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There are charming walks beyond the New Quarter a level region, with olives and figs and almonds and pomegranates standing knee-deep in ripe odorous wheat; but the citizens might be living at Timbuctu for all they know of these things.
Boiteux and Bonnier succeeded in leading a flotilla and a column to the mysterious city of Timbuctu; but a little later a French force sustained a serious check from the neighbouring tribes. The affair only spurred on the Republic to still greater efforts, which led finally to the rout of Samory's forces and his capture in the year 1898.
Nay, there was not even a novel or a story that showed intimate local knowledge. Had I been going to Teneriffe or Timbuctu, the libraries would have furnished information a-plenty; but about this housetop of eastern America they were strangely silent; it was terra incognita.
"Where did you hear that?" "Ah, don't you know?" she responded commiseratingly. "This is the most scandalously gossipy neighbourhood in France. My DEAR young man, every one from here to Timbuctu knows all about it by this time!" "All about what?"
One sees more different kinds of black people in Sierra Leone than in any other port along the Coast; Senegalese and Senegambians, Kroo boys, Liberians, naked bush boys bearing great burdens from the forests, domestic slaves in fez and colored linen livery, carrying hammocks swung from under a canopy, the local electric hansom, soldiers of the W.A.F.F., the West African Frontier Force, in Zouave uniform of scarlet and khaki, with bare legs; Arabs from as far in the interior as Timbuctu, yellow in face and in long silken robes; big fat "mammies" in well-washed linen like the washerwomen of Jamaica, each balancing on her head her tightly rolled umbrella, and in the gardens slim young girls, with only a strip of blue and white linen from the waist to the knees, lithe, erect, with glistening teeth and eyes, and their sisters, after two years in the mission schools, demurely and correctly dressed like British school marms.
Upon which my heart sank curiously, and refused to resume its natural position. In the past I had brought her tramps and peddlers and itinerant preachers, all of whom she had taken in with patience but this, I knew, was different. For a few minutes I wished devoutly I were in Timbuctu or some other far place.
In a talk with his mother, which occurred some time before his death, she stated that it was a rare thing he ever talked in his sleep and then only used the most common expressions. She told me her mother was born west of Timbuctu, belonged to a Berber tribe, and had been taken prisoner and sold to slave dealers of the west African coast.
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