Part 12

There are three great classes of coral reefs--atoll, barrier, and fringing. Now, the utmost depth at which corals can construct reefs is between twenty and thirty fathoms, so that wherever there is an atoll a foundation must have originally existed within a depth of from twenty to thirty fathoms from the surface. The coral formation is raised only to that height to which the waves can throw up fragments and the winds pile up sand. The foundation, such as a mountain peak, therefore, must have sunk to the required level, and not have been raised, as has hitherto been generally supposed.

I venture, therefore, to affirm that, on the theory of the upward growth of the corals during the sinking of the land, all the leading features of those wonderful structures, the lagoon-islands or atolls, as well as the no less wonderful barrier-reefs, whether encircling small islands, or stretching for hundreds of miles along the shores of a continent, are simply explained. On the other hand, coasts merely fringed by reefs cannot have subsided to any perceptible amount, and therefore they must, since the growth of their corals, either have remained stationary or have been upheaved.

The chronometrical measurements were completed in the Indian Ocean by a visit to Mauritius, and thence, voyaging around the Cape of Good Hope, to the islands of St. Helena and Ascension, in the Southern Atlantic, and to the mainland of Brazil at Bahia and Pernambuco, from which the course was set for home. The Beagle made the shores of England at Falmouth on October 2, 1836, after an absence of nearly five years.

On a retrospect, among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, including the spectacles of the Southern Cross, the Cloud of Magellan, and the other constellations of the Southern Hemisphere, the glacier leading its blue stream of ice overhanging the sea in a bold precipice, the lagoon-islands raised by the reef-building corals, the active volcano, the overwhelming effects of a violent earthquake--none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man, whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Tierra del Fuego, where Death and Decay prevail. Both are temples filled with the varied productions of the God of nature. No one can stand in those solitudes unmoved and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. And so with the boundless plains of Patagonia, or when looking from the highest crest of the Cordilleras, the mind is filled with the stupendous dimensions of the surrounding masses.

FELIX DUBOIS

Timbuctoo the Mysterious

_I.--From Paris to the Niger_

Felix Dubois has a considerable reputation in France and on the European Continent generally as an African explorer. His sphere of travel has been confined to the Dark Continent north of the Equator. He first published in 1894 "Life on the Black Continent," but his reputation rests mainly on "Timbuctoo the Mysterious," issued in 1897, of which two English translations have appeared. Dubois' style is vivacious and picturesque, with a vein of poetic feeling in some passages. His "Early History of Northern Africa and Timbuctoo," of the architecture of which he has made a special study, is lucid; but in discussing the extension of the British and French spheres of influence and protectorates during the past century he betrays a certain measure of Gallic Anglophobia.

Having fallen asleep in a railway carriage on your departure from Paris, you awake six weeks later on a canoe-barge upon the Niger. The steamer lands you at the entrance to the Senegal, in a country which has belonged to France for centuries. The port of Senegal is Dakar, the finest harbour on the west coast of Africa, and from thence there is a railway to St. Louis. For eight days you travel up the Senegal river in a steamer to Kayes, the port and actual capital of the Sudan; and a narrow-gauge railway carries you from the Senegal to the Niger at Dioubaba.

This town is situated in the heart of lovely mountain and river scenery. The Bakoy river here breaks into a rocky waterfall, some hundreds of yards in length, full of rapids and foaming currents. The horizon is bordered by mountain-tops, and the river banks are covered by gigantic trees festooned with garlands of long creepers. The road from Dioubaba to Bammaku cuts, from east to west, the massive Foota Jallon range that separates the basin of the Senegal from that of the Niger, and is so abundantly watered that you fall asleep every night to the sound of some gurgling cascade.

It was not without a certain amount of emotion that I approached the great Niger. After days and days of travel a narrow path widens suddenly, and its rocky sides fall right and left, like the leaves of a door. A vast horizon lies at my feet, bathed in the splendours of a tropical sunset; and down there, in a plain of gold and green and red, shines a silver trail bordered by a line of darkness.

