STAY AT SAY 299 abattis. The name of Archinard was in fact a kind of double fetich, for it gave confidence to our own men, and it inspired the Toucouleurs with superstitious terror. In the French Sudan there is not a marabout, a soldier, or a sofa of Samory, not a talibd of Amadu, not a friend nor an enemy of the French who does not retain deeply graven upon his memory the name of Colonel Archinard, for the present Greneral will always be the Colonel in Africa, the great Colonel whom, according to tradition, no village ever resisted for a whole day.

So we managed that the news of the baptism of our Camp* should be spread far and near, and passed on from mouth to mouth till it reached the ear of Amadu himself.

No doubt he had some bad dreams in consequence.

This moral defence, however, required to be supplemented by a material one. Two hundred and twenty by forty-three yards is not a very wide area for thirty-five people to live in, but it is far too big a space to have to defend efficiently.

We felt it would be prudent to restrict the camp, properly so called, to the northern point of the island, and taking six termitaries as points of support, we placed abattis between them. Everything was ready to our hands, branches, logs, brushwood, thorns, etc. We cut down the trees at the lower end of the island, which cleared our firing range, though it also rather spoiled the look of the landscape. We levelled the site of our camp, razed many of the anthills to the ground, and mounted our two guns, one pointing up-stream, on a huge trunk which seemed to have been placed where it was on purpose, which commanded the bank almost as far as Say itself, whilst the other was placed on a big trunk which we drove firmly into the ground, and would keep the people on the banks downstream in awe. At each gun sentries were always on guard. Then the unfortunate Aube was unloaded, patched up