Chapter VIII: Mistakes and False News (2)

Ready to make the besiegers pay dearly for their temerity at least, but it would not do to count upon all of us coming safe and sound out of the affair: the forces were too terribly unequal for that. Amadu had five hundred guns with him, and the Toucouleurs are brave, especially when their fanaticism has been aroused. A certain number of the captives taken by the Tuaregs had also come from Sorgoe to join hands with them. Aliburi, too, the hero of Cayor of Yuri memory, was there, and in a night attack all these auxiliaries would be very formidable adversaries to us. We wondered how many warriors there were altogether, including those armed with bows and arrows or spears only. It was very difficult to form an idea, for negroes never allow their numbers to be counted when they go to war. They think it brings bad luck. There was, however, no doubt that at this time Amadu could muster from ten to fifteen hundred combatants.

And to oppose to all this rabble, we were but forty-five, even if we counted in our scullions.

The worst of it was, a good many of our cartridges had got damaged, partly by the great heat and partly by the damp. The damage was such that at the first shot the weapon might become useless for the rest of the fight, a serious matter when we were so few.

It certainly seemed as if we were in for it at last!

Several nights passed by in suspense, and we all slept badly. On the north we could see the gleam of many moving torches in the forest, for from Talibia to Say signals were being made. Torches of straw were lit and put out three by three, but what these signals portended we could not tell.

_July 17._—It seems that the attack on our camp is now decided upon, for our spy tells us we shall be assailed from the right bank in the night when there is no moon. The Toucouleurs are camped at Tillé above Say. At the benediction to be given at three o’clock Amadu Saturu will stir up the people. We might expect the first alarm at about ten o’clock. Ahmadu Mumi spoke very positively, though he explained that he could not be absolutely certain, and anyhow not a woman had come to the market that morning. Osman, on the other hand, stoutly denied the report, but this only made us more sure of its truth, and we doubled our sentries in preparation for a night which might perhaps be our last.

We waited and waited, but nothing happened. We heard nothing that night, as on so many others, but the howling of the monkeys and the murmuring of the rapids down-stream.

Everything remained quiet the next day too, and gradually all the smoke faded away, whilst the light of the torches was extinguished. The women, who had deserted our market, returned as if there had never been any reason for their absence, and all went on as before. We knew now that the column was again dispersed, the warriors had drawn back at the very last moment, and had gone off in small parties to take slaves in Djerma, or to attack Dosso. All the energy they had displayed with regard to us had been simply wasted.

It had been enough for us to assume a firm attitude, and for the natives to know that we had been warned. To maintain a firm attitude seems rather like a quotation from Tartarin de Tarascon, for we should have found it difficult enough to defend ourselves. How should I have been able to make good my threats that I would burn Say on the first alarm?

It seemed, however, that Saturu really was rather alarmed, lest harm should happen to his town. He would not let the column camped near it enter Say, and the Friday benediction was only after all pronounced on the chiefs. Their secret they knew had leaked out, they had seen us strengthen our defences, and they hesitated after all to attack us. The knowledge of the bloodshed which would inevitably ensue had greatly cooled the enthusiasm of all not quite mad with fanaticism, and many whose adherence had been counted on as certain had failed to put in an appearance. Then the rain had something to do with damping the ardour for war. The daily storms, which had come at last, completed the demoralization of the rabble. They had missed their aim, because we, who were that aim, had been on our guard, and some went off one way, others another, to hunt slaves instead of rushing upon our defences.

We had had a narrow escape, but it was a complete one, for the new moon was rising now, and the river was rapidly increasing in depth, adding each day to the efficiency as a defence of the ditch which divided us from the mainland and our enemies.

We were saved! but for a whole week we had been face to face with the melancholy prospect of ending our lives on this remote island, and often and often as we watched we wondered whether, if we were massacred, we should be better or more quickly avenged than our predecessor Flatters had been.