The Niger, with its vast and misty horizons, is more like an inland ocean than a river. I engaged for my voyage up-stream a boat which was a whimsical mixture of a European barge and an aboriginal canoe, in which a thatched hollow served me amidships as bedroom, dining-room, study, and dressing-room. A small folding bedstead was the only piece of furniture. The crew consisted of Bosos, the true sailors of the Niger, of whose skill, patient endurance, and loyalty I had full experience. Alone among them, travelling through an imperfectly conquered, sometimes openly hostile country, never once did I feel that my safety was in any way threatened.

Coming to Lake Debo, a fief of the Niger, we enter a sea of grass. Paddling being no longer possible, my Bosos crew, leaning heavily upon bamboo poles, push the boat vigorously through the grass, which, parting in front, closes together behind us with loud rustling and crackling. We are no longer upon the water, but seem to be sliding under a tropical sun over grassy steppes streaked with watery paths. These Bosos, living at a distance of nearly 900 miles from the coast, possess no idea of the sea, and the question of what becomes of the mighty Niger beyond the regions they know troubles them very little. One unusually intelligent Bosos, when asked what became of the river beyond the towns which he knew, or had heard of, down the Niger, said, "Beyond them? Oh, beyond them the fishes swallow it."

_II.--The Valley of the Niger_

The country lying to the south of Timbuctoo, which is on the threshold of the great Sahara desert, is the Sudan, otherwise called the Valley and the Buckler of the Niger. It is a vast region traversed to an extent of nearly 2,500 miles by one of the largest rivers in the world. This river rises in the Kouranko chain of mountains, and is really formed by two streams, the Paliko and the Tembi, which unite at a place called Laya. The more important of these is the Tembi, and the wood from which it springs is reputed sacred, and is the subject of innumerable legends and superstitions. Access to it is denied to the profane by the high priests and lesser priests, who represent the diety to mortals. The neighbouring kinglets refer to them before undertaking a war, or other act of importance, and the common herd consult them on all occasions of weight. The spirit of the spring, being eminently practical, will only condescend to attend to them through the medium of sacrifice, but the ceremonies are not very ferocious, merely oxen being offered, and not human victims, as in the neighbouring Dahomey.

The region of the source of the Niger is the land of heavy rainfall, and the slopes of the mountain ranges are channelled by innumerable cascades, rivulets, brooks, and rivers that carry off the heavenly overflow. These countries of the Upper Niger are radiant. Tropical vegetation spreads over them with the utmost prodigality. The river flings itself headlong over the entire low-lying region between Biafaraba and Timbuctoo, covering it and swamping it, until a steppe of barren sand becomes one of the most fertile spots in the universe. The Niger is to the Sudan what the Nile is to Egypt; but we find there not one delta, as in Egypt, but three. Thus a most complete system of irrigation is formed, and fertility is spread over thousands of square miles. The rise and fall of the waters is as regular as that of the Nile, and an infinitely greater distance is covered.

Bammaku is an important strategic centre, from which it is easy to send reinforcements to any part of the Sudan that may be momentarily threatened. This precaution is wise, for we do not really know how far we are masters of this splendid country, which is many times larger than France, and contains from ten to fifteen millions of people. There are only 600 Europeans, including officers and other officials, and 4,000 negroes are enrolled as foot-soldiers, cavalry, and transport bearers, while it requires an army of 40,000 men to maintain order in Algeria, about a fourth of the size of the Sudan.

