Next morning I said I wanted to go to T’intellust. We set off up the main valley in an east to north-easterly direction; it was filled with big trees and had a series of small villages on either bank. After riding for some hours Sidi turned to me and asked me if I wanted to go to T’intellust village or to the House of the Christians. I supposed the latter was some old French Camel Corps camp, but expressed mild curiosity about it. I asked him why, particularly, it was so called. Sidi replied that in the olden days when his father was alive, he had told him that some Christians had come to the valley and had lived with the chief Annur. This interesting information decided me to make for the House of the Christians, which proved to be not so very far from T’intellust village itself, a settlement of “B type” stone houses with a few enclosures and brushwood huts. It lay on the north side of the great bed, which here was several hundred yards broad and contained many large trees between various flood channels. As we approached a group of large trees south of the village I saw some piles of brushwood. They turned out to be the ruins of two thatch huts. I dismounted, tethered the camels and again questioned Sidi, who repeated his story, adding that the Christians were three white men of whom he supposed I knew, for they had not been French. Because they were great men and friends of Annur their houses had neither been inhabited nor pulled down since they went away. Their dwellings had been left slowly to decay, but not before the place had been called after them, the House of the Christians.
Sidi had vouchsafed this information unsolicited; he had no idea of what I was coming to seek. There is no doubt that the ruined huts are the remains of the camp occupied by Barth and his companions in 1850. When they reached T’intellust after narrowly escaping massacre at T’intaghoda, they had camped on a low hill to the south of the village where Annur himself was living. Another attack, by robbers this time, took place there, and for greater safety they moved their camp rather nearer to his village. It was this second camp which I saw.
PLATE 43
T’INTELLUST
Little remains to-day of the falling huts. There was a small wooden drinking-trough and a semicircle of stones to mark the east, to which their servants knelt in prayer. Three-quarters of a century have passed and gone, but their camp has never been touched, “because they were the friends of Annur,” who had given them his word that they would be safe in Air. Barth’s speculation was fulfilled when he said: “This spot being once selected the tents were soon pitched, and in a short time there rose the little encampment of the English expedition. . . . Doubtless this said hill will ever remain memorable in the annals of the Asbenawa as the ‘English Hill,’ or the ‘Hill of the Christians.’”[274] And so it has come to pass. The site induced in me a justifiable glow of pride. Her Majesty’s Government had sent the first successful expedition to Air. A German, Heinrich Barth, assisted by another compatriot of his, had been Richardson’s companions. Their memory survives in the land as the white men who were not French and who did not come as conquerors but as the friends of Annur. In the light of history, the broad-mindedness of the statesman who selected a German to assist Richardson in his work on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government is only less worthy of praise than the loyalty with which Barth carried out his task when lesser men would have considered themselves free to return to Europe after accomplishing only a fraction of what he achieved.
PLATE 44
BARTH’S CAMP AT T’INTELLUST
