HAUSSALAND 259 river and partly hunted into the mountains which on the north made a defensible barrier between their own and subsequent Haussa settlements. The river, no doubt, at first formed the southern boundary of their territory, and was afterwards peopled by them on both sides.

The northern mountains, constantly visited by all the peoples of Haussaland for the sake of the gold, silver, tin, lead, iron, and antimony, which from the earliest times they were reported to contain, were rendered dangerous by the nature of the rude tribes who inhabited them, and they are to this day the home of lingering tribes of naked cannibals. They were from the earliest period a favourite hunting-ground for slaves, more valuable because more easily obtained than the minerals with which the sometimes inaccessible rocks were reputed to be so richly stored. Landor observed, in travelling south from Zaria to the Benue through this country in 1827, that the people on his route were ready to sell their children for a chicken, and at the moment of the British occupation these districts still formed a slave reserve for the more northern states. Last year, 1904, when the High Commissioner made a tour through these provinces, he found that, notwithstanding the suppression of slaveraiding which has taken place under the British flag, parents were privately selling their children at a price varying from is. 6d. to 2s. apiece.

Between these people and the higher-class pagans of Borgu, Nupe, and Kororofa, there has been, for all the time of which we have any record, a very wide gulf fixed. For the most part these lower-class pagans have been driven by the movements of local civilisation far southward towards the coast.

Assuming, as I think we may assume, that the belt of native civilisation which stretched from Borgu on the west bank of the Niger through Nupe to Kororofa, not far from the sources of the Benue on the east, represented the earliest wave and farthest extension of the great movement which at some very distant period