Week after week, the storms of war and civil discord raged more and more furious; the traveller’s position became increasingly painful. His bitterest enemies were the Fulbi. They endeavoured to drag him from the sheikh’s protection by force, and when this failed, had recourse to an artifice to get him into their power. The Welád Shinan, who assassinated Major Laing, swore they would kill him. On the 27th of February, 1854, the chief of the Fulbi again intimated to the sheikh his request that Barth should be driven from the country. The sheikh peremptorily refused. Then came a fresh demand, and a fresh refusal; a prolonged and angry struggle; a situation more and more intolerable; while commerce suffered and the people were disquieted by the quarrels of their rulers. So it came to pass that, on the night of the 17th of March, Sidi Mohammed, eldest brother of El Bakay, beat the drum, mounted his horse, and bade Dr. Barth follow him with two of his servants, while the Towaregs, who supported them, clashed their bucklers together, and shouted their shrill war-cry. He found the sheikh at the head of a numerous body of Arabs and Sourays, with some Fulbi, who were devoted to him. As might be expected, Dr. Barth begged that he might not be the cause of any bloodshed; and the sheikh promised the malcontents that he would conduct the obnoxious Christian beyond the town. He encamped on the frontier of the Oberay, where everybody suffered terribly from bad food and insects. At length, after a residence of thirty-three days on the creek of Bosábango, it was decided that the march should be begun on the 19th of April. On the 25th, after having passed through various encampments of Towaregs, they followed the windings of the Niger, having on their left a well-wooded country, intersected by marshes, and enlivened by numerous pintados. Then they fell in with the valiant Wughduga, a sincere friend of El Bakay, and a magnificent Towareg warrior, nearly seven feet high, of prodigious strength, and the hero of deeds of prowess worthy of the most famous knight of the Table Round. Under his escort Dr. Barth reached Gogo—in the fifteenth century the flourishing and famous capital of the Souray empire, now a small and straggling town with a few hundred huts. Here he took leave of his kind and generous protector; and, with an escort of about twenty persons, recrossed to the right bank of the river, and descended it as far as Say, where he had passed it the year before. In this journey of one hundred and fifty leagues, he had seen everywhere the evidence of great fertility, and a peaceable population, in whose midst a European might travel in security; speaking to the people, as he did, of the sources and termination of their great fostering river—questions which interest those good negroes as much, perhaps, as they have perplexed the scientific societies of Europe, but of which they do not possess the most rudimentary knowledge.