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That night we bivouacked at the foot of the east-side of the pass at about half-past five. Ibrahimawa, the Bornu man whom I have already described as the amateur botanist, had become my great ally in searching for all that was curious and interesting. Proud of his knowledge of wild plants, no sooner was the march ended than he commenced a search in the jungles for something esculent.
By the end of the twelfth century the armies of Kanem were very powerful and its rulers were known as "Kings of Kanem and Lords of Bornu." In the thirteenth century the kings even dared to invade the southern country down toward the valley of the Congo. Meantime great things were happening in the world beyond the desert, the ocean, and the Nile.
In 1822 Major Denham and Lieutenant Clapperton left Murzouk, the capital of Fezzan, and made their way to Lake Chad and thence to Bornu. Clapperton, later on, again visited the Niger from Benin. Altogether these two travellers added some two thousand miles of route to our knowledge of, West Africa.
This fellow was a native of Bornu, and had been taken when a boy of twelve years old and sold at Constantinople; he formerly belonged to Mehemet Ali Pasha; he had been to London and Paris, and during the Crimean war he was at Kertch. Altogether he was a great traveller, and he had a natural taste for geography and botany, that marked him as a wonderful exception to the average of the party.
In every nation sufficiently advanced to have made effigies of their gods or of their deified rulers, the sculptors no doubt have endeavoured to express their highest ideal of beauty and grandeur. Ch. I have met with very few statements opposed to this conclusion. Mr. Rohlfs writes to me to the same effect with respect to Bornu and the countries inhabited by the Pullo tribes. Mr.
Indigenous civilizations arose on the west coast in Yoruba and Benin, and contact of these with the Mediterranean race in the desert, and with Egyptian and Arab from the east, gave rise to centers of Negro culture in the Sudan at Ghana and Melle and in Songhay, Nupe, the Hausa states, and Bornu.
Katsena especially, in the middle of the sixteenth century, is described as a place thirteen or fourteen miles in circumference, divided into quarters for strangers, for visitors from various other states, and for the different trades and industries, as saddlers, shoemakers, dyers, etc. Beyond the Hausa states and bordering on Lake Chad was Bornu.
But I'm afraid they're out of the question on account of the Bolsheviki. Besides, I'm not looking for the sort of adventure that ends between a stone wall and a firing-party. Then there are some queer emirates along the southern edge of the Sahara: Sokoto and Kanem and Bornu and Wadai.
Hausaland and Bornu were still open to Turkish and Mohammedan influence from the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the slave trade from the south, but the face of the finest Negro civilization the modern world had ever produced was veiled from Europe and given to the defilement of wild Moorish soldiers.
Ibrahimawa, the Bornu man, alias "Sinbad the Sailor," the great traveller, amuses and bores me daily with his long and wonderful stories of his travels. He described another country as a perfect Paradise, where no one ever drank anything so inferior as water.
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