350 THE EXPLORATION OF THE NIGER more, we were always rubbing shoulders, so to speak, and constant friction was inevitable. In fact, we ran our angles into our neighbours instead of rubbing those angles down. We were regularly prostrated with our inactive, almost idle life, and the true characters of each one came out without disguise.

At table every discussion led to a kind of squabble. Each of us stuck to his own opinion, even when the most astounding paradoxes had been enunciated. Sometimes, after a regular row, we all sat perfectly mute glaring at each other, and wondering what was to happen next.

At night, or in the hour of the siesta, I used to get out my flute — another form of the Sudanite fever — and play melodies from the Or du Rhm or Tristan et Yseult but even music failed to calm the disputants. The tension was too great, and I was afraid that, even at this late period of our expedition, things would go wrong in consequence.

All of a sudden a happy idea occurred to me, a regular inspiration from Heaven, which every one fell in with at once.

This idea was simply that we should all work, and the result was the immediate restoration of order.

It was a simple task enough that we now set ourselves to do, just to make vocabularies of the various more or less barbarous idioms in use in the Niger districts. There were plenty to choose from, for there is more confusion of tongues, such as is described in the Bible, in these parts than anywhere else. There is a perfectly inexhaustible supply of peculiar phrases.

For instance, between Abo, in the highest part of the delta of the Niger, and the sea, as an officer of the Royal Niger Company told me, there are no less than seven dialects spoken, none of which have the very slightest affinity with each other. It would appear that one wave