road, even the Government, it seems, having to apply to the company for carriers; and a monopoly is always undesirable in theory and sometimes very irritating in practice. (Apparently the same situation has come about in regard to the Riga-Chikum road.) But it is difficult to see how any tin at all could have been got down, or machinery and stores got up, to and from the river if it had not been for the company’s enterprise and far-seeing methods. Certainly the loudest of its local critics would have been quite unable to have coped with the problem. Something remains to be said of the Bauchi province. The province consists of the Bauchi and Gombe Emirates, the Ningi Division, an independent community half Muslim, half pagan, of erstwhile noted freebooters and fighters, and the purely pagan section, of which the Hill Division is the most important. The total population is about half a million. In no part of Africa probably is there such a conglomeration of different tribes—Angass, Sura, Tangali, Chip, Waja, Kanna, Bukurus, etc., etc.—as is to be found in the pagan division of Bauchi which, for centuries, has been the refuge of communities fleeing from Hausa, Fulani and Beri-Beri (Kanuri) pressure. No fewer than sixty-four distinct languages—not dialects—are said to have been noted within it. The men are an upstanding race, lithe rather than muscular, great archers and in many cases daring horsemen, riding bare-backed, covering immense distances in a phenomenally short space of time and shooting accurately (with the bow) while mounted. Most of them go about absolutely naked but for a sanitary adornment of special character. For a picture of primitive man commend me to the spectacle of a naked Bauchi pagan carrying a bow in his hand, on his back a quiver of arrows; on his head, its horns sticking out on either side, the gory and newly severed head of an ox—the “Boar of the Ardennes” in variation and in an African setting of rugged mountains and dying sun! I observed this sight one evening riding into Naraguta from a distant mining camp, passing, ten minutes later, a gorgeously attired Mohammedan _Sariki_ in his many coloured robes on a richly caparisoned horse. Northern Nigeria is a land of extraordinary contrasts, which to some extent no doubt is the secret of its fascination. The women’s clothing is also of the scantiest, consisting of a bunch of broad green leaves fixed round the waist and falling over the hips and lower abdomen. Their chastity is proverbial even among the dissolute camp-followers. [Illustration: SCENE IN THE BAUCHI HIGHLANDS.]