The almamy soon informed Caillié of an opportunity for him to go to Timeh, whence a caravan was about to start for Jenneh. The traveller then entered the province of Bambarra, and quickly arrived at the pretty little village of Timeh, inhabited by Mohammedan Mandingoes, and bounded on the east by a chain of mountains about 350 fathoms high.
When he entered this village, at the end of July, Caillié little dreamt of the long stay he would be compelled to make in it. He had hurt his foot, and the wound became very much inflamed by walking in wet grass. He therefore decided to let the caravan for Jenneh go on without him, and remain at Timeh until his foot should be completely healed. It would have been too great a risk for him in his state to travel through Bambarra, where the idolatrous inhabitants of the country would be pretty sure to rob him.
"The Bambarras," he says, "have few slaves, go almost naked, and are always armed with bows and arrows. They are governed by a number of petty independent chiefs, who are often at war with one another. They are in fact rude and wild creatures as compared with the tribes who have embraced Mohammedanism."
Caillié was detained at Timeh by the still unhealed wound in his foot, until the 10th November. At that date he proposed starting for Jenneh, but, to quote his own words, "I was now seized with violent pains in the jaws, warning me that I was attacked with scurvy, a terrible malady, all the horrors of which I was to realize. My palate was completely skinned, part of the bone came away, my teeth seemed ready to fall out of the gums, my sufferings were terrible. I feared that my brain might be affected by the agony of pain in my head. I was more than a fortnight without an instant's sleep."
To make matters worse, the wound broke out afresh; and he would have been cured neither of it nor of the scurvy had it not been for the energetic treatment of an old negress, who was accustomed to doctor the scorbutic affections, so common in that country.
On the 9th January, 1828, Caillié left Timeh, and reached Kimba, a little village where the caravan for Jenneh was assembled. Near to this village rises the chain erroneously called Kong, which is the general name for mountain amongst the Mandingoes.
The names of the villages entered by the travellers, and the incidents of the journey through Bambarra, are of no special interest. The inhabitants are accounted great thieves by the Mandingoes, but are probably not more dishonest than their critics.
The Bambarra women all wear a thin slip of wood imbedded in the lower lip, a strange fashion exactly similar to that noticed by Cook amongst the natives of the north-western coast of America. The Bambarras speak Mandingo, though they have a dialect of their own called Kissour, about which the traveller could obtain no trustworthy written information.
Jenneh was formerly called "the golden land." The precious metal is not, however, found there, but a good deal is imported by the Boureh merchants and the Mandingoes of Kong.
Jenneh, two miles and a half in circumference, is surrounded by a mud wall ten feet high. The houses, built of bricks baked in the sun, are as large as those of European peasants. They have all terraces, but no outer windows. Numbers of foreigners frequent Jenneh. The inhabitants, as many as eight or ten thousand, are very industrious and intelligent. They hire out their slaves, and also employ them in various handicrafts.