A tedious, trying night, spent without a roof over my head, seemed to fill up the cup of bitterness which I was destined to drink upon this tour of privation. In the darkness no grass could be discovered, and on account of the dampness of the atmosphere no fire could be kindled, so that it was entirely without protection from the wet and cold that I had wearily to await the following morning, when, half-perished by exposure, in spite of the continued storm, I resumed my way, now become more arduous than ever, because, as a result of the rain, it had become exceedingly slippery. The rain of this night had been quite an exception, and was very transient; it passed away, and the prevalence of the north wind, during the last three days overpowered by a current from the south-west, was for a time restored.
Never do I recollect having seen a more cheerful little people than the Sehre, if I may judge them by those who acted as my bearers. No mischance, no fatigue, no hunger nor thirst, seemed ever to take the smallest effect upon the happy temperament of these poor negroes. As soon as we halted they began their jokes and pranks. There was not a woe-begone countenance to be seen; groans and sighs were utterly alien to their disposition, and no sooner was their work over, toilsome as it was, than they began to play, like a lot of boys fresh out of school. Sometimes one would pretend to be a wild animal, and was chased by the others; or sometimes they would contrive and carry out some practical joke. Nothing seemed to entertain them more than to act the part of a great clumsy tortoise, and to waddle about on all-fours, accompanying their movements by all kinds of grunting and clacking noises. And all this jocoseness went on while their stomachs were empty. “If we are hungry,” they would say, “we sing, and forget it.”
We proceeded thirteen miles still eastward from the Telle, and then the wooded country, which had continued in an unbroken succession of thick trees of every variety all the way from the Pongo, came to an end. It was succeeded by extensive steppes and marshy lowlands, which every here and there was relieved by clusters of Terminaliæ. The lowland was bounded towards the east by a range of hills, the base of which we reached about four miles farther on. The direction of the elevated land lay from the south-east to the north-west.
Deviating now from the east a little more to the north, our route conducted us towards Ngulfala, a Seriba in Bongoland, about fourteen miles away. We had to make our way through a complicated system of rounded caps of gneiss, and to wind round flat-topped hills that gave the district the aspect of being a miniature mountain-chain, the source-land probably of the Ghetty and the watershed between that stream and the Pongo. The rise in the ground was very obvious. The highest of the rounded eminences, named Atyumm, was about 200 feet above our path, and at least 500 feet above the adjacent steppe below; it had a semi-spherical form, very like that of Gumango, near Bendo’s village, in the Niam-niam country.
NGULFALA.
Before reaching Ngulfala we had to cross the Ghetty, here a meagre stream, corresponding to the absorbing nature of the soil through which it flows. The distance between the spot and where we had crossed it at Bizelly’s Seriba is about forty miles, but the river presented just the same aspect—a broad, deep rift in the earth, with its water almost stationary in its pools. A considerable number of maraboo-storks were seen, either standing upon the banks or dipping into the water-holes for fish and mollusks (Anodontæ).
The altitude of the Seriba above the level of the sea was 1905 feet, about 500 lower than Dehm Adlan; but it should be observed that an accidental rise in the ground is made simply by the hill-system of Atyumm, itself nearly 500 feet, so that (without allowing anything for the cutting of the stream) the gradual descent of the land during the thirty or thirty-five miles that it extends eastwards from the Pongo must amount altogether to just about 1000 feet.
The lower level of the soil becomes more obvious still over the next stretch of country. The nearest Seriba in Bongoland, called Moody, belonged, like the one before it, to the possessions of Agahd; and the thirteen or fourteen miles that led us there brought us over a tract of perpetual marshes, the flat steppes that divided them being traversed by five khors that we found perfectly dry. The names of these khors were reported to me as the Mingangah, the Bolongoh, the Boddoowee, the Doggolomah, and the Koddahirara, of which, if the testimony of my Bongo bearers is to be trusted, the two former take their course northwards to the Ghetty, and the three latter make their way southwards to the Wow.
In Moody I took a day’s rest, as I had done in Ngulfala. I required it very much, as I had taken a violent cold, and felt altogether weak and out of sorts. Throughout the time we halted there was a strong north wind blowing, very keen and chilly.