AN EXHAUSTED BEARER.
On the following morning I was one of the hindmost of the caravan, and proceeded in the company of Ahmed, our guide, and a few stragglers. We had passed two or three watercourses, overhung with copse wood and now quite dry, when we came upon a Mittoo bearer, exhausted by his journey, lying by the wayside. He was a poor withered, consumptive creature, and seemed as if he were pretty near his last gasp. The other bearers had taken his burden from him, and, conscious that he could not carry it farther, had spoken a few cheering words and left him to his fate. By a fair day’s walking it was just possible he might regain his home, provided he could keep clear of the prowling lions on his way; but lions, it is known, have a remarkable scent for a poor lone and helpless man. Let a poor fellow be sick or wounded, and he incurs a double danger. Meanwhile, the people who were with me were all discussing the matter in their own way; they could not agree whether the poor wretch were really ill, or whether he was making pretence, and not a few of them declared that no sooner would he have the chance than he would be off homewards as nimbly as a hare. Ahmed at this point put in his word, and observed that a day’s journey farther in advance, the man would never have ventured upon being left behind by his company, for fear of finding his way to the caldrons of the Niam-niam. This observation of his immediately turned the conversation to the subject of the cannibalism of that people, of which I was far from being convinced.
I mentioned that Piaggia had resided a whole year among the Niam-niam without witnessing a single instance of the practice. Ahmed replied that Piaggia had only visited the district of Tombo, where the people were nothing like so bad as they were here in the east, and he asserted that I should only have to wait for a few days before proof strong enough would be opened to my eyes. He went so far as to declare, nay, he swore hard and fast, that he knew a case in which some bearers, who had died from fatigue on the way, had been buried, and that in the interval of his going and returning, their graves had been reopened. Naturally I objected to this statement, that only the day before he had branded himself as a liar, and that consequently his word deserved no confidence; he persisted, however, in his affirmation, and went on to argue that it was not possible that it was any beast that had disturbed the graves; stones had been removed to get at the corpses that they wanted. “Yes,” he added, “and I have myself seen them eat foul flesh,—vile, stinking, putrid flesh;” and as he spoke he made grimaces so horrid, that they had every sign of being the expression of a sincere abhorrence. Poor Ahmed! I can think I see him still upon those rocks, expressing his emotion by the gestures of his hands. I can even now hear the vehemence of his oaths. Poor Ahmed I as though he were to be the very first of victims to his own belief, within a few weeks he fell in a mêlée, his body could not be found on the scene of conflict, and where should it by any possibility have gone, except into the stomachs of the Niam-niam?
Farther onwards our progress was very much impeded by the high masses of dry grass which had escaped destruction when the steppes were burned. In the path, which is a mere narrow rift in the steppes, made by those in front forcing themselves through, grass-stems abound so hard and firm, that they are as unyielding as the stubble of a sorghum-field, and make a most disagreeable obstruction in the way. The chain of hills over which we had crossed the day before constitutes the present boundary between the hunting-grounds of the Bongo and the Niam-niam. Indications, however, are not wanting that until a few years ago, the country quite up to the base of the hills had been occupied by the Niam-niam; at present the first district of this people is reached at the farther bank of the Ibba. As we continued our march, we observed a number of half-burnt posts belonging to their huts, and every here and there amidst the grass, there were the remnants of the great wooden drums, which never fail in any village of this people.
A BATH IN THE IBBA.
At noon we arrived at the Ibba, as I have said the Upper Tondy here is named. About a hundred feet in breadth, but only three feet deep, it offers no difficulty in the way of being forded. The water was running from east to west at the rate of sixty feet a minute, and many blocks of gneiss were lying in the river-bed, which was bounded by gradually ascending banks. I found some deep water beneath a line of overhanging trees, and thoroughly enjoyed a refreshing bath; it was my mishap, however, to experience an inconvenience which occurred to me again more than once in the course of my travels. Half-an-hour I had to wait for my clothes, which had been carried off by the mistake of one of my servants, and taken to the caravan. In my position it was impossible to avoid the heat of the sun, and the skin of an European is too sensitive to endure without mischief a temperature which at the very least was 80° Fahr. in the shade, the ordinary heat of the district in a locality well shaded, but quite open to the influence of the wind.
Upon the southern side of the river were the first cultivated lands of the Niam-niam that we had yet seen, and which at that time were lying fallow. Shortly afterwards the ground suddenly rose for some hundred feet. The universal Sorghum is here the prevailing crop, but farther on it is in a very large degree replaced by Eleusine.
We next found ourselves upon the territory of a tolerably rich chieftain, named Nganye, who was on very friendly terms with Aboo Sammat. Meanwhile, for the first mile or two after we left the river, we observed that all the inhabitants vacated their abodes. The name of the superintendent of the district was Peneeo. In all regions like this, where the greater fear happened to be on the side of the natives, the same behaviour was repeated, and very often was accommodating to both parties. In these cases the people with their wives and children, their dogs and poultry, their guitars, their baskets, their pots and pans, and all their household articles, make off to the thickest parts of the steppes, which have been spared from the fire and reserved for elephant hunting; there they hide themselves in an obscurity which only the eye of a bird could penetrate. It will not rarely happen that they are betrayed simply by the cackling of their fowls.
Some of Mohammed’s soldiers, who had been sent on in front, returned and brought us tidings of welcome from Nganye, whose residence we hoped to reach on the following day. We found ourselves, however, already very comfortable, as Peneeo, the chief of the district, or Behnky,[44] had likewise, as Nganye’s representative, paid us his compliments; he had brought a supply of corn for the bearers, and a lot of poultry as a present to myself. In his retinue were a number of men, who, although they were not unlike the score of Niam-niam that I had seen at Sabby, yet here in their own home had an appearance singularly wild and warlike.
POPUKKY-GRASS.