Also he can prevent his enemies, the bad spirits, from eating the men under his protection, and can cause snakes to bite the evil ones. Hence the word dassiri, which literally means " to attach the mouth." It is probably the oldest religion of the Soudan. In the Dienne region are to be found traces of the old Phallic worship. The boys after circumcision join a secret society called ntomo, for which privilege they pay a certain number of kolas and receive three blows from a rope. The keeper of the sacred Phallus is called ntomowoulu, and fetes called liego are held by the boys and girls after their circumcision and excision, either by night or by day, under the sacred tree. There are many fetishist societies, the objects of which, more than that of religion, are amusement and good eating and drinking. Besides the Bambaras, the Bozos have a variety of superstitions of their own, chiefly connected with fishing. At the beginning of each fishing season the head of some family that has a hereditary and traditional right will hold a ceremonial over the family or tribal fishing-ground. In return for his services he gets a benefice of some 228

DIENNE2 kind, either a percentage of fish from each boatload, or perhaps the whole of the first day's proceeds. The ceremony generally takes place in February or March. The Peuhls, whose chief livelihood is in stock, have their own ritual at the breeding-season. Like all the Soudanese, the Dienniens have their lucky and unlucky days. Friday is the luckiest day of all, when all actions are blessed. Sunday night is particularly propitious for the consummation of marriage, Thursday for travelling, being the day that the Prophet chose for his great journey. The 3rd, I3th, I4th, and 15th days of the month are luckiest. Processions to various holy tombs, accompanied by prayer and recitations from the Koran, are organised to bring rain in times of drought, and rainbows, as provocative of drought, must be prayed against. Thunderbolts must be dislodged and cast into deep water. Grasshoppers are considered unlucky, and are driven away by prayer. And, as usual, against each and every evil there is a gri-gri. There is no outward difference between the amulet of a Mahommadan and that of a fetishist, only inside the former there are, of course, verses of the Koran, and cabalistic designs, whereas the latter most probably contain all sorts of little horrors. But the inwardness of all the fetishist beliefs are hard to ascertain. Religion is about the one topic on which negroes are reserved, and they take infinite pains to keep the rites of it a secret from the white men. In the bush, where there are white men, they will transplant their ceremonial from the open places, where they have hitherto held it, to the fastness of the forest, or some remote spot that an outsider is not likely to discover. They seem to have a vague conception of an 229

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU incorporal, omnipotent god, who is the author of everything. Some people say that he is represented to them by the sun, but it seems more probable that it is the sky. In any case, they consider him too distant, too remote, to intervene or be interested in the affairs of men, or to be accessible to prayer and intercession, and if they invoke the name of their deity it is more as a matter of form than of conviction. The thing that strikes them most favourably about the Mahommadan and Christian religions is the assured manner in which their disciples speak directly, and appear to achieve some communion with their god. They are all fatalists, and Mahommadanism has had little or nothing to teach them in this respect. It is their belief in the inaccessibility of their deity that makes them so superstitious, that has led them to believe in, and seek protection and aid from so many incongruous spirits. And, naturally, the sorcerers thrive and batten on these superstitions and beliefs, for they make a good, substantial living by them. One of their most important sources of wealth is the contrivance and sale of amulets, giving protection against the powers of evil. A sorcerer is sometimes the head man or priest of a village or sometimes a man of a race apart. Among all races he is feared and held in awe, for not only can he concoct poisons, but he can keep off winds carrying illness and epidemics, and mete out death to an enemy. This latter it would appear that he can really do, for the negro, being extremely credulous, when cursed by a sorcerer will sometimes die of sheer " funk," and if he doesn't a little poison will work wonders, for a really conscientious and reliable sorcerer always has a small following of acolytes, who, under penalty of death or misfortune, will carry out his commands. 230

DIENNE It is hard to say whether a sorcerer is entirely a charlatan, or whether he has a belief in his own spells. Of course, part of his trade is sheer bluff and stagecraft, but it is possible that he, being also a negro and credulous, is at least partly sincere. He is generally a man with a trade apart from his magic, and consequently more intelligent than his neighbours. He would seem to have considerable powers of suggestion, or hypnotism, or whatever the occultists call it, and we sophisticated white mortals who have seen something of African magic cannot always deny or entirely understand the powers of the African magician. The supernatural powers of a sorcerer are not transmitted to his offspring, though those of a sorceress are. In most tribes, before he dies a sorcerer hides his money and the paraphernalia of his trade somewhere in the bush or forest, and after he is dead, whoever succeeds in finding it takes on his position. But this is rather the theory than the practice, for the sorcerer has generally given some friend or acolyte more than a hint beforehand as to the whereabouts of his treasure. 231

CHAPTER XVII IN ANSWER TO QUESTIONS ANYONE who wants to " get on with the story "or to finish it-had better skip this chapter. There is no "news " of any kind in it, or any information of any value. It rambles rather like a preacher who has lost his cue and his notes, and is afraid he has missed out something. It is a feeble attempt to answer, from my own impressions, the very many questions I have been asked since, on matters which I now realise I did not study intelligently enough at the time, or make half enough enquiries about, so busily employed as I was in thinking how I could best pander to, or assuage the discomforts of, my miserable body. One of the questions put to me most often and most earnestly was what I thought of the natives of Senegal and the Soudan, and of their possibilities mentally, and socially, and " dangerously." A great deal has been said about the vexed "black problem," and many books have been written on the subject by all sorts and conditions of persons, including one from the pen of one of the blackest of the aforesaid " problems," Rene Maran (to use his pen name), functionary at Fort Crampel, Congo way, whose Batouala produced such outcries and scandal when it won the Prix Goncourt a couple of years ago. Rather an unnecessary outburst of hot air, I am inclined to

