Niger

/T To men in the days when Mungo rode the rounds
U of Anderson’s patients in Selkirk the lie and flow
of the Niger were still as debatable as the meaning
and origin of the Martian canals are to us. Now it
is a far-off tale, this tracing of the Niger’s course,
and only the human incidents of accident and
encounter in the tales of the explorers preserve any
interest. We know now that the main stream of the
Joliba in that far day, as now, rose in the Liberian
mountains less than 150 miles from the West African
coast. Instead of flowing towards the sea, it
streamed towards the interior of Africa, gathering
waters from innumerable tributaries, and passing
through a multitude of countries ruled by negro
kinglets till beyond Sego, the capital of Bambarra,
it diffused itself into a vast sweep of interlocking
lakes and swamps subject to annual inundation.
Below Timbuctoo (no river-port, but inland) it
gathered itself together again, and, swollen with the
waters of a new tributary, the Bani, flowed south¬
east as the Kwara, passing through the disrupted
kingdom of Songhay and so through the Benin lands
of cannibals and exquisite wood-carvers till it
finally completed its 2,600 miles journey by emerg¬
ing on the Atlantic, seeping through a vast delta of
120 miles into the Gulf of Guinea. Well down the
river where it became the Kwara stood a town with
o