French enterprise in Africa

by Hourst

Rice and mutton were the staples of our meals. Every morning Fili Kanté used to come to the chief of the mess and say, as if he were announcing a new discovery—“I shall give you mutton and rice to-day, Lieutenant.”—“And what else?” I would ask.—“An omelette.”—“And after that?”—“A nougat and some cheese.”

You read that word nougat? Well now, would you like to know what it was made of? Here is the recipe (not quite the same as that for Montélimar almond cake): Take some honey; make it boil; add to it some pea-nuts shelled and ground. Turn it all out on to a cold plate—the bottom of an empty tin will do if you have nothing else—and let it stand till cold.

It makes a capital dessert, I can tell you, especially when there is nothing better to be had.

You read, too, that we were to have cheese. We could generally get as much milk as we liked, and it made a first-rate cheese the second day; quite delicious, I assure you. We generally had cheese for all our mid-day meals, and nougat at supper or dinner, whichever you like to call it.

Sometimes, too, we fished, but there was not very much to be got out of the Niger near Fort Archinard; now and then, however, we succeeded in making a good haul, enough for a meal, with the use of a petard of gun-cotton.

The fish we caught in the Niger were much the same as those found in the Senegal. The kind the natives call “captains” and ntébés are very delicate in flavour, and often of considerable size. We once caught a “captain” at Gurao on the Debo, weighing nearly 80 lbs. It took two men to carry it, and when it was hung from a pole it trailed on the ground. But we rarely had such luck as this at Fort Archinard.

Another kind of fish, called the machoiran, with very flat jaws, was to be found in the mud and ooze of the Niger, but beware of eating its flesh. If, it is said, you cut the fat off its tail (Heaven only knows if it has any), by mistake, at full moon, and then drink some fresh milk, and sleep out of doors for the rest of the night on a white coverlet, and then in the morning drink a basin of water, you will surely catch leprosy. I don’t suppose the lepers of Say had really taken all these precautions to ensure having the disease.

I must add that there is one thing which all travellers in Africa will find very useful. I allude to the Prevet tablets of condensed food. We can justly testify to their efficacy, whether they are Julienne, carrots, Brussels sprouts, pears, or apples. They are light, easily carried, and easily divided. To have used them once is recommendation enough, but it is necessary to know how to prepare them, and not to follow Baudry’s example, who one day served us some Prevet spinach, which tasted for all the world like boiled hay. If ever you travel with him, don’t make him chief of the commissariat.

In the morning we also worked at making our map, for we should certainly never have been able to finish it in Paris in the limited time we should be allowed for it. We made a duplicate copy of the map, grosso modo, from Timbuktu to Say, to guard against the possible loss of one of the barges. Then came the time for taking our daily dose of twenty centigrammes of quinine dissolved in two centilitres of alcohol, which, truth to tell, was anything but pleasant to the taste. Even Abdulaye himself, who could swallow anything, made a wry face at this terrible mixture; but to help us to digest the everlasting mutton and rice boiled in water, and to keep down the symptoms of fever which threatened us all, nothing could be better.