IN ANSWER TO QUESTIONS think, for if M. Maran writes more than a little ungratefully about the French, to whom, indubitably, he owes a great deal, at any rate from the European point of view-for alone each heart knoweth its own sorrows-he does not make out too good a case for his own black brothers. So that, though personally offensive to those who know by experience the inexactitudes of his work, it cannot add much bitterness to the problem of black and white. And surely anyone, black or white, may write what book seems good to him (as long as he can find a publisher to support him, which is not always as easy as it sounds !), especially when it takes the non-committal form of a novel. In any case, I doubt if many an author (including myself) writes any more correctly of those races of another colour that we have attempted to portray. In fact I have read many delightful books which I am sure would provoke howls of dissent from their prototypesif they could read them! But that doesn't necessarily spoil the quality of those books, either as literature or as entertainment, and the world doesn't seem much the worse for them. But perhaps I am utterly wrong. Anyway, as to the pros and cons of any question dealing with the negro, no opinion of a mere tourist and unknowledgeable observer like myself can have any value. But in fairness I must say that, personally, throughout my travels I have always rather liked the negro-in his proper place. I have encountered none of the somewhat sordid difficulties or unpleasantnesses with which nervous and imaginative people try to frighten one beforehand. In fact, as a woman travelling alone, which I have done frequently among natives of all sorts, varying in colour from pale cafe-au-lait to boot-polish 233

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU black, I never found a hint of "unpleasantness." It is only, I am sorry to say, when black or brown becomes in some way in touch with white that they may become tainted. This will come as rather a disappointment, I dare say, to sensationmongers or smellers-out of the morbid and bizarre, and I only touch on this rather messy subject because I have so often been asked such extraordinary questions, and been obliged to listen to what I can only describe as unadulterated rot. I have nearly always found negroes easy and pleasant to deal with in my wanderings. They have a natural simplicity that makes them easier than the brown, and more subtle and mentally complicated races. Till one gets to understand them a little, and grows philosophical, they drive one rather mad with their unreliability and irresponsibility, their-generally deliberate---obtuseness and apparent lack of reasoning powers. But as soon as one ceases to consider them as grown-up people, and treats them as rather forgetful and naughty, but likeable, children, they are all right. One simply has to learn that they have apparently no sense of sequence or consequence ; that because one has told a negro to sweep a room or cook a meal, or do anything else, great or small, for three hundred and sixty-four days, there is no reason to suppose that he will do it on the three hundred and sixty-fifth if one has failed to remind him, or that he will do it at all unless one stands over him. But-which is pleasant if one likes cheerfulness and smiles around one, as I do-he is generally good-tempered, cheery, if a trifle noisy; always roaring with laughter over something or other, and nearly always willing. Unlike some people, such as the Arabs and the Chinese, with whom one never knows what feelings of scorn or hatred may 234

IN ANSWER TO QUESTIONS 235 underlie a grave and perfect politeness, with a negro one always knows, as the saying goes, " where one is." He is touchy and moody, as a child or a sensitive dog is touchy and moody. He will sulk for hours over some trifle in which one has unwittingly offended his feelings or his dignity. Though he will rarely tell you what the matter is, he will always give himself away, and, once the matter is put right, he will bear no rancour. He will talk to you as one chap to another, without servility, but his exuberance and apparent lack of respectfulness impress you merely as that of some good outdoor dog who has not learnt parlourtricks. Like a dog, too, he learns your idiosyncrasies and your moods, and unless he is in a bad temper he fits himself in with them. He lives for the minute, and that minute generally seems good to him to loaf and laugh in, unless you can peremptorily impress upon him that life is temporarily real and earnest or you will know the reason why. Of course, I speak of the up-country negro, not the hybrid of the white sea-ports. And also I speak of the Niger tribes, who are the only West Africans that I know, who, however remote from white influence and civilisation, are of good stock. Indeed a French writer, who did not seem especially to love either, said, speaking of the Senegalese and the Soudanese, that "There is as much difference between them and a native of the Congo as between an Englishman who uses soap and a Russian moujik." I have never personally come across dishonesty among the negroes I have been in touch with. Indeed, considering that I am a very careless creature, I have sometimes been surprised at an almost meticulous honesty about small things, except, perhaps, unconsidered trifles of food. I

