I have read in books of travel of countries where, to avoid succumbing from the heat, Europeans live in holes dug in the earth, and make negroes pour more or less fresh water on their heads from calabashes to keep them cool. We never got as far as that, but I do think that Say, at least in June and July, can compete in intensity of heat with any other place in the world. In such an oven we quite lost our appetites! Now ensued a time of terrible _ennui_. All our energy, all our gaiety, all our philosophy melted away before the awful prospect of living in this remote and hostile corner of the earth for five whole months; five months during which we knew we could not stir from the island; five months in which we must endure all the storms of heaven in our frail huts, and be exposed to the ceaseless plots against us of Amadu. The dreary, monotonous days in which nothing happened, did not even supply us with topics of conversation, so we talked more and more of France, which of course only intensified our home-sickness. Taburet, who had a wonderful memory for dates, seemed to find every day of the month an anniversary of some event. It became a more serious matter when our _ennui_ resulted in constant attacks of fever, but fortunately these attacks, thanks to the daily dose of quinine, were never very serious, only their recurrence was weakening, the more so that they were accompanied by what we called the Sudanite fever, a kind of moral affection peculiar to African soil. This Sudanite affection betrayed itself by different eccentricities in different people. It really is the effect of the great heat of the sun upon anæmic subjects, or upon those whose brains are not very strong. Sometimes, at about four o’clock in the morning, we used all of a sudden to hear a series of detonations inside the enceinte. “Holloa!” we would exclaim, “some one has got an attack of Sudanite fever, and is working it off by firing at bottles floating on the river.” Or another of the party would seal himself up hermetically in his hut, blocking every hole or crack through which a ray of sunlight could penetrate. The whole of the interior would be hung with blue stuff, under the pretence that red or white light would give fever. Another case of Sudanite! We could cite many more examples of the disease during our stay at Fort Archinard. However different may be most of its symptoms, one is always the same—a patient afflicted with it contradicts everybody and shows an absolutely intolerant spirit.