Chapter Chapter 29 · Signs of Vegetation.—The Fantastic Notion of a French Author.—A

. Signs of Vegetation.—The Fantastic Notion of a French Author.—A

Magnificent Country.—The Kingdom of Adamova.—The Explorations of Speke

and Burton connected with those of Dr. Barth.—The Atlantika

Mountains.—The River Benoué.—The City of Yola.—The Bagélé.—Mount

Mendif.

From the moment of their departure, the travellers moved with great

velocity. They longed to leave behind them the desert, which had so

nearly been fatal to them.

About a quarter-past nine in the morning, they caught a glimpse of some

signs of vegetation: herbage floating on that sea of sand, and

announcing, as the weeds upon the ocean did to Christopher Columbus,

the nearness of the shore—green shoots peeping up timidly between

pebbles that were, in their turn, to be the rocks of that vast expanse.

Hills, but of trifling height, were seen in wavy lines upon the

horizon. Their profile, muffled by the heavy mist, was defined but

vaguely. The monotony, however, was beginning to disappear.

The doctor hailed with joy the new country thus disclosed, and, like a

seaman on lookout at the mast-head, he was ready to shout aloud:

“Land, ho! land!”

An hour later the continent spread broadly before their gaze, still

wild in aspect, but less flat, less denuded, and with a few trees

standing out against the gray sky.

“We are in a civilized country at last!” said the hunter.

“Civilized? Well, that’s one way of speaking; but there are no people

to be seen yet.”

“It will not be long before we see them,” said Ferguson, “at our

present rate of travel.”

“Are we still in the negro country, doctor?”

“Yes, and on our way to the country of the Arabs.”

“What! real Arabs, sir, with their camels?”

“No, not many camels; they are scarce, if not altogether unknown, in

these regions. We must go a few degrees farther north to see them.”

“What a pity!”

“And why, Joe?”

“Because, if the wind fell contrary, they might be of use to us.”

“How so?”

“Well, sir, it’s just a notion that’s got into my head: we might hitch

them to the car, and make them tow us along. What do you say to that,

doctor?”

“Poor Joe! Another person had that idea in advance of you. It was used

by a very gifted French author—M. Méry—in a romance, it is true. He has

his travellers drawn along in a balloon by a team of camels; then a

lion comes up, devours the camels, swallows the tow-rope, and hauls the

balloon in their stead; and so on through the story. You see that the

whole thing is the top-flower of fancy, but has nothing in common with

our style of locomotion.”

Joe, a little cut down at learning that his idea had been used already,

cudgelled his wits to imagine what animal could have devoured the lion;

but he could not guess it, and so quietly went on scanning the

appearance of the country.

A lake of medium extent stretched away before him, surrounded by an

amphitheatre of hills, which yet could not be dignified with the name

of mountains. There were winding valleys, numerous and fertile, with

their tangled thickets of the most various trees. The African oil-tree

rose above the mass, with leaves fifteen feet in length upon its stalk,

the latter studded with sharp thorns; the bombax, or silk-cotton-tree,

filled the wind, as it swept by, with the fine down of its seeds; the

pungent odors of the pendanus, the “kenda” of the Arabs, perfumed the

air up to the height where the _Victoria_ was sailing; the papaw-tree,

with its palm-shaped leaves; the _sterculier_, which produces the

Soudan-nut; the baobab, and the banana-tree, completed the luxuriant

flora of these inter-tropical regions.

“The country is superb!” said the doctor.

“Here are some animals,” added Joe. “Men are not far away.”

“Oh, what magnificent elephants!” exclaimed Kennedy. “Is there no way

to get a little shooting?”

“How could we manage to halt in a current as strong as this? No, Dick;

you must taste a little of the torture of Tantalus just now. You shall

make up for it afterward.”

And, in truth, there was enough to excite the fancy of a sportsman.

Dick’s heart fairly leaped in his breast as he grasped the butt of his

Purdy.

The _fauna_ of the region were as striking as its flora. The wild-ox

revelled in dense herbage that often concealed his whole body; gray,

black, and yellow elephants of the most gigantic size burst headlong,

like a living hurricane, through the forests, breaking, rending,

tearing down, devastating every thing in their path; upon the woody

slopes of the hills trickled cascades and springs flowing northward;

there, too, the hippopotami bathed their huge forms, splashing and

snorting as they frolicked in the water, and lamantines, twelve feet

long, with bodies like seals, stretched themselves along the banks,

turning up toward the sun their rounded teats swollen with milk.

It was a whole menagerie of rare and curious beasts in a wondrous

hot-house, where numberless birds with plumage of a thousand hues

gleamed and fluttered in the sunshine.

By this prodigality of Nature, the doctor recognized the splendid

kingdom of Adamova.

“We are now beginning to trench upon the realm of modern discovery. I

have taken up the lost scent of preceding travellers. It is a happy

chance, my friends, for we shall be enabled to link the toils of

Captains Burton and Speke with the explorations of Dr. Barth. We have

left the Englishmen behind us, and now have caught up with the

Hamburger. It will not be long, either, before we arrive at the extreme

point attained by that daring explorer.”

“It seems to me that there is a vast extent of country between the two

explored routes,” remarked Kennedy; “at least, if I am to judge by the

distance that we have made.”