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU have also found a good deal of loyalty. But, then, my experience has been comparatively superficial and very brief. Most white Africans will tell you that the negro has no abiding sense of loyalty or honesty; that after many years of seemingly both qualities he will let you down or rob you. And I suppose the white man who asserts this must have some sad and sound experience or reason for his assertion. Whether these regrettable lapses are the result of cold-blooded and deliberate depravity, or a sudden irresistible atavistic reversion to primitive instincts, I, of course, cannot say, but am inclined to believe it is the latter. So much for the superficial aspect of the negro before white influence has touched him closely. There remains the civilised or semi-civilised article, who has adopted the white man's gods and the white man's ways. Whatever race civilisation may come from, it is its religion that is the thin end of the wedge. Throughout many hundred years Mahommadanism, spreading farther and farther south, has ousted the indigenous paganism, but it is doubtful whether among pure negroes it has had much basic or social effect. The Africans have simply adopted it, its beliefs and its formulas, and most of all its superstitions (which they have merely grafted on to and mixed up with their original ones), and the marabouts, with a certain amount of practical sense, have considerably modified Mahommadanism to the needs and preferences of the converts. But from what men who have studied the subject tell me, the negro mind itself is left unchanged. He has simply imitated, and imitation is the negro's supreme gift. And when the negro adopts Christianity it seems to me that it takes him just the same way. 236

IN ANSWER TO QUESTIONS Naturally every sincere Christian believes he is doing real good by grafting the advantages, spiritual and material, of his own superior religion and civilisation on to the sinful child of nature. This touches on problems near which an angel, much more myself, might fear to tread. So I will only cite the average everyday employer of the part of Africa that I know, who, when engaging an employee, never, if he can help it, will take a converted negro. Indeed, the proprietor of one of the few well-run hotels of the A.O.F. told me that he always got his staff from up-country, straight from the bush, in spite of all the extra trouble it gave him to train them to their work, and that he sacked them as soon as they had learnt white ways. Personally I have little use for the " Coast" negro, who proudly calls himself un civilisg, nor have I found anyone else who has. He has too many of the white vices added on to his own. Against that is the fact that before white people came to Africa the natives were ravaged by disease, some of them quite sophisticated ones, and were tainted with immorality, abortion, and drunkenness; and whereas now a native gets drunk on algoulou, or trade brandy, or trade whiskey, his grandfather tippled on pernicious mixtures of his own brewing, and bangui, the sap of the palm, on which, though it sounds innocent enough, you can get as deliriously drunk as on anything else. But the West Coast negro is no worse than the negro in any part of the world in the same transition state. The French have put a great deal of tact and understanding into their treatment of various black problems. They have a viewpoint on their black brothers quite different to ours. They have not nearly such a strong "colour 237

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU feeling" as we have, and they give them much more latitude and social rights than we do. In Senegal there are four communes in which the natives vote on an equality with the whites, and there are at least two black representatives from the A.O.F. in the Chambre des Diputis in Paris. The French seem to encourage the idea of the " black Frenchman "-the man whose skin is black, but whose ideals are, or are supposed to be, white. Also, they do not have the horror of the mulatto that we hold so strongly in our colonies. A profoundly-thinking colonist spoke to me hopefully of a future half- caste population carrying on the French ideals transmitted through their white blood, combined with the physical capacity to thrive in a climate where white men cannot do the necessary manual labour. There is little of our fierce segregation of the sheep and the goats, so to speak, of the great gulf fixed between black and white. Which of the two systems will prove the soundest in the long run, the most beneficial to all interests, is a question that only an impartial critic with a life's experience can guess at, and then perhaps without certainty. At any rate, we shall know in a hundred years' time, in the third and fourth generation. The French most certainly, even though at first sight they may seem a trifle unprogressive and unmethodical, are wise and admirable colonists, slow but thorough, and have a gift for getting on with their natives, and getting the best results out of them, unequalled by any other race. It is superstition and polygamy that make any sort of real conversion to Christianity difficult. Polygamy, as I have said before, is almost a necessity to the up-country negro, especially to one who is forbidden, or cannot afford, slaves, 238

IN ANSWER TO QUESTIONS owing to the cumbersomeness and elaboration of all their household arrangements. It is no sinecure to be an African wife, and it is doubtful if one woman-an African woman, that is to say, who is not progressive and who does things just as did her grandmother and all her ancestresses before her---could achieve all the necessary ritual by herself. The aforesaid lack of progressiveness, or, rather, lack of invention and mechanical aptitude, is one of the greatest factors of the negro's non-civilisation. He can imitate, and learn by rule of thumb, but rarely can he create. Superstition, too, is as component a part of a negro's blood as are the red corpuscles themselves. Never is it completely eradicated, even among those who for generation after generation have lived in some white man's land, such as America. The beliefs and superstitions I have heard all along the Niger are the same at bottom as the stories I have been told by old black " mammies" during those portions of my childhood spent in the States. They are born of the spiritual wants of a race whose religion has been indefinite and loosely defined, who have gone to nature, to the animal and vegetable life round them, as explanation of forces and instincts beyond the grasp of their undeveloped minds; who have invested the seen with a dual personality, the Unseen, and, failing anything more tangible to hold on to, have ascribed a sacred importance to, have grown to reverence, if not to worship, the good and the bad manifestations of a simpler form of mechanism than themselves. Their superstitions are those of violence, as is their religion. The spiritual writhings, the foamings at the mouth, the strange trances of a Soudanese sorcerer, the frenzies, the emotional orgies, have a curious family resemblance with 239