We now understood all the false rumours which had been spread of French columns marching in the neighbourhood, and of all these columns were going to do. The reports were spread merely to induce us to leave our _tata_, where we were in comparative security, and which the Toucouleurs seemed to look upon as impregnable. Our enemies wanted to decoy us to go and meet our comrades, so that they might fall on us in the bush, where the odds would have been against us, and so destroy us altogether.

Then when they saw how we took the rumours, we heard they changed their tactics, and tried to throw us off our guard again by talking about making friends, signing treaties, and so on, meaning, if they could secure our confidence, to fall suddenly upon us _en masse_. The plan was ingenious certainly, but those who concocted it had reckoned without allowing for Osman’s stupidity.

What became of the Toucouleur column after all? Not having dared through fear of our guns to march against us, it had turned its attention to Dentchendu, a big village on the left bank; but the chief hesitated too long in this case also, giving time for the inhabitants to receive warning, to put their village in a state of defence, and send all the useless mouths away.

Again the Toucouleurs were too late, and besides, as Osman, who still visited us in spite of all our rebuffs, told us, the poison of the Dentchendu arrows is very dangerous.

All these warriors are fond of fighting and going on slave raids, for the glory of the Prophet, but they take very good care of their own skins. We wondered if the Toucouleurs who remained faithful to Amadu would become cowards like his own people through contact with them. Our experiences made us think that we were indeed far from the heroic days, when the Senegalese Foutankés, in the battle of Kale, charged a column on the march to rescue the wives of Ahmadu who had been taken prisoners, stopping suddenly beneath a hail of bullets from the French sharp-shooters to prostrate themselves, and make a propitiatory salaam.

Having through fear abandoned the idea of attacking us at Fort Archinard, the column wandered in the rain from village to village, and was received everywhere with apparent friendship by the terrified inhabitants, so that all the fire ended in smoke, though no one seemed to know exactly why.

The check the Toucouleurs had received made it possible for some of the chiefs to show us sympathy, whether feigned or real it was impossible to tell. Amongst these was Hamma Tansa, chief of the Sillabés, who was rather an original character for a native. He was something of an epicure, what we should call a jolly good fellow, but charitable to others. He kept open house, or rather hut, and always had a lot of friends about him, whom he treated to everything. When he was informed that the meal was served, he used to jump up, flap his white _bubu_ as he would wings, and shout, “Let’s fall to!”

He was literary too, and the missives he sent us, written on little plaques of wood, were, in accordance with Arab usage, very polite, and sometimes even in verse. He said he meant to pay us a visit, was most anxious to do so in fact, but somehow he never fulfilled his promise: either he had not time, or he was afraid of Amadu, or something else.

One fine day our old friend Hugo appeared again, sent to us by the chief of the Kurteyes, and who, thanks to Taburet’s skill, had now quite recovered from the affection of the eyes from which he had been suffering. He sent us a message to the effect that, as long as the river was low, he and his people were afraid of the Toucouleurs; “but wait,” he added, “till it rises, for then the Kurteyes are the kings of the Niger; no one can get at us, and we shall be able to shake hands with you.”

The most devoted and zealous of all our friends, however, was Galadio, and there was a perpetual going and coming between his village and our camp. Marabouts, griots, traders, etc., were constantly arriving, telling us, “I am from Galadio’s village,” and we received them, from motives of policy, with open arms, buying from them rather than from others, giving them presents, and plenty of kind words. They all sang the praises of their master, and he really did show himself to us in a very amiable light. He was perhaps if anything rather too gushing.

At my request he sent us the female blacksmith of Bokar Wandieïdiu, to whom I have already alluded, to help us to complete our Tuareg vocabulary. She was accompanied by a marabout named Tayoro, a Fulah from Wagnaka in Massina, a very distinguished and refined-looking old man, with a white beard, who came from Konnari in the same district, and whose name was Modibo Konna.

He spoke _bozo_, or the dialect of the Niger fishermen near Mopti, and this enabled Baudry to draw up an elementary vocabulary of that language.

