Zinder is full of half-crazy fighis, who can just write the Arabic alphabet. They go about the streets begging piteously, with a calabash inkstand and reed-pen in their hands. I have been pestered with two or three every day since I came here. They also wander through the country parts of Damerghou. Bornou is the nursery of these silly pedagogues, in whom learning and madness are most cordially united; but, as I have already mentioned, it sends out a few instructed ones to redeem the reputation of these ignoramuses. In the afternoon I went to see the place of execution, and found it covered with human bones, the leavings of the hyænas, whose dens are close by. Proceeding a little further I came to the Tree of Death! a lonely tree springing out of the rocks, some forty or fifty feet in height, and of the species called here _kanisa_. My guide would not approach it very near, for he assured me that if any person went under its boughs, there must instantly come an order from the Sultan to put him to death, or hang him heels upwards upon its branches. "Don't you see the place is swept clean underneath its boughs? This is done every day, and by the executioner alone: no other person dare go there, for if he do he must die!" I certainly began to feel sick myself at the recital of various horrors perpetrated at this place by the executioner, and don't know whether, if any one had offered me some great reward, I would have ventured to place my feet upon this accursed spot of mother earth. Never in my life did I feel so sick at heart--so revolted at man's crimes and cruelties. The tree itself was a true picture of death--a tree of dark, impenetrable foliage, with a great head, or upper part larger than the lower one, and this head crowned with fifty filthy vultures, the ministers of the executioner, which eat the bodies of the criminals! The number of executions here performed is very great--some two or three hundred in a year. Since we have been here a man has been butchered in the night, scarcely a hundred yards from my house; so that I am in a pleasant neighbourhood, what with the executions and what with the hyænas. The people pretend that for a small offence the Sultan inflicts capital punishments: for example, merely speaking bad language. Turning from these disagreeable scenes, we went to see the dens of the hyænas, which are beneath the rocks, extending far under ground. Here we saw bones and dung enough. The scavengers of Zinder are, therefore, the vultures and hyænas: the former wing the air and dart on their prey by day, and the latter prowl the streets by night.