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU " Revivals," the frantic, often epileptic," getting' of religion that I have witnessed in the States. It would seem that religion, with a negro, is not a grace, but an obsession. I am digressing badly, but it has interested me so often to observe the queer, tiny atavistic resemblances, the comparisons that have thrust themselves upon me, between the negro au naturel and the negro as white men, after many generations, have* left him. But, superstition and polygamy apart, the negroes have proved that they cannot at present run a civilisation of their own, of which the proof is Liberia, that comic- opera republic a little farther down the Coast, that, according to legend, boasts an army with more generals than rankers, where there is more gold braid on the uniforms than gold in the Treasury, and where one of the chief Government officials ekes out an insufficient income by selling picture postcards and souvenirs to tourists on the steamers that put into their capital ! The republic was a Utopian idea on the part of America, after the liberation of her slaves, and Mistah' Johnson and his fellow-beneficiaries, who do not seem to have derived much from their association with the civilisation of America except a strong American accent, make more good stories up and down the Coast than do " drunks" and "mothers-in-law " on English music-halls! I think that Liberia is an adequate and convincing answer to the " Black Peril" bogey that occasionally rears its head in our midst. To civilise or not to civilise ; it is all a very vexed question, and one is apt to become prosy about it, because one hears so very much of it, and, like Omar Khayyam, comes out by the same door wherein one went. My own worthless opinion is that our black brother on the whole, with a few brilliant exceptions, is not yet ready for civilisation, or at any 240

IN ANSWER TO QUESTIONS rate in the form that we understand it. The negro's intelligence is by no means to be despised. Some people in connection with it use the words " arrested development." I am inclined to think that the phrase is incorrect, and that it should simply be " undevelopment." It is generally recognised by ethnologists and scientists that a large bit of the African map is still, from every angle, in its stone age. Similarly, the negro mind is still in embryo, as doubtless ours was some few thousand years ago, and if you try and impose on it at its present stage our complicated cerebral ramifications, you will produce the forced, unnatural precocity of an infant phenomenon. And we all know what a morbid growth an infant prodigy is, and how quickly and nastily it decays. As I have said, the negro has a genius and a passion for imitation, and assimilates the externals of civilisation, or of any novelty that amuses him, with an amazing facility. He will, and often does, ape the manners, beliefs, ideas, and outlooks of white men as easily as he apes their clothes. But in the former, as in the latter (even when dressed by Savile Row !), he is never quite the genuine article, and he is sometimes an exquisite caricature. Many Coast negroes that I have met reminded me of somebody's epigram about women speaking on platforms-" Like dogs walking on their hind legs, they did it badly, but you were surprised to find them doing it at all." Quite possibly the day will come when the negro will have a civilisation equal to our own, but it will not, it seems to me, be the same as ours, and it will not be for a very long time-too long a time for us to worry our heads about. Next to the inhabitants, the climate perhaps is one of the most talked-of characteristics of West QT 241

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU Africa. Though I have already had, and shall probably have more to say in abuse of it, it is not the bugaboo, the black legend, that for many years it had been made out, and, in any case, it is rather a matter of geography. Though "West Africa" to the uninitiated is merely a small patch on the African map, from St. Louis on the north to Lagos on the south, it is something like two thousand miles. One has no idea of the size of West Africa till one goes there. It is really quite a long way to Timbuktu, but is only about three inches on the average map. As for the climate, parts of it are damp, and parts of it are dry, and you can take your choice. And everywhere it is Hot, with a capital " H." Very Hot, especially up-country, away from the influence of the sea. But the generic term of the" White Man's Grave" is a libel. That ominous title was originally given to Sierra Leone, before its coast was cleared of its fever traps, and generally tidied up, and, in especial, before people had learnt how to live. You always have to learn how to live in a very hot climate, and I imagine you'd have to do the same in a very cold one. A Frenchman, one of the oldest inhabitants, remarked to me that if people lived in France or England as they used to live in West Africa they'd be dead just as quickly! The sun and mosquitoes are the chief natural pests of West Africa. For the former a determined adherence to a sun-helmet and coloured glasses, and a moderation of (but not necessarily abstention from) alchohol, especially spirits, are excellent antidotes. Mosquitoes give you malaria, a most unpleasant complaint, but wherever you go you find quinine on every dinner-table, playing the r6le of salted almonds or hors d'oeuvres. The anti-quininites are spreading a rapid and feverish 242

IN ANSWER TO QUESTIONS propaganda, and are terribly scientific, and get as heated over it as over the Irish question or Lloyd George. Personally, I always took it (and an extra dose if a mosquito under my net had unduly ravaged me), on the principle that it didn't seem to be doing any harm, and might be doing some good. As for all the other indigenous diseases that give West Africa a bad name-yellow fever, blackwater fever, typhus, etc.-I doubt if the risk of getting them, or dying from them, is any greater or more frequent than of getting or dying of flu in England. The West African climate is a dog with a bad name, once deserved, now rather ill-used. Certainly it is not a nice climate, or one that one would deliberately choose to live in, and is very bad for the hair and the complexion, especially the former, as I know to my cost. Bad water plays a bad second fiddle with most people, though, unless you have a fool-proof inside, it is very nearly as important. I got nearly as casual as the white residents about it until I got a mild attack of dysentery. The French seem content with merely filtering the water, which, it seems to me, merely removes the larger fauna that you could yourself fish out with a straw or a hairpin, leaving the little deadly ones a fair free field. Or they will be meticulous about the water itself, and fill it with ice, which is simply nothing but frozen disease. Personally, having properly corrugated my inside once by overdoing the proportions of a water purifier brought out from home, I have come to the conclusion that nothing is really safe or practicable but boiling the water in the homely, old-fashioned way- not just telling your servants to boil it, but watching them do it. I do not think that West Africa--or, rather, 243

