My description will, I trust, illustrate something of the process employed with specimens collected and preserved in the field. You may already know them if you have been “behind the scenes” in an important museum, and have seen the wealth of research specimens that are there, carefully stored away from the strong rays of daylight so that their colour shall not fade. Drawer upon drawer of different species, all uniform in shape and labelled for the purpose: the Type specimens from the locality where the species was first discovered, and specimens from any other part of the world where it has since been found to exist; many rare and immensely valuable; many the absolute proof of vastly important records that have gone to establish the Natural History of the world, and valuable as the parchments of the historian or the relics of the antiquarian. There you may actually see how the collector makes up his skins in the field, and why they are made, and how the peoples of the world come to know all the creatures that inhabit it.
CHAPTER V
ZINDER
Zinder is a very strange town: strange because of its great size in so isolated a position; strange because of the nature of its site and old-world obsolete composition.
Kano, though it is the commercial metropolis of the Western Sudan, is first and foremost the capital of the province of the same name by reason of its large population and importance; and in like manner so we find Zinder, the capital of Damagarim, vastly larger than any fellow-village in the territory—a unique and imposing place, lost in a wilderness of great spaces and little peoples.
It is difficult to give those “back home” a fair conception of the solitude of Zinder. But let us suppose for the moment that England and Scotland are wilderness—without “made” roads, without mason-built houses or cottages—and all England covered with scrub-wood of a great sameness, wherein, concealed among the foliage, a few natives have settlements of primeval gipsy kind, while Scotland, we picture, in fancy, as a mountain-land of barren rock, with lowlands of desert sand, and almost no inhabitants at all.
Zinder is 140 miles from Kano, and Agades, at the southern foot of the Aïr mountains—and the only other old-world town on my route—is 257 miles north of Zinder. Suppose we take London to represent Kano, and set out to walk with a caravan of loaded camels toward the north of England. Days pass, and we see a few gipsy-constructed villages by the wayside—nothing more; but when we approach Sheffield, we are surprised to see a large fortified town appear before us, in the distance, standing in the great wilderness alone. This we can take to represent Zinder, for from London to Sheffield is about equidistant as from Kano to Zinder. If you would continue the journey as far as Edinburgh or Glasgow, you should imagine that you have passed from the scrub-wooded land into desert, and that either of those Scottish towns may represent Agades, for from Sheffield to Edinburgh is about equidistant as from Zinder to Agades. Therefore, to realise the solitude of Zinder, you require to imagine that Sheffield stands alone in her dignity in all the land between London and Edinburgh; and if you would picture even greater solitude, such as invests isolated Agades, you may imagine Edinburgh as a straggling town, not large, but steeped in ancient history, and that it is the only town in the length and breadth of Scotland, the earth’s surface of which we have imagined to be barren as sea-shore which the tide has left, and containing but a mere handful of inhabitants. By such comparisons, by likening with bold sweeps of the brush the home geography to that in the territories of Kano, Damagarim, Damergou, and Aïr, we arrive at the conclusion that there would only be three towns throughout the length of England and Scotland, which we have called London, Sheffield, and Edinburgh for convenience of comparative distance at which they are set apart, and nothing intervening excepting a number of diminutive hut-villages of natives among the scrub-wood of the land. By this time, if your imagination has run free, you have shovelled the countless towns on the map of England, Scotland, and Wales into the sea, so that you have just the three you require and the requisite solitude surrounding them. But that is not all you do: trains must vanish, and ships that visit your shores, and the ocean around you shall be deserted, and no strangers shall come to the land. . . . Then is the picture of Solitude such as it is in the Western Sudan drawn to completion, and you may realise something of the ever-present weight of seclusion that hangs over ill-fated places that lie remotely out of the world and seem to soliloquise of Eternity, since they are so much alone and so near to the earth.
“Ah, it is a sad land!” is an exclamation I have oftentimes heard escape from the lips of Frenchmen who hold appointments in the country, for their vivacious natures feel most keenly the solitude of the barren land which envelops them with a grimness akin to the bare walls of a prison, and holds out no hope of escape until the date of release decreed, the while many a homesick heart has passionate longing for freedom of expression in convivial and comprehensive surroundings. I have been informed by officers that the depression of solitude—no doubt combined with the unnerving influence of malaria—is so great, that some men cannot stand it, and have to be prematurely sent from the territory in a state of total mental collapse; especially is this the case, it is asserted, among the N.C.O.s, who have naturally a narrower field of interest outside their military duties than the officers.
Zinder, like Kano, is surrounded with great earthen walls of similar height and strength, and they are so prominent that they may be sighted at a long distance off, whether you approach the place from the south or the north, for the nature of the landscape is such that you descend to Zinder (altitude 1,640 ft.) from the south, and look on its imposing bulwarks whenever you top a distant ridge which lies about two miles away; while you ascend to it from the north, where, perched on the crown of a rocky ridge, it has the pleasing appearance of a fortified castle. Kano has no view equal to this northern aspect of Zinder, which is of charming outline, and which looks particularly picturesque in the shades of evening, and fantastic in the moonlight, for then are the barren, unsympathetic surroundings almost forgotten under the softening influence of night’s enchantment.
The site upon which Zinder stands is a curious one, insomuch that it is on a rising grade, which extends to the upper or most northern section of the town, which is on a low-rugged ridge extraordinary for the outcrop of giant boulders thereon, some of them many times the height of man, and lending an uncommon character to the surroundings of the habitations. The huts are built of clay-soil in the same manner as at Kano, for the community is, as there, largely Hausa, but the town in general, since it is smaller, is less bewildering in its narrow street-lanes, while there are markedly fewer inhabitants and less commotion. There is a circumstance in Zinder which is sad to relate: many of the dwellings are forsaken, and stand to-day in disrepair or in ruins, and a certain melancholy atmosphere of decline is there. Doubtless there are many causes for this decline, but those that are apparent and presently prominent are: firstly, that the lure of the rapidly ascending prosperity of industries and commerce of Kano has influenced many to desert the old town and go to settle in the great metropolis; and, secondly, that jurisdiction under military rule would appear to contain some element that is irksome to a certain number of natives, and so those who are not content, depart from under the immediate eyes of the administrative to seek, perhaps, a greater freedom in some distant bush-village, or in Hausaland in Nigeria. Natives of primitive environment are very easily influenced, and the act of changing abode an undertaking of small consequence, so that once a movement commences, others quickly follow the example of the leaders. My boys, Sakari and John, I fancy, expressed something of popular Hausa opinion when they quaintly proffered the conviction that “Kano is sweet past Zinder.”
