The floods have fallen and a thousand dark forms are building up the muddy, slippery banks against the next invasion, with saplings rough hewn in the forest; the men chopping and adjusting these defences, the women carrying up earth from below in baskets. Beneath, the fishermen are making fast their canoes and spreading out their nets to dry—all kinds of nets, ordinary cast nets, nets resembling gigantic hoops, stiff nets encased in wood somewhat after the pattern of the coracle. The broad river fades away into the evening haze. For the swift wings of night are already felt, and the sun has just dropped behind the curtain of implacable forest. One by one, in twos and threes, in struggling groups, the workers scramble up the slope on to the path—or what remains of it from the floods—which skirts the village. It grows dark. One is vaguely aware of many naked, shadowy, mostly silent figures on every side of one; wending their way along the path, or flitting in and out among the houses. Eyes flash out of the semi-obscurity which is replete with the heavy, dank odour of African humanity when African humanity has been busily at work. In the open doorways a multitude of little fires spring into life, and with them the smell of aromatic wood. The evening meal is in preparation, and presently tired and naked limbs will stretch themselves to the warmth with a sense of comfort. The lament of a child serves to remind you how seldom these Niger babies cry. And now it is the turn of the fireflies to glow forth. Thick as bees, they carpet the ground on every marshy spot where the reeds grow—vivid, sentient gems. Patches of emeralds: but emeralds endowed with life; emeralds with an ambient flame lighting them from within. They hover above the ground like delicate will-o’-the-wisps. They float impalpable, illusive, unearthly beautiful in the still night air, as some rare and fleeting dream of immortality, some incarnation of transcendent joy towards which dull clay stretches forth arms everlastingly impotent. [Illustration: THE HOE-DANCERS. (THE HOE-DANCE IS A HAUSA AGRICULTURAL DANCE OF GREAT ANTIQUITY.)] CHAPTER VII THE SALLAH AT ZARIA