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU the Niger area-will become a happy huntingground for tourists yet awhile (perhaps that is one of its chiefest charms !). It is altogether too uncomfortable, and not sufficiently" picturesque." But if one does not mind heat, mosquitoes, fever, and most inconvenient and dilatory forms of transport, it well repays all these things in interest. Its interest is mental rather than emotional. It is more interesting for what it isn't than what it is. It isn't desert, it isn't jungle, it isn't black or brown, or north or south, but a mixture of all these things. It contains all the elements of a dozen different countries and races and religions. It is infinitely suggestive, and there is nothing obvious about it-little that can be easily tabulated. In the same village, in the same house, in the same person, even, one can trace the elements of half a dozen different personalities, wrought of mixed blood; Egyptian, Arab, Berber, Asiatic, prehistoric-all these can be found under one black skin. If one was an ethnologist or an archaologist, or one of a lot of other "ists," one would find food for infinite study. Every phase of it is an epitome of over-lapping. It intrigues by its incoherence, its incompleteness, and piques you into wanting to go farther, to know more, to understand more. It is a tantalising country. Its lack of adequate means of transport is its chief drawback-or, rather, its lack of roads where there might well be roads-and the lack of roads affects its trade, for, though the Soudan at any rate is not a store of untapped richness, it has distinct possibilities that stand in need of exploitation. The British from their own colonies in the south chuckle with justifiable pride about their rails, and roads, and general opening up, and trade returns, and budgets. But, then, that is chiefly what we want colonies for-for trade and 244

IN ANSWER TO QUESTIONS 245 commerce. Everything else is a secondary consideration. The French, it seems to me, have a different ideal, a different conception of colonisation; an ideal based on a military spirit, a spirit of patriotism and empire-building, rather than on commerce. Their colonies are more their children than their servants.

CHAPTER XVIII THE END OF THE ROAD I ONLY remained at Dienn. for twenty-four hours, for the sun was becoming stronger every day, and the water lower, and soon travelling on the Niger would be intolerable. The remaining days passed in a kind of slow haze, an immensity of heat and glare that stultified and brutalised one. Life was a routine of tiny necessary acts, each performed with the minimum of effort, yet that in the great heat, loomed portentous, dreaded. The effort of bending down to pick up something one contemplated at least five minutes beforehand. One spoke in a dream, moved in a dream, like a dream, too, passed the hours spent ashore, where there were Europeans, and one was temporarily galvanised into a semblance of life. When effort was not required one sat inert, like a log, not even thinking, till the moment came when, marionette-wise, one must act. Anything that jarred or broke the great silence was like a blow on a sensitive spot. I weakly longed to throw things at the men as they sang their interminable chants, and hated them for feeling well and fit. The smell of karity that emanated from them and their belongings was like an obsession that unconsciously, even when one's olfactory organs had become blunted, pervaded one with a sense of peevish discomfort. The incessant

THE END OF THE ROAD pounding of millet in the big wooden bowl, that shook the chaland with regular rhythmic jolts, was a torture, each blow seeming as if it were being delivered on an aching head. One's whole being was a vast weariness that wrapped one as in a heavy garment, that weighed on one, bore one down. It was only by a definite exercise of self- control that one could behave Christianly, civilly, decently. Sometimes, when the sun sank low on the horizon, and the great glare had faded, and the effort of enduring was over, I used to have a queer feeling of being disembodied-that my body, a cumbersome, distressful thing, lay supine below me, and that I, the real I, looked down and pitied it in a kind of foolish abstraction and hysterical pity. At such moments I could have cried if I had not been too tired, and the sound of a voice was torture. At night, when Allah was kind, the temperature dropped to a little over a hundred, and then, as one lay gathering energy to crawl outside on to the heap of sail and rags, it used to seem as if life came slowly and painfully back, as if the breath of fresher air that drifted through the canvas flaps, that one could feel running up one's limbs, penetrating one's veins, setting the heart and lungs and muscles to work, mingling with an exquisite relief, gave one, too, a queer kind of torture-the torture, one might imagine, of a dead thing being brought forcibly back to life. Sprawling on the heap of rags outside was resurrection. One was once more a human being, no longer a horrible marionette. To the dreadful, flame-like beauty of the day succeeded a beauty that consoled and caressed like a benediction. Each night the sun set in glory of orange and gold reflected in the broad expanse of water. I 247

