172 
TIIE KILIMA-NJAR 0 EXPEDITION. 
chief of Mosi having sent a messenger asking for 
advice and ammunition, I immediately armed twenty 
of my own men with Sniders and muzzle-loading guns, 
took a barrel of powder, a box of cartridges, and a bag 
of buckshot; and, further , in view of an eventuality 
which I had often anticipated even in England , I packed 
a mysterious box with some of the contents of a water¬ 
tight case, and gave it to one of my men with the 
strictest injunctions as to its careful porterage. 
As we wound along the hill-side towards Mandara’s 
we found the narrow path choked with lowing kine 
and bleating goats. At the approach of war and in¬ 
vasion the inhabitants of Mosi were driving all their 
cattle to Mandara’s fortress. Thither we also went 
our way. Ordinarily the chief would pass his days in 
a circle of four or five bee-hive huts and open sheds, 
surrounded by a low hedge of dracoenas and exposed 
to view from the village green; but in troublous times 
he withdrew to an extraordinary fastness which merits 
a word or two of description. To the south of these 
visible huts, which to an unsuspecting passer-by con¬ 
stituted the entirety of Mandara’s town, rose a dense 
grove of unusually fine bananas. The initiated who 
wished to approach the hidden citadel wound through 
their cool green shade by circuitous paths, patent to 
all at this time by the press of cattle that thronged 
them, and then arrived at a stockade of living forest. 
The chief of Mosi had girt about his stronghold with a 
compact band of trees, dug up by the roots as saplings 
and planted alive, so that with a year or two’s growth 
their trunks had thickened and left no space between. 
Further, they were planted in the outer works four 
deep, and, being alive and green, their network of 
foliage masked the fortress with a living grove which 