This lady blacksmith, with Tayoro and Modibo Konna, were our guests for some days, and we were really quite fascinated by their manners, and the way in which they behaved to us. We had certainly not been accustomed to meet with tact such as theirs amongst the natives, and they finally removed all my prejudices against their master Galadio. So I sent to ask him whether, as he was too old to visit me, I should go to see him, for were we not friends like two fingers on one hand, or, to use the native simile, like two teeth of one comb? If he would see me, when should I come?

It would only take me three days to go, I reflected, and it was of importance for us to let the whole country see that Galadio was our friend, and that when we broke up our camp we should leave behind us an ally devoted to our interests, in fact so compromised that he must remain true to us. It would be very important to us to have such a helper when it came to the organization of the district, and he might be made its ruler as a protected native chief.

My messengers returned a few days later, bringing horses with them for me to make the journey, and assuring me that their master would be delighted to receive me.

While waiting for the envoys to come back, we worked very hard at our vocabularies. All went well with them, and we completed them in a few days. Between whiles Tayoro turned our knowledge of his dialect to account, by telling me the following charming story about the time of the Fulah reformation in Sokoto.

When the great reformer, Othman Fodio, who, by the way, was a noted robber and slave-hunter, preached the so-called reformation, that is to say, the revolt against the chief of the Haussa Fulahs, he was followed by a great many disciples, as of course all prophets are.

One evening when Othman was preaching and expounding the truth, his eyes suddenly fell upon a venerable-looking old man who was sobbing.

“Look!” cried the reformer, “look at that old man weeping; follow his example, for Allah has touched his heart.”

Then the poor old fellow, the tears still rolling down his cheeks, said in a choked and broken voice, “No, Modibo, no, you have read my heart wrongly; when I saw you holding forth so vehemently, and shaking your grey beard, you reminded me of my old goat which I left at home in my hut to follow you. That is what made me sob,” and he went on weeping.

This anecdote, which loses much of its piquancy in translation, is very typical of the character of the nomad Fulahs, illustrating as it does their combined fanaticism and self-interest.

As I have said, we were all quite won over by the behaviour of Tayoro and Modibo Konna, when one fine evening, after the lesson in Tuareg was over, Suleyman the interpreter came to seek me, and said point-blank: “Commandant, all these people are only making game of you. Tierno Abdulaye, the Arabic translator, who is a mischievous fellow, saw that old Modibo Konna is an old gossip who can’t keep a secret, and as he wanted to know all about Galadio and the rest of them, he said to him, ‘What, will you Modibos, good Mussulmans, true believers, take part against Amadu, against the son of El Hadji Omar?—and your chief Galadio, is he likely to take the side of the French? I, Tierno Abdulaye, am with them because I can’t help myself, but my heart is with the Toucouleurs, my fellow-countrymen. If it came to a fight, I should be the first to desert. True Mussulmans could not really consort with Kaffirs!’

“‘All in good time!’ answered Modibo Konna. ‘At least I shall find somebody to talk to, meanwhile. Do you really suppose that we were ever, in good faith, the allies of the commandant? Why, Galadio is Amadu’s best friend; he it was who helped him to reach the left bank. Tayoro and I are only here as spies, to prevent the French from doing harm, such as attacking Dunga or Say. As soon as you arrived Ibrahim realized that it would be best to seem friendly with you. He even reproached Amadu Saturu for refusing your hospitality, because they would have been able to keep an eye on you better at Say. By adopting this attitude towards you, we have got presents, Kaffirs are always lawful prey, whilst the rest of the natives have got nothing. As for me, Modibo Konna, I was recalled from Dunga, where I was looking after Ibrahim’s affairs and sent here. When I go back I shall return to Dunga to report all I have seen. Do you suppose for one moment that a marabout such as Ibrahim would ever be false to the true religion?’”

The whole secret of the plot against us was now revealed. Galadio, distrusting the old gossip, had merely sent Tayoro, the clever diplomatist, with him to see that he did not talk nonsense. For four whole months they had all been fooling us, with very considerable address, it must be admitted. However, the duplicity with which we had been treated all this time had one good result—we had had the pleasure of imagining that we had at least one good friend in the country on whom we could rely, and this thought had been good for the morale of our men, for it is not at all inspiriting to feel completely isolated in a strange land. Even if it is all a delusion, it is consoling to fancy oneself liked and respected.

