382 THE EXPLORATION OF THE NIGER passed later. "Why," he said, "did you not come to Kibtachi to begin with, instead of stopping with Saturu, who wishes you no good ? " Talking of presents, Galadio, when he returned the signed treaty, sent a wonderful collection of gifts, including kola nuts, symbolic of friendship, with calabashes full of honey, and bags of baobab flour, the medicinal effect of the two being totally different, the honey acting as an emollient, the flour as an irritant.

The chiefs of the Sidibes, Kurteyes, Sillabes, etc., all vied with each other now in sending messengers to us to assure us of their friendship, and yet another notable, chief of the Torodi Fulahs, asked us to make just such a treaty with him as we had with his friend Galadio. " Galadio and I," he wrote to us, "are together like two teeth of the same comb ! " A happy metaphor indeed, a regular literary gem !

Yes, indeed, they all belonged to the same comb, these native friends of ours, and as yet we did not suspect how very dirty that comb was.

Presently we heard of a split amongst the Toucouleurs, and that the Gaberos had had enough of Amadu. They sent, in fact, to beg me to intercede for them with my friend Madidu, and to get him to let them return to his country. There were more fresh quarrels too between the Toucouleurs and the Sidibes. Amadu had put a Hadji marabout of the Sidibe tribe in irons, and by way of reprisal the Sidibes had seized three Toucouleurs at Yuli, opposite Dunga. The hostile tribes were, in fact, snarling at each other from the two banks of the river, and showing their teeth rather like porcelain dogs, only in this case the dogs were jet black.

The Sidibes, according to Pullo Khalifa and the son of their chief, who came to us with him, were disposed to throw themselves upon our protection. If, they said.