132 
AFRICA AND ITS EXPLORATION. 
In this market, stocked with all the provisions in use in 
Africa, beef, mutton, goats’ and sometimes even camels’ 
flesh, are sold. 
Writing-paper of French manufacture, scissors and 
knives, antimony, tin, red silk, copper bracelets, glass 
beads, coral, amber, steel rings, silver ornaments, turban 
shawls, cotton cloths, calico, Moorish habiliments, and 
many other articles, were exposed for sale in large 
quantities in the market-place of Kano. 
There Clapperton bought for three piastres an 
English cotton umbrella from Ghadames. He also 
p 
visited the slave-market, where the unfortunate human 
chattels are as carefully examined as recruits. 
The town is very unhealthy, the swamps cutting it 
in two, and the holes produced by the removal of the 
earth for building produce permanent malaria. 
It is the fashion at Kano to stain the teeth and 
limbs with the juice of a plant called gourgi, and with 
tobacco, which produces a bright red colour. Gouro 
nuts are chewed, and sometimes even swallowed when 
mixed with trona, a habit not peculiar to Houssa, for 
it extends to Bornou, where it is strictly forbidden to 
women. The people of Houssa smoke a native tobacco. 
On the 23rd of February Clapperton started for 
Sockatoo. He crossed a picturesque, well-cultivated 
country, wdiose wooded hills gave it the appearance of an 
English park. Herds of beautiful white or dun-coloured 
oxen gave animation to the scenery. 
The most important places passed en route by Clap¬ 
perton were Gadania, a densely-populated town, the 
inhabitants of which had been sold as slaves by the 
Fellatahs, Doncami, Zinnia, the capital of Gambra, 
Kagaria, Kouari, and the wells of Kamoun, where he 
met an escort sent by the sultan. 
Sockatoo was the most thickly populated city that 
the explorer had seen in Africa. Its well-built houses 
form regular streets, instead of clustering in groups as in 
the other towns of Houssa. It is surrounded by a wall 
between twenty and thirty feet high, pierced by twelve 
gates, which are closed every evening at sunset, and it 
