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Updated: May 17, 2025
He tried to free his feet from the tangle of serpents, and did not succeed. From terror he passed to anger: "I must be able to do it!" he exclaimed aloud. From the gloomy gorge of Jenne, the dull rumble of thunder answered him. He glanced in that direction. A flash of lightning rent the clouds and disappeared above the blackness of Monte Preclaro.
The citizen replies that up there at a villa near Sant' Anselmo lives a holy man, who is adored by the whole quarter, because he visits the sick, healing many, and talking of religion better than the priests themselves: so they call him "the Saint"; or rather, "the Saint of Jenne," because he performed many miracles in a town in the hills, called Jenne. Why, even the newspapers talked of him!
Benedetto bowed his head, and reflected for some time. "Perhaps on one occasion," said he, "for one moment, at Santa Scolastica, when my master, in the Abbot's name, offered me the habit of a lay-brother, that habit which was afterwards taken from me at Jenne.
He must now take Benedetto there, but in a few minutes he would return to the church for them. The gentleman was the same person the Selvas had met on the hillside of Jenne, where he was awaiting the Duchess di Civitella. The Duchess had arrived shortly after, with two other ladies and several gentlemen, among them a journalist, and the young man of the eye-glass.
At first, coming from the sunlight into that darkness, Benedetto could not distinguish anything, but presently he saw the man stretched on the bed; he was breathing hard, groaning and crying, and cursing the Saints, women, the village of Jenne, and his own unhappy fate. On her knees beside the bed, Maria Selva was wiping the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.
The river Niger, running northward from below Jenne to near Timbuctoo, and then turning west and south to the Gulf of Guinea, flows through one of the richest valleys in the world. In richness it is comparable to that of the Nile and, like that of the Nile, its fertility depends upon the water of the central stream.
At half-past eleven, the Selvas and Noemi accompanied by the innkeeper's wife a fine, big woman, very neat, very simple, and gay in a quiet way went to visit Sant' Andrea, the church of Jenne. Coming out into the open square from the maze of narrow lanes, where stands the inn, they found a large assemblage of women, strangers, so the hostess said.
Noemi, forgetting her weariness, hung upon the Padre's lips, and the Padre, precisely on this account, said so little and was so circumspect that she trembled with impatience, and presently felt tired again. She took Maria's arm, and allowed Don Clemente to go on with her brother-in-law. Then Don Clemente confided to Giovanni that his mission at Jenne was of a painful nature.
But their language was very different from the other parts of Bambarra: and I was informed that in my progress eastward, the Bambarra tongue was but little understood, and that when I reached Jenne, I should find that the majority of the inhabitants spoke a different language, called Jenne Kummo by the Negroes; and Kalam Soudan by the Moors.
He was very friendly and communicative, and spoke highly of the hospitality of his countrymen, but withal told me that if Jenne was the place of my destination, which he seemed to have hitherto doubted, I had undertaken an enterprise of greater danger than probably I was apprised of; for, although the town of Jenne was nominally a part of the king of Bambarra's dominions, it was in fact, he said, a city of the Moors the leading part of the inhabitants being bushreens, and even the governor himself, though appointed by Mansong, of the same sect.
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