OUR TETHERED MULES.
The mules are unharnessed or unsaddled, as the case may be, and tethered in a row by ropes fastened to one foot, whilst the carts are packed like artillery. Presently we shall take the animals to drink at a neighbouring stream, and then their food will be thrown down before them, and they will fling themselves upon it like gluttons, eating the grain at once, but chewing the straw for the rest of the day.
Just a glance now over the loads to see that all is right. Nothing is missing. That’s a good job! Meanwhile our black cook has set up his saucepan on three stones, and a folding table has been opened beside some rapidly constructed grass huts which smell delicious. Breakfast over, we give ourselves up to the delights of a siesta.
In the afternoon we go and look at the animals, who refreshed by their rest, joyfully prick up their ears at our approach. They are good beasts, these mules, or Fali-Ba (big asses), as the negroes call them. They were torn from their native land, Algeria, huddled together between-decks on some crowded boat, where they suffered much from the motion, and were then taken to Kayes, where fresh martyrdom awaited them. Beneath the broiling sun to which they have never been accustomed, they have to drag their carts, as a convict does his chain. Instead of the barley and oats of their own land, they have to put up with hard and bitter millet, instead of scented hay they get the coarse rough grass of the Sudan. As long as they live—and that won’t be more than five years at the most—they will have to plod along the same road again and again, and cross the same marigots, until the moment of release comes, when they will fall between their shafts, and their emaciated bodies will be thrown aside in the bush, there to feast the hyæna and the jackal, whose jarring laugh and shriek so often disturb the rest of the weary traveller.
Was it the heat of the African sun, I wonder, which converted some of the members of our expedition into poets, and led to such outpourings as I quote below? I cannot say, but these are the words written by one of our party to the manes of the Fali-Ba, who have fallen beneath the burning sky of the Sudan. I pray critics to be merciful to these inter-tropical effusions.
THE TETHERED MULE.
With lean neck stretch’d toward the scatter’d grain,
He scents his provender with dainty air,
Casts one side glance at his companions there,
And beats with twitching ear a glad refrain.