“It is easy to determine: take the map and see what is the longitude of

the southern point of Lake Ukéréoué, reached by Speke.”

“It is near the thirty-seventh degree.”

“And the city of Yola, which we shall sight this evening, and to which

Barth penetrated, what is its position?”

“It is about in the twelfth degree of east longitude.”

“Then there are twenty-five degrees, or, counting sixty miles to each,

about fifteen hundred miles in all.”

“A nice little walk,” said Joe, “for people who have to go on foot.”

“It will be accomplished, however. Livingstone and Moffat are pushing

on up this line toward the interior. Nyassa, which they have

discovered, is not far from Lake Tanganayika, seen by Burton. Ere the

close of the century these regions will, undoubtedly, be explored.

But,” added the doctor, consulting his compass, “I regret that the wind

is carrying us so far to the westward. I wanted to get to the north.”

After twelve hours of progress, the Victoria found herself on the

confines of Nigritia. The first inhabitants of this region, the Chouas

Arabs, were feeding their wandering flocks. The immense summits of the

Atlantika Mountains seen above the horizon—mountains that no European

foot had yet scaled, and whose height is computed to be ten thousand

feet! Their western slope determines the flow of all the waters in this

region of Africa toward the ocean. They are the Mountains of the Moon

to this part of the continent.

At length a real river greeted the gaze of our travellers, and, by the

enormous ant-hills seen in its vicinity, the doctor recognized the

Benoué, one of the great tributaries of the Niger, the one which the

natives have called “The Fountain of the Waters.”

“This river,” said the doctor to his companions, “will, one day, be the

natural channel of communication with the interior of Nigritia. Under

the command of one of our brave captains, the steamer _Pleiad_ has

already ascended as far as the town of Yola. You see that we are not in

an unknown country.”

Numerous slaves were engaged in the labors of the field, cultivating

sorgho, a kind of millet which forms the chief basis of their diet; and

the most stupid expressions of astonishment ensued as the _Victoria_

sped past like a meteor. That evening the balloon halted about forty

miles from Yola, and ahead of it, but in the distance, rose the two

sharp cones of Mount Mendif.

The doctor threw out his anchors and made fast to the top of a high

tree; but a very violent wind beat upon the balloon with such force as

to throw it over on its side, thus rendering the position of the car

sometimes extremely dangerous. Ferguson did not close his eyes all

night, and he was repeatedly on the point of cutting the anchor-rope

and scudding away before the gale. At length, however, the storm

abated, and the oscillations of the balloon ceased to be alarming.

On the morrow the wind was more moderate, but it carried our travellers

away from the city of Yola, which recently rebuilt by the Fouillans,

excited Ferguson’s curiosity. However, he had to make up his mind to

being borne farther to the northward and even a little to the east.

Kennedy proposed to halt in this fine hunting-country, and Joe declared

that the need of fresh meat was beginning to be felt; but the savage

customs of the country, the attitude of the population, and some shots

fired at the _Victoria_, admonished the doctor to continue his journey.

They were then crossing a region that was the scene of massacres and

burnings, and where warlike conflicts between the barbarian sultans,

contending for their power amid the most atrocious carnage, never

cease.

Numerous and populous villages of long low huts stretched away between

broad pasture-fields whose dense herbage was besprinkled with

violet-colored blossoms. The huts, looking like huge beehives, were

sheltered behind bristling palisades. The wild hill-sides and hollows

frequently reminded the beholder of the glens in the Highlands of

Scotland, as Kennedy more than once remarked.

In spite of all he could do, the doctor bore directly to the northeast,

toward Mount Mendif, which was lost in the midst of environing clouds.

The lofty summits of these mountains separate the valley of the Niger

from the basin of Lake Tchad.

Soon afterward was seen the Bagélé, with its eighteen villages clinging

to its flanks like a whole brood of children to their mother’s bosom—a

magnificent spectacle for the beholder whose gaze commanded and took in

the entire picture at one view. Even the ravines were seen to be

covered with fields of rice and of arachides.

By three o’clock the _Victoria_ was directly in front of Mount Mendif.

It had been impossible to avoid it; the only thing to be done was to

cross it. The doctor, by means of a temperature increased to one

hundred and eighty degrees, gave the balloon a fresh ascensional force

of nearly sixteen hundred pounds, and it went up to an elevation of

more than eight thousand feet, the greatest height attained during the

journey. The temperature of the atmosphere was so much cooler at that

point that the aëronauts had to resort to their blankets and thick

coverings.

Ferguson was in haste to descend; the covering of the balloon gave

indications of bursting, but in the meanwhile he had time to satisfy

himself of the volcanic origin of the mountain, whose extinct craters

are now but deep abysses. Immense accumulations of bird-guano gave the

sides of Mount Mendif the appearance of calcareous rocks, and there was

enough of the deposit there to manure all the lands in the United

Kingdom.

At five o’clock the _Victoria_, sheltered from the south winds, went

gently gliding along the slopes of the mountain, and stopped in a wide

clearing remote from any habitation. The instant it touched the soil,

all needful precautions were taken to hold it there firmly; and

Kennedy, fowling-piece in hand, sallied out upon the sloping plain. Ere

long, he returned with half a dozen wild ducks and a kind of snipe,

which Joe served up in his best style. The meal was heartily relished,

and the night was passed in undisturbed and refreshing slumber.