Apart from the fertility of the soil for cereal crops, there are three kinds of trees which grow abundantly everywhere. The most interesting is the karita, or butter-tree, from the nuts of which a vegetable butter is extracted with all the delectable flavour of chocolate. Throughout the whole of the Sudan no other fatty substance is used. The second tree is the flour tree. The flour is enclosed in large pods, is of a yellow colour, rich in sugar, and is used in the manufacture of pastry and confectionery. The third is the cheese-tree, called _baga_ by the natives, from the capsules of which a fine and brilliant vegetable silk is yielded. The principal articles of commerce sent by Bammaku to Timbuctoo are the products of these trees, gold, and kola-nuts.

In the voyage up the river beyond Bammaku we passed the districts in which the principal towns are Nyamina, Sansanding, and Segu, in which are the large cotton-fields, from the produce of which the beautiful fabrics known as _pagnes de Segu_ are made, which are in great request in Senegal and the markets of Timbuctoo. Near Segu is an establishment known as the School of Hostages, instituted by the explorer Faidherbe for the education of the sons of kings and chiefs of Senegambia, to enable them to take part in home government, or to enter the civil and military services of Senegal and Sudan.

_III.--The Jewel of the Niger Valley_

Jenne is the jewel of the valley of the Niger. A vast plain, infinitely flat. In the midst of this a circle of water, and within it reared a long mass of high and regular walls, erected on mounds as high, and nearly as steep, as themselves. When I climbed the banks from my boat and entered the walls, I was completely bewildered by the novelty and strangeness of the town's interior. Regular streets; wide, straight roads; well-built houses of two stories instantly arrested the eye. But the buildings had nothing in common with Arabic architecture. The style was not Byzantine, Roman, or Greek; still less was it Gothic or Western. It was in the ruins of the lifeless towns of ancient Egypt, in the valley of the Nile, that I had witnessed this art before. Arrived at Jenne, the traveller finds himself face to face with an entirely new ethnographical entity--_viz._, the Songhois.

They themselves invariably told me that they came originally from the Yemen to Egypt on the invitation of a Pharaoh, and settled at Kokia, in the valley of the Nile, whence they spread westward to the Niger in the middle of the seventh century. They built Jenne in 765, made it the market of their country, and founded the Songhois Empire, which, under three distinct dynasties, lasted for a thousand years.

In the sixteenth century a marvellous civilisation appeared in the very heart of the Black Continent. The prosperity of the Sudan, and its wealth and commerce, were known far and wide. Caravans returning to the coast proclaimed its splendours in their camel-loads of gold, ivory, hides, musk, and the spoils of the ostrich. So many attractions did not fail to rouse the cupidity of neighbouring territories, chief among them being Morocco. El Mansour, sultan of Morocco, invaded the Sudan in 1590, and in a few years the fall of the Songhois Empire was complete. Two elements of confusion established themselves, and augmented the general anarchy--_viz._, the Touaregs and the Foulbes, the former coming from the great desert of Sahara, and the latter from the west. Both were pastoral nomads. A petty Foulbe chief, of the country of Noukouna, named Ahmadou, spread a report that he was of the family of the Prophet, and for the next eighty years the Sudan was given over to fire and sword by a succession of rulers who massacred and pillaged in the name of God. Jenne happily escaped serious ruin, because of its situation on an island at the junction of two tributaries of the Niger.

The houses of Jenne are built on the simple lines of Egyptian architecture, with splendid bricks made from clay procured near the town. The grand mosque was long famous in the valley of the Niger, and was considered more beautiful than the Kaabah of Mecca itself. It lasted eighteen centuries, and would have lasted many centuries longer if Ahmadou, the Foulbe conquerer, had not commanded its destruction in 1830. Jenne in the middle ages not only ranked above Timbuctoo as a city, but took a place among the great commercial centres of Islam. Jenne taught the Sudanese the art of commercial navigation, and her fleets penetrated beyond Timbuctoo and the Kong country. Regular lines of flyboats even now carry merchandise and passengers at a fixed tariff, and for a consideration of two and a half francs you can go to Timbuctoo, a twenty days' journey, and for three francs can send thither a hundredweight of goods. The characteristics of the people are sympathy, kindness, and generosity.

