Exploration of Aïr

by Angus Buchanan

I did not miss any of my share of this sort of experience when the day came for me to set out from Kano—I don’t think anyone does. Camels and their Tuareg drivers were in my camp at Farniso ready to start on the morrow (12th January). That evening trouble began: the camel-men, not having finished their private bargaining in Kano and seeking an excuse to delay, had put their heads together, with the result that they concocted a story that they had not enough rope to cope with the tying of the awkward loads of the white man—which was true, in fact, though anyone might know that it was not necessary to go to Kano to secure them with a village close at hand. However, knowing their homes were distant, and that it might be long before they had again occasion to visit Kano, I gave permission for one of them to go back, provided he would start there that night when the moon rose at 11.30 p.m., which he promised to do. Being easy-going and trusting at that time, which was before I had much knowledge of the plausible and sly-tongued Tuareg, I turned in and slept soundly—and so did the cameleer, for next morning I learned that he had not started for Kano until daylight. This meant that the whole morning was lost—not very pleasant when tents are down and everything you possess is bundled up and roped in camel-loads, and there is nothing left to do but sit on them and smoke innumerable cigarettes and inwardly curse your camel-men and your luck.

The camels were, in the meantime, turned at large to feed in the neighbourhood with their fore-feet hobbled, which was as it should be; and all was right until the man returned from Kano with more ropes and his purchases of cloth, and a cameleer hastened out to bring in the animals, but returned in about an hour to say that he could not find two of the camels.

At this stage everything seemed fated to go wrong on this day.

But there is a rift in the clouds even on the worst of days, and in the end the lost camels appeared in view, coming in at a breakneck pace before a mounted camel-man who had skilfully tracked them down in the sand for a long distance and rounded them up. The brutes, though their fore-feet were hobbled, had tried to return to their old haunts in Kano.

It was after 3 p.m. before we got loaded and away on this ill-fated day.

I had arranged before starting that we would camp at Fogalawa, 18 miles away, and it was well I did so, for, after starting out together on the road, I did not see the main part of the caravan again until midnight, since I remained throughout the journey with the tail-end of the line, where an obstreperous and unruly old female camel made the devil’s own trouble, and threw her load again and again with most vicious determination. The climax came close on sunset, when the camel-man and I were overheated and dust-grimed and angry over our exertions, and the cantankerous brute cut loose once again, and threw and shattered the chop-boxes and strewed the contents on the road. While bemoaning my ill-luck, and letting tongue run loose on the virtues (?) of our beast of burden, and at a loss to know what to do next, a native chanced to come up with some unloaded camels, and I was able to strike a bargain for a beast to take the place of the unruly one.

Thereafter the journey was a smooth one, but, nevertheless, I had lost so much time on the way that it was midnight before I came into camp behind the last camel, and had been nine hours on a journey that should ordinarily take five and a half to six and a half hours.

So much for the discrepancies of the “first day”; and now I must return to our starting-point, so that I may tell of the wayside. During the afternoon and through the night in the darkness we travelled over a broad roadway of loose shifting sand that held north through fairly open country that was, in general, under cultivation. Trees were plentiful, growing for the most part singly and not in close-set mass, but they do not impress one with height or stature at this season, though in the Rains the full-leaved trees of any size are imposing and conspicuous enough in most of the flat country between Kano and Kanya. No doubt the whole country has been covered with acacia bush at one time, with an odd large tree shooting above the dwarf forests here and there, and though the acacia bush has been cleared away to give place to cultivation, the big trees have been left standing, since to the toilers in the fields they are harbours of shade from the merciless sun.

Along the road a constant incoming string of caravans of camels and donkeys and oxen passed us, carrying bulging bales of ground-nuts to Kano, for the ground-nut season had begun, and unprecedented prices were being paid for them by the white man, which had created a widespread boom in the district and a tremendous wave of speculative excitement. It was a great year— 1920—of prosperity for the natives of Kano, this last fling of commercial extravagance at the end of the war—a rich year that, in the end, must have left its mark, for one could easily forecast the time to come, when there would be acute comparisons between the heyday of the boom and that other day when the boom must burst, and hearts be sore—for it is hard even for a native to come back to the solid old ground-level after he thinks he has reached a golden citadel in the clouds.

Next morning we continued on our way without any repetition of trouble with the animals, and the old camel, that had stubbornly refused to carry the white man’s boxes yesterday, to-day carried with ease a greater load of ammunition packed in native grass-woven bales. The brute had been nothing more than wildly scared of the strange articles that it had been set to carry.