A ROCKY HILL NEAR KENDADJI.
What a passage it was! We pushed on, actually moored, so to speak, to an anchor and a grappling-iron, using first one and then the other, sometimes both according to circumstances. We kept on bumping against rocks, here, there, and everywhere, but fortunately we were going too fast to do the boats much harm. Then we had to fling ourselves into a perfect labyrinth of obstacles, striking against them again and again, but fortunately without making any fresh holes in our much-tried barks. Still more rocks ahead! Quousque tandem!
At about eleven o’clock on the 22nd we reached Tumaré. The chief at first refused to give us guides, but a liberal present won him over.
Things seemed likely to be worse rather than better, for we had not gone more than four and a half miles during the whole of the 23rd. The river was now but a river in name; a mere maze of narrow channels between innumerable islets covered with fine trees and millet. The bed of these channels is encumbered with rocks, amongst which our barges had to follow a serpentine course for which they were little fitted. At two o’clock we reached the village of Desa, and the evening was wasted in a palaver without result. A feeling of sullen hostility against us was everywhere manifested, and the first question the natives asked was whether we were the same white men who had come the year before. At last, however, we succeeded in getting some guides who took us as far as Farca.
Our coolies told us that the crocodiles lay their eggs at this time of the year, when it always rains and blows hard. On this account we were obliged to remain anchored opposite Desa all the morning. We started at two o’clock in the afternoon. What a river we had to pass down! Before we arrived at the anchorage, where we remained for the night, we had to go through a pass not much more than five yards wide.
The people of Desa, we were told by the natives above Gao, are Kurteyes of a very fierce and inhospitable disposition, and, truth to tell, their first reception of us was anything but cordial. “What had we come to their village for?” they asked. “Why had we not stopped at a bigger one?” By dint of the exercise of much patience, and the use of many soothing arguments, we gradually succeeded in appeasing them. They gave us an original version of the fight which had taken place with Captain Toutée the year before. It was not, according to them, with the Tuaregs that he had fought, but with the people of Sinder.
All the negroes of the riveraine districts of the Niger wear the same kind of costume, including the veil, and use the same kind of weapons as the Tuaregs, which explains the mistake. The Tuaregs had been awaiting the expedition at Satoni, intending to attack it, but it had made a détour and avoided them. The Wagobés of Sinder by order of Bokar Wandieïdu, and also because a sentinel had by accident killed a nephew of the chief of the village, attacked the canoes of the Toutée expedition, attributing what they thought was a retreat to fear. Fifty natives were killed, and the memory of their fate was still fresh.
About noon the next day we were opposite Satoni, and we anchored the same evening near the right bank, where we could make out some lofty dunes on which were perched three villages and a Tuareg encampment.
I had a presentiment that we had now reached a critical and most perilous moment of our expedition. All the defiance we had recently met with, and the unwillingness to help us was of bad augury, and we were, as a matter of fact, entirely at the mercy of the natives.