Here trades are specialised. Conformably with, and contrary to, Arab usage, it is the men who weave the textiles, and not the women. The latter do the spinning and the dyeing. Masonry is man's work--in negro countries it is the women who build the houses--and in the blacksmith's and other trades the craft descends from father to son.

_IV.--Timbuctoo, Queen of the Sudan_

The day of my departure from Jenne was occupied in receiving farewell visits from scores of friends, who first believed me a harmless lunatic as "the man with the questions," and then received me with affection. From Jenne to Timbuctoo we journeyed by boat for 311 miles in a labyrinth of meandering tributaries, creeks, and channels along the course of the Niger, and reached at last the Pool of Dai, whose waters appear under the walls of Timbuctoo itself; and then, a few miles further on, we arrived at Kabara, the landing-place and port of Timbuctoo.

Two things arrest attention on disembarking--the sand and the Touaregs. The sand, because you have no sooner set your foot on shore than you flounder about in it as if it were a mire; and it pursues you everywhere--in the country, in the streets, and in the houses. The Touaregs are impressed on you because, though you never see them, everything recalls them. The town is in ruins, but its wretchedness is overpowered by life and movement. The quays are astir with lively bustle, and encumbered with bales, jars, and sacks in the process of unloading. To travel from Kabara to Timbuctoo, only five miles distant, there is a daily convoy--medley of people, donkeys and camels, attended by twenty _tirailleurs_ with rifles on their shoulders.

An immense and vivid sky, and an immense and brilliant stretch of land, with the grand outlines of a town uniting the two. A dark silhouette, large and long, an image of grandness in immensity--thus appeared the Queen of the Sudan. She is indeed the city of imagination, the Timbuctoo of legends. Her sandy approaches are strewn with bones and carcasses that have been disinterred by wild beasts, the remains of the camels and other animals that have fallen and died in the last stages of the journey.

The illusion of walls, produced by the distinctness with which the town stands out from the white sand, disappears, and three towers at regular intervals dominate the mass. The terraces of square houses are now distinguishable, renewing the first impression of grandeur in immensity. We enter the town, and behold! all the grandeur has suddenly disappeared, though the scene is equally impressive on account of its tragic character rather than its beauty. And this is the great Timbuctoo, the metropolis of the Sudan and the Sahara, with its boasted wealth and commerce! This is Timbuctoo the holy, the learned, that life of the Niger, of which it was written, "We shall one day correct the texts of our Greek and Latin classics by the manuscripts which are preserved there." These ruins, this rubbish, this wreck of a town, is this the secret of Timbuctoo the Mysterious? It is a city of deliquescence.

Jenne had the vein of Egyptian civilisation; the origin of Timbuctoo has to be sought in a different direction, for her past is connected with the Arabian civilisation of Northern Africa--the world of the Berbers and all those white people whom we have known under the name of Touaregs in the Sahara, Kabyles in Algeria, Moors in Morocco and Senegal, and Foulbes in their infiltrations into the Sudan, who had been crowded back into the interior by the invasions of Phoenician and Roman colonists. So also, when the Moors were driven out of Spain back to Morocco, to find their ancient patrimony in the hands of Arabs, they were forced to prolong their exodus into the south, and became nomads about the great lakes on the left bank of the Niger, in the neighbourhood of Oualata and Timbuctoo, carrying with them the name of Andalusians, which they bear to the present day.

Touareg is a generic name for a large number of tribes descended from the Berbers. Being driven into the desert, to the terrible glare of which they were not accustomed, nor their lungs to its sandstorms, they adopted the head-dress of two veils. Being perpetually kept on the march, every social and political organisation disappeared, and they gradually lost all notion of law and order. Like the Jews, and all other people thrown out of their natural paths, their souls and brains became steeped in vice. Their nomadic life reduced them to the level of vagabonds, thieves, and brigands, and the only law they recognised was the right of the strongest. Travellers and merchants were their principal victims, and when these failed, they robbed and killed each other.

