CARRIED OFF BY A LION.
As we were preparing to continue our march, some people came to meet us with some dismal intelligence from the neighbouring village of Geegyee. They said that on the previous night a Nubian soldier, who had laid himself down at the door of his hut, about five paces from the thorn hedge, had been seized by a lion, and, before he could raise an alarm had been dragged off no one knew whither. I now learnt, that this district had for some years been infested with lions, and that lately the casualties had been so frequent that the greater part of the inhabitants of Geegyee had migrated in consequence. The entire village would have been transplanted long ago, but the lions had been always found to follow every change of position. At seven o’clock in the morning we reached the ill-omened spot, the poorest of neglected villages, surrounded by woods. A thorn hedge formed its enclosure but nowhere could we discover an entrance. Although the sun was now high, the inhabitants, terrified lest the lions should be near, were still sitting either on the tops of their roofs or on the piles that supported their granaries. Speechless and depressed with fear, my people proceeded on their journey: every one kept his gun in hand, and the bearers, listening anxiously at every rustle that broke the stillness, peered carefully after any traces of the dreaded foe.
After a good day’s march we arrived at Aboo Sammat’s Seriba Dokkuttoo, lying on the extreme east of the frontier of the Bongo; it was about twenty miles from the chief Seriba Sabby, being somewhat further to the south. Half a league before we reached Dokkuttoo we had crossed a considerable, though only periodical stream, called the Mokloio. It was now five feet deep, meandering over a low flat fifty feet wide to join the Roah.
The Roah is a river of about the same size as the Tondy, with which it finally unites itself; it here makes a remarkable bend from south-east to north-east, but its general direction for some distance in this district is due north; the stream flowed between banks twenty or thirty feet in height; its average width was full forty feet, whilst it was only three feet deep; the velocity of the current was one hundred and twenty feet a minute. The grass flat covered by the Roah at the time of its inundation is not so wide as that covered by the Tondy at Koolongo; it measured barely half a league across, and I therefore conclude that this river carries northward a volume of water smaller than the Tondy.
The Bongo were most assiduous in securing the large supplies of fish offered by the Roah. Across the stream in many places was thrown a kind of weir like a chevaux de frise; this they stopped up with bunches of grass and so formed a small dam; over the open places were set creels, and altogether a rich produce rarely failed to be obtained. Some miles up the river, where the banks are shut in by impenetrable reeds, is a favourite resort of hippopotamuses, and it was said that, two years previously, the natives had killed no less than thirty in a single day. The brutes had been driven by the low condition of the water to seek the deeper basins of the river-bed, whence all escape was impossible.
We remained in Dokkuttoo for two days, of which I made the most by excursions in the neighbourhood. A small slave caravan, containing one hundred and fifty girls and children, happened to be passing through the Seriba; it was conducted by traders coming from Ghattas’s and Agahd’s territory in the east. The whole party huddled together for the night in a couple of huts, several old female slaves being entrusted with the supervision of the children. I was a witness of the arrangements for the evening meal, and, contrary to my expectation, found that everything was conducted with much system and regularity. The old Bongo people of the neighbouring villages had brought fifty bowls of dokhn-groats, and as many more containing sauces prepared from sesame-oil, Hyptis-pap, and dried and powdered meat or fish, and other comestibles of gourds and wild Melochia.
FORCED PROVISIONS.
My own entertainment was well provided for, and the agent had an extra bullock slaughtered in order that my little company should not proceed without the supply of meat necessary for the journey. Every mouthful of food that I swallowed in this unhappy country was a reproach to the conscience, but the voice of hunger drowned every higher emotion; even the bread that we ate had been forced from the very poorest in the season of their harvest when their joy, such as it was, was at its height; they probably had neither cow nor goat, and their little children were in peril of dying of starvation and only dragged out a miserable existence by scraping up roots. The meat, in the abundance of which we were revelling, had been stolen from poor savages, who pay almost a divine homage to their beasts, and who answer with their blood for the stubbornness with which they defend their cows, which they hold dearer than wife or child.
Leaving Dokkuttoo, we proceeded for three leagues to the south, passing through the light bushwood that skirted the left bank of the Roah. The woods lay close down to the river as it flowed between its rocky banks. We crossed the stream near some huts, already inhabited by Mittoo, of which the name of the local chief was Degbe. Further south our path again and again crossed wide meadow-flats containing water-basins almost as large as lakes, which, as they had no perceptible current, had every appearance of being ancient beds of the Roah. Several larger kinds of antelopes, water-bucks, and hartebeests appeared, and a herd of thirty leucotis challenged me to a chase. At night, at our bivouac in the forest, we enjoyed in consequence a fine feast of the savoury game. Between the Roah and the Rohl the previous uniformity of the rocks began to be broken by projections of gneiss and by scattered hills. About ten leagues from Ngahma we passed a remarkable spot of this kind, where huge blocks of stone rose in mounds from which colossal obelisks might be hewn. These elevated places alternated with extensive flats level as a table top.
Ngahma was Aboo Sammat’s most important settlement amongst the Mittoo. It lies in a S.S.E. direction from Dokkuttoo and derives its name from the elder of the people, who, with his twenty wives, resides at no great distance; by the natives it is called Mittoo-mor. From Ngahma I turned north-east towards Dimindoh, a small settlement of elephant-hunters belonging to Ghattas’s “Gebel company,” as the people style his establishments on the Bahr-el-Gebel. The district was the highest elevation between the Roah and the Rohl, the country being more diversified by defiles, clefts, and periodic streams than that which I had previously traversed. Dimindoh lay on the further bank of a little river called the Wohko, which, during our march, we had repeatedly to cross. The stream flows over a course of some seventy miles without any perceptible increase in its dimensions, a peculiarity that I have again and again observed in many other small rivers, which seem to flow across wide tracts of country unchanged in their condition by the affluence of any spring or running brook.