On the 24th November 1830 the dull thunder of the Atlantic rollers breaking on the shore came like sweetest music to the travellers’ ears, growling a gruff but hearty welcome, and soon the sea itself lay before them—its cool healthy breezes fanning them with delicious touch, its gleaming limitless expanse fair as a glimpse of heaven.
The Niger mystery was solved at last, and the river portals thrown wide open to the world, never again to be closed.
[CHAPTER XXVIII.]
FILLING UP THE DETAILS.
While Clapperton and Lander were thus bringing the work of Park to a successful conclusion, and proving the accuracy of M‘Queen’s geography of the Niger basin, there were others at work in the region which the labours and death of their great pioneer had made classic ground. Major Laing, in the course of a Government mission, had travelled from Sierra Leone to Falaba, in the country of Sulima, and ascertained that the Niger took its rise in the Highlands of Kurauka, some 70 miles south-west of Falaba, and not more than 150 miles east of Sierra Leone. The river itself he was prevented from reaching, but none the less did he come under the irresistible influence of its fascination.
More than ever had Timbuktu and the Niger become names to conjure with, as well as to infect men with a species of reckless self-sacrifice that no amount of past experience, prudence, or common sense could dispel. As in the case of Lander, and others of his predecessors, having once tasted the bitter-sweet of African exploration, there could be no rest for Major Laing until he had gathered again the magic fruit. Accordingly, after an interval of three years, he once more set forth, determined to carry his cherished dreams into realisation.
Timbuktu and the Upper Niger were the goals of his journey. Like Denham and Clapperton, he took Tripoli as his starting-point. Thence he passed south-west to Ghadamis and the oasis of Twat. Between the latter and Timbuktu lay the wild wastes of the Sahara—never trodden by man without extreme risk of encounter with plunder and bloodshed-loving nomads, and death from thirst or privation. Even these factors of an African journey had their wild attraction for men of Laing’s temperament, adding a sauce piquante, as it were, to the otherwise monotonous march and daily routine of worry and privation. To such, too, the frowning immensity of the Sahara—the frightful desolation which marks its every feature—and the flaming sun and lurid heavens that hang above it, have elements which strike them with the profoundest feelings of awe, and leave an indelible impress on their minds.
For sixteen days after leaving Twat, Laing underwent all these sensations in their most striking form; and that his experiences of desert travel might be complete, he was attacked at night by a party of Tuareg marauders, and left for dead, with no less than twenty-four wounds. Thanks, however, to the secret elixir of heroic minds and the soundness of his constitution, he miraculously recovered, and undismayed, continued his way to Timbuktu, which was reached on the 18th August 1826.
Laing was the first European who had ever entered that historic city, which for four centuries had been the loadstone of kings, merchants, and savants. He arrived in an unhappy hour. Only a short time before the first waves of the approaching tide of Fulah influence had entered the region of the Upper Niger. Already Timbuktu had felt its strange power, though resenting the political position usurped by the ministers of the new revival.