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU have never seen water so absolutely rippleless; each detail showed with more than natural distinctness. Soon the reflections, colour of blood, changed to an iridescent sheet, like mother of pearl, deepening to all the colours in the heart of a pansy. As it lay, black and smooth as a piece of velvet, one would not have known it was water save for the cool, swishing sound under the poles of the laptots, as with the rhythm of caged animals they paced up and down the six inches wide of deck, polished bright as steel by the friction of their bare black feet. There was no twilight, and the stars came down suddenly, brilliantly, like a myriad of tiny electric lights, setting the water aglow with spangles. There was no breeze, for we had left the tang of the desert night far behind, but the air chilled slowly and imperceptibly, reviving, life-giving. Later the moon, like a haughty queen who likes to reign alone, floated up slowly and serenely, as if disdainful of the stars, setting the world shimmering in a radiance of steel and silver, making the banks of golden sand quiver as if they were dancing, painting a patchwork of ragged shadows. The bushes on the banks, the rocks, the banks themselves, were bleached to a silvery grey, broken by the outlines of slim trees that stood like pale ghosts. Only our slowly moving craft made a small black patch, like a dark, ominous wraith moving through an enchanted world. Sometimes a piroguee, poled by naked black men, would be silhouetted against the brightness, its prow curling upwards like that of a gondola, and one's mind, lazily awakening, would look back into the Africa of a 1undred, a thousand, perhaps a million years ago, and one felt that one was but a relic of atavism, a small, unimportant thing 248

THE END OF THE ROAD that had come down haphazard through the centuries unchanged; that the world had never altered, that civilisation did not exist, that one owned eternity, and would live for ever so, objectless, forgotten, idly drifting, a particle of the great Black Continent that makes slaves of white men as well as of black, that kills men by inches-men who, flying to escape her, yet come back to her breast to die-who metes out death and disease and madness, and withal a savage, insatiable joy. At such moments the black giants, shadowy in the moonlight, who paused to rest sometimes beside me, who sang hoarse chants as they paced their interminable treadmill, seemed my brothers, the rare voices of wild animals from the bush seemed my natural prey, and the camp fires along the banks my home. Sometimes I talked in queer " pidgin "language with the great shadowy figures. One, I gathered, was going to be married as soon as the trip was over. The bride was fourteen years old and pretty, and he had had to pay in kind the value of three hundred francs for her. Sometimes we would talk of djins, and apprehensively finger our gri-gris. No one was going to remain longer in Koulicoro than he could help, apparently, for there were beaucoup gri-gris, bad ones, bought by bad men from sorcerers, and if any of these bad men took a dislike to you he might, with the assistance of his gri-gri, make you die a slow and painful death. They all looked rather askance at the only fetishist of the crew, a new man taken on at Mopti to replace one who had always declared himself beaucoup malade when it was his turn to do a bit of work. He was a Bambara, and Bambaras, it appeared, are not good men, though to a mere tyro of a white he looked too rollicking and good-natured to hurt a fly-a good-looking QT* 249

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU lad who had a great success with the girls whenever we stopped at a village. The only person who seemed indifferent to anything in heaven, earth, or the other place was the head laptot, respectfully referred to as le patron. The patron was certainly a " character." With the scowl of a cross baboon and the physique of an ox, he had a wonderful gift of organisation and a logical sense rare among negroes. He was a person on whom one could rely in any difficulty or set-back. He had a tremendous sense of personal dignity, easily hurt, and of responsibility. He was an autocrat, and his word was law, but his heart was the heart of a child. He had been worsted in various encounters earlier in the trip, when our views on travelling had differed, and he bore no malice, but he would sulk like a child at some imaginary slight, and was inordinately susceptible to flattery. He would preen and prink interminably over a new bou-bou or a pair of shoes in the hopes one would tell him that he looked nice. He was a creature of violent moods, sometimes a whirlwind of energy, cursing and lashing his men to work, and working himself harder than any of them; sometimes sitting in a sublime abstraction, a Byronic gloom. Then suddenly he would descend from his greatness, and play like a kitten by himself, devising all sorts of little tricks and oddities, with a bright black eye cocked to see if one was noticing or amused. Certainly he missed his vocation as a jazz drummer. He would sit for hours with a small calabash turned upside down between his knees, drumming with his fingers a rhythm that instinctively set one's shoulders twitching. The rhythm was as old as the negro race, as old as Africa itself, yet curiously new. As he drummed he 250

THE END OF THE ROAD forgot to show off, and his eyes looked violently alive, almost greedy, and I would drop my pencil, and the fragments of this book, that the perspiration pouring off my face has since made it rather difficult to piece together, and listen with twitching shoulders and a nervous foot. The ceaseless, soft drumming conjured up visions of dark forests that defy a pallid moonlight, where the eyes of big beasts peer out from the shadows; of rough huts; of the gleam of a fire; of huge jars of potent, native-brewed drink, fiery and exasperating; of grinning, black, greedy faces; of lewdly leaping and crouching black bodies; of sacrifices and curious symbols and monstrously formed tom-toms played by men with a devil in their supple wrists, and a fleck of foam at the comers of their mouths; of the dance of wild hunting and wilder love; of the dance of a black Pan, the dance of nature itself ; also it conjured up a vision of big rooms of old rose and gilt, of supper-tables, and of the gleam of champagne in slim glasses; of the braying of a saxophone held between black fingers, of reddened lips, and roughened, hennaed hair. Even if the chaland was not a floating Ritz she was dependable, as I realised a day past Segou when I passed my old friend, Tin Lizzie, Junior, derelict, stuck on a sandbank, as she had apparently been for over a week. She looked more groggy and disreputable than ever, cocked up on one side. All her livestock, human and animal, had abandoned her, and a hundred or so negroes were paddling round in the water with long ropes, trying to float her two big barges of merchandise. Tin Lizzie herself had the patient, resigned air of a tired donkey. I was glad I had not been well enough to return with her; she had been a dangerous travelling companion, for as I learnt 251

