THE NIGER TO THE NILE—ALEXANDER. 393 
Beyond Miltu the flat expanse is for the first time broken by an 
isolated group of wooded ironstone hills, known as the Togbau, about 
300 feet in height, abutting on the left bank of the river. From the 
top, a vast view of a barren country presents itself, and my mind was 
at once carried back to a similar occasion, when I viewed the land- 
scape from the top of the Keffi hills in Nigeria, and I could not help 
being forcibly struck by the contrast of the two scenes. There, as 
far as the eye could reach, stretched wide fields of yellowing corn, 
whose surface was often broken by clusters of hamlets where dwelt 
the happy harvesters, while here on all sides to the distance lay a 
barren stretch of bush and sand. 
From Fort Lamy onward the Shari region is thinly populated. 
Between Busso and Fort Archambault there are no villages, and the 
magnificent river flows through a silent land untouched by traffic of 
any kind, and one can travel for days without meeting a single native 
canoe. Regarding the natives, those on the right bank belong to the 
kingdom of the Bagirmi people, who have carried on for years a sys- 
tematic slave raiding against the Sara tribes, or Kurdi, as they are 
known to the Bagirm:; inhabiting chiefly the country away on the 
left bank, where they live in small communities, scattering their huts 
among their crops as a protection against surprise. They are timid 
people, but good and industrious farmers, growing chiefly millet and 
ground nuts; and, what is rare, both men and women work. ‘They 
may be observed in the fields together, sowing their crops. After the 
ground has been cleared the man walks along making a dab in the 
soil at intervals with his native hoe, and the woman follows with the 
seed, which she places in the hole and covers up with her foot. 
Closely allied to these people, both in appearance and customs, are 
the Kabba-sara, who inhabit the vicinity of the river above Fort 
Archambault. Beyond the right bank to the east the women of the 
Kabba-sara insert enormous wooden disks 4 inches in diameter in 
holes bored in the upper and lower lips, and the face is disfigured to 
such an extent that it no longer looks human, and the power of 
speech is reduced to a mumbling. This hideous custom is said to 
have originated in the mutilations which the women inflicted on 
themselves to prevent being seized by the sultans of Bagirmi for their 
harems in the days of slavery. The raids of these Bagirmi sultans, 
followed by the devastations of Rabeh, have crippled and depopu- 
lated to a disastrous extent the whole of the Shari region. This great 
leader had no less than 60,000 men in the field, who devastated and 
fed on the land like locusts. Each division of this large army had 
its foraging ground apportioned to it each day by the leader. 
During our journey up the Shari the amount of game we met with 
was truly wonderful. On different occasions Gosling obtained ele- 
phant, giraffe, buffalo, rhino, hartebeest, bushbuck, duiker, water 
