Niger

literature and art. And both could stir like
antique border raiders to the trumpet cry of that
fine essence of life which they called Romance.
They rode the Peebles hills together, and talked
with great affection in the stilted jargon of their
times. Mungo seems to have done most of the
talking—talk that returned again and again to his
quest of the Niger.
His hunger for those days shone through his
speech even while he would tell of the horrors of
Bubaker or Benowm, of curious experiences,
ludicrous, frightful, obscene, that he never confided
to the pages of his Travels lest he be mistaken for
another Munchausen. Scott once interrupted such
a recital to ask, c And you want to go back there
again ? 5 and Mungo’s mask went down for a
moment. He would rather brave Africa and all
its horrors than spend his life in long toilsome rides
amidst the hills, c for which the remuneration is
hardly enough to keep body and soul together ’.
There was little society in Peebles to suit Mungo’s
taste. But near at hand lived an old soldier,
Colonel John Murray of Cringletie, with whom he
struck up a friendship. They would sit at table
in Murray’s house arranging battles in African
fashion, and facing up imaginary European levies
against Ali’s wild tribesmen of Ludamar. It must
have been a consoling pastime, this routing of Ali
in imagination.
Another year, and yet another, recordless but for
little notes of the day-to-day life in slumbering
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