i6o THE EXPLORATION OF THE NIGER natives armed only with spears, and he told me that when he was travelling with Attanoux amongst the Azgueurs they were received with similar hostility, but that a calm demeanour and the exercise of tact had made their enemies of one day the best friends of the next.

I harangued my people. Peace was restored, and that so completely that we were presently amusing ourselves with catching the goats grazing on the island and decking them out with collars of different-coloured velvets.

Some negroes, who lived in a village on a little island near ours, came to see us, bringing us some sheep. They did not seem at all excited about what was going on, and in truth were accustomed to the ways of the Tuaregs.

" They are dancers," one of them said to me, pointing to the Tademeket, who still continued to gesticulate at us.

The next day, March i, we continued our journey, accompanied as before by Tademeket on the right bank. We passed the Burrum islands, where the river is very wide, and beyond which it flows between two lines of dunes forming its banks.

The scenery is perhaps finer here than anything else we have seen on the Niger. The mighty dunes look as if they had never been disturbed by man, for the wind at once obliterates all trace of the footsteps of passers by. There is a melancholy poetry about them, and their outlines are rather marked than disguised by the thin line of green bush at the edge of and in the water. How well I understand the effect produced on the traveller by the Sahara in spite of its apparent monotony. It exercises on those who gaze on it for long at a time something of the hypnotic attraction of the sea. I am not the only one who feels in this way about the dune of Africa, for Baudry one day read us the following sonnet he had composed on the subject : —