Truth to tell, I must add, in common fairness, that we were all more or less affected by it. We might have managed to pull along peaceably in an ordinary station with occupations which separated us from each other sometimes, but in this island, this cage, for it was little more, we were always rubbing shoulders, so to speak, and constant friction was inevitable. In fact, we ran our angles into our neighbours instead of rubbing those angles down. We were regularly prostrated with our inactive, almost idle life, and the true characters of each one came out without disguise. [Illustration: THE MEMBERS OF THE EXPEDITION AT FORT ARCHINARD.] At table every discussion led to a kind of squabble. Each of us stuck to his own opinion, even when the most astounding paradoxes had been enunciated. Sometimes, after a regular row, we all sat perfectly mute glaring at each other, and wondering what was to happen next. At night, or in the hour of the siesta, I used to get out my flute—another form of the Sudanite fever—and play melodies from the _Or du Rhin_ or _Tristan et Yseult_, but even music failed to calm the disputants. The tension was too great, and I was afraid that, even at this late period of our expedition, things would go wrong in consequence. All of a sudden a happy idea occurred to me, a regular inspiration from Heaven, which every one fell in with at once. This idea was simply that we should all work, and the result was the immediate restoration of order. It was a simple task enough that we now set ourselves to do, just to make vocabularies of the various more or less barbarous idioms in use in the Niger districts. There were plenty to choose from, for there is more confusion of tongues, such as is described in the Bible, in these parts than anywhere else. There is a perfectly inexhaustible supply of peculiar phrases. For instance, between Abo, in the highest part of the delta of the Niger, and the sea, as an officer of the Royal Niger Company told me, there are no less than seven dialects spoken, none of which have the very slightest affinity with each other. It would appear that one wave of migration has succeeded another, as the breakers do on the beach, the natives composing the different parties of emigrants dying out, or leaving only a few survivors stranded like islets in a flood in the tropical forests, retaining their original customs and dialects, and continuing to offer sacrifices in the old way, uninfluenced by the other native populations. It has been different further inland, for the last emigrants have been absorbed by the earlier settlers, rather than driven back, but at the same time their characteristics have not been merged in those of other tribes, so that we still find side by side totally different customs, and people speaking different dialects quite unlike each other, such as the Tuareg, Fulah, Songhay, Bambara, Bozo, Mossi, etc., almost equally distributed over extensive districts.