“Just then a marabout passed by. ‘Let him be the judge!’ said the disputants, and they put their case before him. “‘I know of nothing in the Koran which applies to your difficulty,’ said the holy man; ‘but show me the milk.’ He took the milk, he looked at it, he drank it. ‘This is really good milk,’ he added, ‘but there is nothing about your case in the Koran that I know of.’” With two other vocabularies of Gurma and Bozo expressions, less complete than those of the Songhay and Fulah languages, we made up a total of more than ten thousand new words, to which we added many very interesting grammatical remarks. This absorbing occupation, which fortunately became a positive monomania with some of us, contributed more than anything to our being able to survive the last month of our stay at Fort Archinard. [Illustration: OUR QUICK-FIRING GUN.] [Illustration: NATIVES OF SAY.] CHAPTER VIII MISTAKES AND FALSE NEWS We must now return to our arrival at Say. Although the days there were most of them monotonous enough, they brought their little ups and downs, and we received news now and then, of which, under the circumstances, we naturally sometimes exaggerated the importance. It would be wearisome for me as well as for the reader to give an account of what happened every day during our long winter at Fort Archinard. My notes were written under various difficulties and in very varying moods, reflecting alike my exaggerated low spirits when things went wrong, and my excess of delight when anything occurred to cheer me. Consecutive pages of my journal often contradicted each other, and any one reading them would imagine they were written by two different persons; but this is always the way with travellers, and even Barth himself was not exempt from such fluctuations of mood. My journal _in extenso_ might serve as an illustration of the psychology of the lie as illustrated amongst the negroes and Mussulmans, but no other useful purpose, so I shall greatly condense it. The reader will still, I hope, get a very good idea of all we went through. If what I quote is rather incoherent, excuses must be made for me, for the news we got was often incoherent enough, and our life at the Fort was rather a puzzle too sometimes, with our alternations of hope and anxiety. _Friday, April 10._—We are getting on with our fort; our abattis are finished and ready for any attack. (This was written the day after our arrival, whilst our work was still in full swing.)