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU later, she had carried yellow fever as her passenger, and most days had had to pause while a shapeless bundle was cast ashore as a hostage to the vulture and the jackal. Not that that would worry one very much. It is amazing how callous one becomes, not only to other people's sufferings, but to any form of risk, in a country where a human life is such a tiny thing poised against the great forces of nature. A few days later I travelled for four hours in the same compartment with a man on the opposite seat dying of typhus, and in view of the calm attitude of the other white passengers I had not the face to move into another carriage. Sometimes one listens with horror to the accidents or death of people whom one has never seen or heard of that the friends of those people tell almost as a jest, or at most as a matter of gossip. The last few days of the journey seemed neverending. The crew were tired and worked lazily. The river had shrunk to half its natural width, judging by the banks of golden sand that stretched wide on either side. I have never seen sand so brightly golden ; I suppose it was beautiful, but to strained, sore eyes it made just a violent patch of glittering, cruel brilliance to shrink from. I was obliged to hang damp cloths along the sides of the boat inside, as if one's flesh touched any part of the framework it was scalded. By now the nights, away from the influence of the Sahara, were very nearly as hot as the day, and infinitely more wearisome. The moon had waned, and it was very dark. As ever at nighttime, each misery of the day was intensified a hundredfold, and during sleepless hours, to a mind that ran riot in a moribund, inert body, the great continent that loomed round one in the darkness seemed like a monstrous beast that 252

THE END OF THE ROAD played with one, that waited, licking its lips, for the moment when it should elect to smother one, and devour one at its leisure. Sometimes up in the northern desert, tormented with sand and sun, defeated by the country and its people, I have hated the Sahara as, punily proud human, one hates the thing one cannot conquer. But I have never feared it. Here in the darker heart of Africa I have feared, not anything corporal or real, not anything animal, human, or tangible, not illness or death even, but the spirit of her. Once, between sleeping and waking, in a kind of half- conscious nightmare, it seemed to me that the wailing laugh of a hyena on the bank was the wailing of my own soul, caught in the toils. The last time I saw a thermometer in the chaland it registered over fifty-four degrees centigrade at three in the afternoon-that is to say, about 1290 Fahrenheit-a very dry heat that withered me and made me feel like a parched pea that would rattle if shaken; a heat that affected the nerves pretty badly. I used to think to myself: " If only I could feel cool for an hour, or even for ten minutes, I could go on with it," as an insomniac sighs for a moment's sleep, as Lazarus did for a drop of water. In a temperate climate like our own we do not give much serious thought to the place that we have been threatened with as a penalty for wrongdoing, or have any very serious apprehensions about it. I have even heard people make jokes about " a warm climate." They would not if they had been to the Soudan in the hot season ! Indeed, I made a pretty thorough stocktaking of my own past life, and decided that nothing I had done was bad enough! And yet, as one by one we floated past familiar landmarks, and evidences of civilisation became :253

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU more frequent, I again began to be conscious of a queer regret. Though every inch of my body was craving for the fleshpots, though one part of me remembered the ice and the punkahs and the cool drinks in long glasses of Bamako, and a trunkful of clean frocks and silk stockings at Dakar, another part was rebelling, was looking back down the long, shining water-road as a dog looks back after rabbits. I had said time and again: "Three, two days more, and we reach Koulicoro," yet, as the remaining days dwindled into hours, though my eyes looked ahead, the rest of me hung back. Is it atavism or decadence that the wild places of the world get such a grip on some people ? In late years, since I have travelled, if not off, at any rate on the fringes of the map, I can believe in Mowgli, in Tarzan, and a host of the other dear atavistic myths-a realisation at once illuminating and depressing! And this time the road lay behind me irrevocably, broad, shining, and treacherous. As the wooded red valleys blotted out the grey monotony of "up there" the track of it became blurred, indistinct, undetailed, as a road that is trodden and used up, where no new signposts point the way to the unknown. Only, 'way back at the cross-roads I knew that it ran on for ever and ever south, and wondered if Allah would one day let me travel it. I could see it in imagination, and hear it call me, very faintly, and I knew equally that later, when for days, and weeks, and months, the memory of it had been blotted out and blurred by a host of busy, teeming things, that it would still call at incongruous moments, sometimes softly, insidiously, sometimes with the merciless blare of a trumpet, with a veiled reproach that so early and so easily I had turned back. It was on the hottest moment of the hottest 254

THE END OF THE ROAD day of all that we crawled into Koulicoro, a little dead village now, with a feeble trickle of sluggish water running through great sand-flats, its oddly shaped craft embedded, lop-sided, high and dry, till next rainy season. Never did anything seem so luxurious as a sit-down luncheon in the bungalow of a kind Frenchman in a world that no longer rocked, or grunted, or squeaked, and a broad divan with soft cushions to wallow, on afterwards. The little narrow-gauge train that at eight bumpy miles an hour conveyed me into Bamako next morning seemed unreal, monstrous, almost frightening, and Bamako itself, with its population of four hundred white inhabitants, civilisation let loose. I did not realise how far I had lapsed from the manners of polite society till at tea among a group of the local great ones I unconsciously emptied the dregs of a cup of coffee over my shoulder on to the floor! I spent five days at Bamako, waiting for the down-country train, resting and curing a variety of minor ailments, and taking bath after bath at the house of an angelically kind young Englishman, head of Walkden's trading firm. I wanted to return to the coast through French Guinea, but to my great regret it was too late in the year, I was too " done" and too hurried. Three days by train and car, memorable for nothing but one of the nastiest motor-smashes I have ever witnessed, and the messiest and most wholesale slaughter of a family of cows, who, placidly grazing, ran our train off the lines, and the Atlantic Ocean looked me in the face at Dakar, where everyone seemed rather disappointed that I had failed to fulfil the lurid programme they had mapped out for me. Three days later I was at sea, northward bound, 255

