SLAVE-RAIDING 413 were looted. As soon as the frontier of the pagan country was reached, a general licence was, of course, given, and Dr. Barth describes day by day the progress of this vast band of robbers, who spread like a swarm of locusts over the fertile country.

The pagans were apparently in this instance of the higher type. They were no homeless savages. On the contrary, they were better agriculturists than the Bornu people themselves. The whole country was rich, and village after village of neatly built huts, having their pagan cemeteries and rude monuments to the dead, stood among fields of corn, tobacco, indigo, cotton, sorghum, and rice. In one place Dr. Barth says : '' The landscape was exceedingly beautiful, richly irrigated and finely wooded, while to our great astonishment the ground was so carefully cultivated that even manure had been put upon the fields in a regular manner, being spread over the ground to a great extent, the first example of such careful tillage that I had as yet observed in Central Africa, either among Mohammedans or pagans." Throughout this district the army marched, murdering, burning, destroying as they went. The inhabitants, knowing the object of their march, usually fled before them to the forest, abandoning their property that they might save their persons. This manoeuvre was frequently successful, and slaves were not always obtained. The villages were none the less burnt, and the surrounding crops destroyed. When prisoners were captured, only women and the young were kept. Full-grown men were massacred. On one day Dr. Barth reports : '* A large number of slaves had been caught this day. Altogether they were said to have taken a thousand, and there were certainly not less than five hundred. To our utmost horror not less than one hundred and seventy full-grown men were mercilessly slaughtered in cold blood, the greater part of them being allowed to bleed to death, a leg having been severed from the body." On other occasions the whole day's spoil was limited to a handful of slaves,