They adopted a vague form of Islamism which they reduced to a belief in talismans, and the Sudanese bestowed upon them three epithets which epitomise their psychology--"Thieves, Hyenas, and the Abandoned of God." Yet it was to these people that Timbuctoo owed its origin, for it was there that they established a permanent camp. It was under the dominion of Askia the Great, who drove the Touaregs out of the city, that Timbuctoo became the great and learned city whose fame spread even to Europe, and its apogee was reached in 1494-1591.

The decadence of the city began with the Moorish conquest in the latter year, and it became the scene of repeated incursions by various tribes--Touaregs, Foulbes, Roumas. Under the hands of a thousand tyrants the inhabitants were robbed, ill-treated, and killed on the least provocation. To avoid being pillaged in the open street, and seeing their houses despoiled, they adopted a new manner of living. They transformed their garments and dwellings, and ceasing to be Timbuctoo the Great, they became Timbuctoo the Mysterious. By these means the town acquired a tumble-down and battered appearance. Timbuctoo is the meeting place, says an old Sudanese chronicle, of all who travel by camel or canoe. The camel represents the commerce of Sahara and the whole of Northern Africa, while the canoe represents the trade of the Sudan and Nigeria.

A great part of the trade is in rock-salt, derived from the mines of Taoudenni, near Timbuctoo. Large caravans from Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli, numbering from 600 to 1,000 camels, and from three to five hundred men, arrive from December to January, and from July to August. Their freight represents from six hundred thousand to a million francs' worth of goods. Smaller caravans of sixty or a hundred camels arrive all the year round, and between fifty and sixty thousand camels encamp annually in the caravan suburb before the northern walls of the city. The city is simply a temporary depot, and the permanent population are merely brokers and contractors, or landlords of houses which are let to travelling merchants. The chief manufacturing industry of the city is exquisite embroidered robes, which cost from three to four thousand francs each, and are principally exported to Morocco.

An ancient Sudanese proverb says, "Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, and silver from the country of the white men, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuctoo." It would be an exaggeration to put the university in the mosque of Sankoré on a level with those of Egypt, Morocco, or Syria, but it was the great intellectual nucleus of the Sudan, and also one of the great scientific centres of Islam itself. Her collection of ancient manuscripts leaves us in no doubt upon the point. There is an entire class of the population devoted to the study of letters. They are called Marabuts, or Sheikhs, and from them doctors, priests, schoolmasters, and jurists are drawn.

_V.--The Romance of the Modern Conquest_

The prosperity of the French Sudan is so closely connected with that of its principal market that if the general anarchy had been prolonged in Timbuctoo all the sacrifices of human life and money France had made on her threshold would have remained sterile. The French Government decided that the sooner an end was put to the ruinous dominion of the Touaregs the better it would be. Up to the last moment England endeavoured to put her hand upon the commerce of Timbuctoo. Failing in her efforts from Tripoli and the Niger's mouth, she attempted to secure a footing by way of Morocco, and was installed towards 1890 at Cape Juby. It was then too late. French columns and posts had been slowly advanced by the Senegal route, and in 1893 Jenne was captured.

In the following year a flotilla of gunboats was dispatched while two columns of troops followed up to anticipate any concentration of nomad Touaregs, which might prevent the occupation of the Mysterious City. From the flotilla a detachment of nineteen men was landed. Of these only seven were Europeans, the remainder being Senegalese negroes. They had two machine guns with them, and, under the command of a naval lieutenant, Boiteux by name, they marched to the walls of Timbuctoo, and demanded that the rulers of the city should surrender it, and that they should sign a treaty of peace placing the country under the protectorate of France. The city was occupied, temporary fortlets were run up, and the nineteen mariners held them till January 10, 1894, when the first of the two of the French columns entered the town. Twenty-five days later the second column arrived.