THE ROAD TO TIMBUKTU bucketed and tossed, with a salt-laden Atlantic gale blowing fresh health and strength into every tired limb, and nerve, and muscle; blowing away the memories of Africa, its dreams and hard realities, its violences and stupefying calms; blowing away, too, but only for awhile, the memory of its roads-the roads that never end. THE END 256

MAP

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INDEX OF PLACES A Adrar, 33, x83 Agadas, 178, 179 Ain Sefra, 170 Aka, 103 Algeria, 28, 102, 110, 123, 142, 163, I64, 168, 187 Ambidedi, 47, 48 Arouan, 149 Atlantis, 173 Atlas Mountains, 29, 33, 170, 182 B Bale du Levrier, 40 Bamako, 21, 49, 52, 97, 100, 254, 255 Bandiagara, ioo Bani River, 96, 100, 219 Barguish, I8o Bel Abb6s, I68, 170 Beni Isguen, 175 Bilma, 178, 179 Biskra, 19, 171, 172, 175, 183 Bou Saada, 176 Bornou, 54, 18o C Cap Blanc, 40 Cape Verde, 15, 17, 18 Caramance, 25 Chad, Lake, 54, io8, 161, x8o Charlottesville, 96 Chenini, 178 Colomb Bechar, 170 D Dagana, 28, 43 Dakar, 14, 15, 25, 30, 43, 44, 49, 51, 56, 73 Dh6bo, Lake, 103, 209 Dienn6, 51, 135, 139, 140, 153, 218 Dir6, xo8 Djelfa, 176 Djerba, 178 Douirat, 178 E El Golea, 174 El Juf, 33, 143 Eloued, 178 F Fagubine, Lake, 103 Fal~m6, River, 47 Fez, 40, 142, 144 Fezzan, 177, 18o, 18z Figuig, 170 G Gab~s, 178 Gao, 52, 54, 58, 120, 139, 140, 146, 148, 154 Ghadam6s, 132, T77, 194 Ghardaia, 175 Ghat, 132, 177, 194 Gloumaceren, 178 Goree, 19 Gorges de Chiffa, 173 Goundam, 120, 141 Gour, 170 Guermessa, 178 H Hamtagel, 138 Hodna, 176 Hoggar, 171, 174, 177 Hombori, 120 Idinen, 194 Igidi, 170 In Salah, 174 Isser Ber, 103

INDEX OF PLACES J Jeddah, 77, i8o Jemen, 152 K Kabara, 113, 140, 148, I6I, 209 Khayes, 28 Kokia, 152, 153 Kouakourou, 92, 93, 218 Koulouba, 49 Koulicoro, 56, 58, 61, 249, 255 L Laghouat, 175 Lagos, 242 M Marrakech, 40, 142 Mauritania, 22, 24, 25, 29, 33, 104, 142, 148, 157, 168 McMahon, 170 Mecca, 30, 56, 77, 132, 133, 179, i8o Mogador, 142 Mopti, 95, 96, 155, 204, 218, 249 Morocco, 49, 54, 78, 139, 150, 154, 168, 169, 170 Moursouk, 178, 179, 18o N Nalout, 177 Niafunk6, 103, 107 Niger, 8, 20, 22, 25, 27, 28, 50, 54, 55, 56, 58, 61, 62, 69, 73, 8o, 86, 89, 96, ioo, 103, 110, 113, 140, 141, 152, 153, 176, 178, 18I, 184, 196, 203, 209, 211, 213, 214, 217, 221,235, 244, 246 Nile, 51, 62, 152, 153 0 Oran, 170 Ouargala, 172, 174 Oulata, 139, 145, 149, x68 Our' Oumaira, 114 P Podor, 28, 29, 30, 33 Port Etienne, 40 Rufisque, 22 S St. Louis, i6, 22, 24, 28, 30, 43, 62, 132 Sansanding, 89, 148 S6gou, 52, 68, 83, 89, ioo, io8, 251 Senegal, River, 25, 29, 47, 62 Sidjilmassa, 176 T Tafilalet, 142, 148 Tameracet, 164 Tambacounda, 47 Tamentit, 168 Tanezruft, 168, 171 Tangier, 54 Taoudeni, 40, 143, 168 Timbuktu, 7, 1I, 12, 14, 20, 30, 51, 52, 54, 63, 71, 102, 103, io8, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, II6, 181, 183, 198, 218, 221, 222, 223, 242 Touat, 142, 149, 168, 176 Touggourt, 163, 173, 174 Tripoli, 143, 149, 168, 177, I8o Tunis, 142, 168, 178, 179 262

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