i68 THE EXPLORATION OF THE NIGER waded through the mud, which was above their knees, towards us, but they halted at a respectful distance. They were evidently in a great state of alarm, and would only. converse with us from afar off; if we attempted to approach them they decamped. It was a good half-hour before we were able to reassure them sufficiently for them to come close to us, and even then they still trembled.

The two messengers turned out to be Armas, relations of the chief of the village. Their first articulate words were a prayer that we would go to an island they pointed out to us rather more than a mile away, for they said they were afraid we should come to blows with the Tuaregs, and that their village would suffer.

We tried to reassure them, telling them we had not come to make war ; quite the reverse, we wanted to make friends with the Tuaregs. To begin with, would they tell us where Madidu was ? Madidu, was the reply, was not far off, though not actually in the village. And what, we went on, was the meaning of all this gathering of forces, as if they were threatened with war ? It was to defend themselves, they said, against a raid of the Kel Air, which they had been told was about to take place. I avoided replying that the Kel Air were far away on the east and north, and that it seemed extraordinary that warriors should have gathered on the banks of the Niger to repulse them.

But to return to the question really at issue. I begged the envoys to announce to Madidu the arrival of the nephew of Abdul Kerim, whom his father had received and treated well some fifty years before ; adding that we had not come to do any harm, in proof of which I urged that when the Tademeket and the Tenger Eguedeche had declared war against us we had not even answered their challenge.

My uncle, I went on, had given El Khotab a horse, I