The end of it all might however have been very different. Horses had been sent for me to go to Galadio’s camp, and if I had started, accompanied by Father Hacquart and a few men, we might have been murdered by the way. Maybe Galadio would have been afraid of immediate reprisals; maybe he would have hesitated to commit a crime which would have compromised him for the future; or perhaps, even he was, after all, too good a fellow to injure those who were coming to him as guests.

This was the last scene of the comedy in which we took part at Fort Archinard. We had now to begin to think seriously of starting again, as we had already long before announced that we should go on September 15. We had bought our stores of grain, and our barges were once more in a state of repair. The information we had received about the river was to the effect that it was now navigable again. We were all busy repacking our stuffs and knick-knacks, and were eager to be off.

Taburet was simply boiling over with impatience, and was already inquiring what steamboat we could catch at Dahomey, and wondering by what train he could go to Conquet. The rest of us, though we did not say so much about it, were just as anxious for the start, the more so that a kind of wave of fever was passing over our island, attacking the negroes, who had not always taken the preventive doses of quinine, more than us. Baudry, what with the repair of the barges, the buying up stores in the market, and the repacking, was quite worn out. It was really time we broke up our camp.

On September 15 everything on board was once more ship-shape. Digui had gone to reconnoitre our route the evening before, and had come back very late, looking anxious. “It is very bad,” he said, “but we shall get past somehow.” The coolies, weary as they all were, could not contain their joy at the idea of leaving the Fort, and poor old Suleyman Futanke, who was no doubt afraid of being given back to Amadu, or left behind as useless, made desperate efforts to learn to row. Happiest of all, perhaps, was Atchino, the man from Dahomey, who had spent the whole day before packing tomatoes for us to eat on the journey, and who was dreaming all the time of the bananas of his home.

In the morning, Abdulaye cut a great piece of bark out of a fig tree, and on the plain surface beneath, he engraved with a chisel the letters M. H. D. N. 1896. He then nailed firmly on to the same tree a plank, on which was written in large characters the name of Fort Archinard, for the benefit of those who should come after us.

At the eastern corner of our _tata_, looking down-stream, we dug a deep hole, in which we buried all our old iron, with the nails and poles we no longer needed, and which would only have encumbered us. They may perhaps be useful to others who may halt on our island. We levelled the soil above them and so left them. We were fortunate indeed that no other cemetery was needed at Fort Archinard, and were most grateful for the mercy of Heaven, which had preserved us all for so long.

We did not wish the natives who had treated us so badly to profit at all by our leavings, so we made a big bonfire of our tables, chairs, doors, etc., in fact of everything that would burn. The coolies and we whites all worked with a will at making the pile, and we set light to the whole at once—camp mattresses, abattis, etc. etc.—with torches of straw, and a grand blaze they made; the crackling of the dry wood and the occasional blowing up of the powder in the cartridges could be heard a long way off.

The coolies meanwhile, like so many black devils, danced round the fire beating their tam-tams, each performing the figures peculiar to his tribe, whilst Suleyman alone looked thoughtfully on, and we watched, not without a certain _serrement de cœur_, the burning of what had been Fort Archinard, that remote islet in the land of the negroes where for five long months we had lived, and hoped, now buoyed up with illusive joy, now depressed with the knowledge of how we had been deceived.

Somehow the heart gets attached to these lonely districts, where such thrilling emotions have been lived through, where real sufferings and privations have been endured. It is with them as with women, we often love best those who have given us the most pain.

Fort Archinard burnt gloriously. When the smoke became too dense and nearly choked us, we embarked on our barges, which were already launched, and turned back just once more, like Lot’s wife after leaving Sodom, to gaze at the conflagration.

We were off again with light hearts full of hope, to face new rapids!