4i6 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY might be the spirit of the raided populations, such aggression did not pass without leading to some form of retaliation. Roads were closed in every direction, and the approach of the Mohammedan was resented in arms by a peasantry who always cultivated their fields with weapons slung upon their backs. The bow and arrow — often the poisoned arrow — of the pagan Is in dexterous hands a more effective weapon than the clumsy and old-fashioned musket of the local Mohammedan, and it was by force of numbers rather than by superior weapons or military skill that the Fulanl armies overpowered the pagan populations in their raids. It lay with the pagans In return to close their roads to the passage of all individual traders who might prove to be but spies upon fertile or thickly populated lands. Nor Is It to be understood that the pagans themselves were wholly free from the vice of slave-raiding. They paid their tribute usually In slaves. They raided their enemies for slaves, and, as one of the incidental results of this preying of man on man, the roads through the country became generally so unsafe that travelling was only possible in well-defended caravans.

It Is also to be noted, as the result of half a century of anarchy, that the population of the Haussa States and Bornu, described by Dr. Barth In 1854 as dense, and estimated at about fifty millions, had, at the period of the British occupation, entirely deserted some of the most naturally fertile areas, and had fallen to a total which is now believed to equal only one-fifth of the estimated amount, or about ten to twelve millions.