VILLAGE HEAD-MEN 198 WOMEN COTTON SPINNERS 232 MEN WEAVING 232 MAPS MAP OF SOUTHERN NIGERIA 46 ” NORTHERN NIGERIA 92 ” ILLUSTRATING AN UNAUTHORIZED SCHEME OF AMALGAMATION 204 PART I THOUGHTS ON TREK CHAPTER I ON WHAT HAS BEEN AND MAY BE After trekking on horseback five hundred miles or so, you acquire the philosophy of this kind of locomotion. For it has a philosophy of its own, and with each day that passes you become an apter pupil. You learn many things, or you hope you do, things internally evolved. But when you come to the point of giving external shape to them by those inefficient means the human species is as yet virtually confined to—speech and writing—you become painfully conscious of inadequate powers. Every day brings its own panorama of nature unfolding before your advance; its own special series of human incidents—serious, humorous, irritating, soothing—its own thought waves. And it is not my experience that these long silent hours—for conversation with one’s African companions is necessarily limited and sporadic—induce, by what one would imagine natural re-action, descriptive expansiveness when, pen in hand, one seeks to give substance to one’s impressions. Rather the reverse, alack! Silent communing doth seem to cut off communication between brain and pen. You are driven in upon yourself, and the channel of outward expression dries up. For a scribbler, against whom much has been imputed, well-nigh all the crimes, indeed, save paucity of output, the phenomenon is not without its alarming side, at least to one’s self. In one’s friends it may well inspire a sense of blessed relief.