The western portion of the Bauchi province is the true centre of the nascent industry. The country about here is wild and beautiful, broken by mountain ranges which cannot always be negotiated on horseback, and rising to a considerable height, up to 5000 feet round about Bukuru and Pankshin. Anything more at variance with the forest regions of the south it would be impossible to imagine. The whole province is well watered, and the mineral section lies in the watershed of three fluvial systems, one feeding the Chad of which the Delimi (or Bunga) is the most important; another the Benue, of which the Gongola, Kaddera and Sango are the principal contributory offshoots; another the Niger, through its tributary the Kaduna which branches out into a fan of numerous lesser streams. Naraguta, on the Delimi—where most of the mining is actually concentrated—is situate almost at the heart of these three systems. There appears to be no bed of tin-bearing wash over the whole country, but for centuries upon centuries hundreds of feet of rock—chiefly granite of sorts, with gneiss and basalt—have been denuded by the action of the weather, and the tin discovered is the concentration of the tin disseminated throughout those rocks which has been washed into the beds of the rivers. Practically (there is one known exception, perhaps two) all the tin as yet discovered is alluvial, and there is virtually no alluvial tin except in the river-beds themselves. It occurs in patches, which explains, although it does not excuse, the flamboyant statements issued on the strength of specific returns, over a given area, from washings. A company may have secured a licence, or a lease, over a wide area in one particular corner of which one or more of these patches has been met with. The returns from washings in these patches, some of which are very rich, are made to apply in prospectus-framing to the whole area, when the bulk of it may be virgin not only of tin in payable quantities, but of any trace of tin at all.