Niger

of the rains to a trickling stream. The caravan made
a short halt, and then splashed through and climbed
the banks on the road to Kinytakoorro. Two
slaves, a man and a woman belonging to a slati of
Bala, proved especially laggard throughout the
course of the day. Lashed by the whips, they
stumbled forward until about three o’clock in the
afternoon, when they began vomiting in an unre¬
strained manner, as Mungo observed with interest.
They vomited clay : they had been eating quantities
of clay through hunger or desperation.
The caravan entered Kinytakoorro in style, with
drums and singing men. Here they were provided
with lodgings, slaves and free, and took up residence
there until the 22nd of April. That day they
marched only seven miles. This brought them to
a village which believed itself about to be invaded
by the Foulahs. The villagers had abandoned the
plain and taken to the rocky hillsides. There they
had built temporary huts and assembled great piles
of stones to roll down on the heads of trespassers.
Mungo greatly admired these defences, and, with a
passing twinge of regret that he had not arrived at
the village at the time when the Foulahs were carry¬
ing out siege operations, prepared to enter the
Jallonka wilderness.
Some little way within its borders they came on
two looted and burned villages : the Foulahs had
been here. At ten in the morning another Senegal
tributary hove in sight, so thick with shoals of fish
that the very water tasted and smelt fishy. This is
225
G.N.
P