It is eleven o’clock. One wonders if London is looking quite so spiritual just now, with its flaming lights, its emptying theatres, its streets thronged with jostling, restless crowds.
CHAPTER VI
A RAGOÛT OF THINGS SEEN AND FELT
Some things detach themselves, as it were, from the general background, rooting themselves in memory. Such, the rise in the road beyond which the first of the great Mohammedan towns of the north lay concealed. Bida, the capital of the Nupes, the centre of an active trade, known for its handsomely embossed, if unsubstantial, brassware; known, too, for its rough glass bangles of black or dull blue, made out of nothing more romantic than old bottles melted in native furnaces kept going by the blowers who, when the stuff is sufficiently liquid, twirl it round a stick until the desired shape is attained; known, too, for its special species of kola—the labozhi, highly esteemed throughout Nigeria, requiring shade and a rich, deep loamy soil to bring it to perfection. Until the British occupation the cultivation and sale of the labozhi kola were the prerogative of the ruler, the Emir, who must now be content with a tenth of the crop, and let his subjects have a chance. Past a Fulani cattle encampment; past flat country covered with rice fields; past rustling fields of guinea corn ready for the cutter, with heads towering eleven feet in height; past clumps and dotted specimens of shea butter trees, in the branches of many of which are fixed calabashes for the bees; past the weird red clay monuments of the white ants dotting the plain; along the rough pitted, red dusty road, and so on until the rise. And then, between us and the rambling city, with its decaying walls, its wide central avenue, and its umbrageous trees, its masses of blue robed men and women with their henna-dyed teeth and picturesque head-dress, a cloud of dust, and borne down the wind blowing towards us the blare of trumpets and the rattle of drums.
DUG-OUT ON THE KADUNA MANNED BY NUPES.
“SILHOUETTING PERCHANCE A GROUP OF PALMS.”
The great Mamodu himself, once a notorious slave raider and the perpetrator of innumerable infamies, has elected to ride out and meet us. Surrounded by two or three dozen notables and officers of his household, by a scarlet and green robed bodyguard, by four mounted drummers and two mounted trumpeters; ambling gently beneath a large umbrella of many colours held over his head by an attendant, and clad from head to foot in green-grey robes, with a turban of the same colour, Mamodu’s tall, powerful figure and olive complexion—a Nupe with Fulani blood—emerges from the crowd. Trumpets—long thin trumpets blown lustily and not inharmoniously—blare, drums beat, horses curvet and try to bite one another’s necks. Mamodu and his escort dismount and do their gaisua (salutation). We dismount also, advance, shake hands, and become the target for a hundred pairs of dark pupils in bloodshot, whitish-yellow balls, which glare at us over the lower part of dark blue turbans swathed across chin and mouth and nose, while the introduction formally proceeds to the accompaniment of many a guttural “Ah! Um, Um, Um!” At a word from the stalwart gentleman in grey we could be cut down in a couple of minutes with these long, fierce, leather-sheathed swords which hang at every hip. In point of fact, we are a great deal safer on this African road than we should be crossing Trafalgar Square. Presently we shall see the process, here conducted by one Englishman—trusted, and even liked for his own sake, by the people—aided by an assistant, of turning ci-devant slavers and warriors into administrators. In his work this Englishman relies for the pomp and panoply of power upon three policemen, one of whom is old and decrepit. The Bida division covers 5,000 square miles, and Bida itself counts 35,000 souls. The facts suggest a thought or two.