MY JOURNEY FROM LOKO TO DORRORO 193 



more merged into their inherited natures, till perhaps a 

 day came when their masters seemed in their eyes an alien 

 people, whose grasp had weakened with generations of ease 

 and luxury, and they organised themselves and broke 

 away, driving off what cattle and sheep they could collect 

 in their hurried flight into the bush, where their long know- 

 ledge of its windings made it easy for them to confound 

 pursuit. And perhaps, too, they became even a source of 

 trouble and dread to their former lords, who starting up in 

 the night at a distant low whistling might hear their bulls, 

 bewitched by the magic of the sound, stampeding and 

 clearing their bounds to join their old drovers in the 

 bush. 



This power over cattle, begot of generations of intimacy 

 between man and beast, the cowherd tending his herd by 

 day in the pastures and lying down with it in the bush by 

 night, is common to all the Fulani, and to all the pastoral 

 peoples of Bornu ; a fact which, as Mr. Morel points out, 

 largely strengthens the idea that their origin is traceable to 

 the East. In my own experience, I have heard the distant 

 whistling round our camp at night, to find in the morning 

 that some of the bullocksf^ collected for us by the local chief, 

 had broken their tethers and gone away. 



In Bornu it is a frequent and pretty sight to see a herds- 

 man and his boys sheltering from the heat in the shade of a 

 big tree, while, away beyond the open stretch of sun-stricken 

 plain, his cattle wander off into the outskirts of the bush in 

 search of sparse tufts of dry grass, that have survived in the 

 shelter of the scrub. And it is pleasant to hear the long- 

 drawn note of his whistle, and then to watch the beasts 



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