On the 22nd March, 1827, Caillie left Freetown for Kakondy, a village on the Rio Nunez, where he employed his leisure in collecting information respecting the Landamas and the Nalous, both subject to the Foulahs of Fouta Djallon, but not Mohammedans, and, as a necessary result, both much given to spirituous liquors. They dwell in the districts watered by the Rio Nunez, side by side with the Bagos, an idolatrous race who dwell at its mouth. The Bagos are light-hearted, industrious, and skilful tillers of the soil; they make large profits out of the sale of their rice and salt. They have no king, no religion but a barbarous idolatry, and are governed by the oldest man in their village, an arrangement which answers very well. On the 19th April, 1827, Caillie with but one bearer and a guide, at last started for Timbuctoo. He speaks favourably of the Foulahs and the people of Fouta Djallon, whose rich and fertile country he crossed. The Ba-Fing, the chief affluent of the Senegal, was not more than a hundred paces across, and a foot and a half deep where he passed it; but the force of the current, and the huge granite rocks encumbering its bed, render it very difficult and dangerous to cross the river. After a halt of nineteen days in the village of Cambaya, the home of the guide who had accompanied him thus far, Caillie entered Kankan, crossing a district intersected by rivers and large streams, which were then beginning to inundate the whole land. On the 30th May the explorer crossed the Tankisso, a large river with a rocky bed belonging to the system of the Niger, and reached the latter on the 11th June, at Couronassa. [Illustration: Caillie crossing the Tankisso.] "Even here," says Caillie, "so near to its source, the Niger is 900 feet wide, with a current of two miles and a half." Before we enter Kankan with the French explorer, it will be well to sum up what he says of the Foulahs of Fouta. They are mostly tall, well-made men, with chestnut-brown complexions, curly hair, lofty foreheads, aquiline noses, features in fact very like those of Europeans. They are bigoted Mohammedans, and hate Christians. Unlike the Mandingoes, they do not travel, but love their home; they are good agriculturists and clever traders, warlike and patriotic, and they leave none but their old men and women in their villages when they go to war. The town of Kankan stands in a plain surrounded by lofty mountains. The bombax, baobab, and butter-tree, also called "ce" the "shea" of Mungo Park, are plentiful. Caillie was delayed in Kankan for twenty-eight days before he could get on to Sambatikala; and during that time he was shamefully robbed by his host, and could not obtain from the chief of the village restitution of the goods which had been stolen.