“You don’t suppose that there is any truth in that story, do you?” I asked, as Pereira finished his recital. “I certainly do not imagine it to be true,” he replied. “But as I have said, we should not be too incredulous, for the longer one lives in Africa the more does one realise that it is a land of wonders.” This story of Pereira’s, wildly improbable as it was, made a considerable impression upon me, for not only is it true, as my host had remarked, that Africa is a land of strange and unexpected happenings, but to a newcomer like myself, the novelty of the surroundings, and the total contrast to the conditions of life in prosaic, workaday England, produce an impression of unreality that vitiates the standard of probability. I recalled, too, the mysterious references of Amádu Dandaúra to the “treasure-house” and the “blind men” of Tánosu, and bitterly regretted that I had not taken the opportunity of learning from him more about the weird and dreadful cavern of Aboási, if such a place really existed. CHAPTER IV. I VISIT A GRAVEYARD AND MEET A BLIND MAN. I do not know whether in the preceding pages I have made the reader understand what manner of place Quittáh is. Probably I have not, and a few words of description may be useful before proceeding further. Quittáh, then, is one of a row of towns or villages dotted along a narrow tongue of sand which stretches from the mouth of the river Volta with a few interruptions to the Niger Delta. On one side of this isthmus is the ocean and on the other a chain of large lagoons, and so narrow is the space separating sea and lagoon that, in many places, travellers proceeding along the latter in canoes can not only hear the boom of the surf upon the beach outside, but can see the white crests of the waves over the low-lying shore. Thus from the peculiarity of its position Quittáh was very much like a small island. From the sea one was cut off by the dangerous surf; from the adjacent villages of Jella-Koffi and Voja by the loose, shifting sand which it was almost impossible to walk upon, while between us and the mainland the lagoon spread out like an inland sea, right away to the horizon. This mainland, of which I heard occasional reports from native traders, became to me a source of continually increasing curiosity. From the lagoon-side market, where I often stood watching the fleets of canoes unloading their little freights of produce on to the “hard,” it was, as I have said, invisible, and the lagoon stretched, an unbroken waste of water as far as the eye could see. But from our verandah a few palms could be seen upon the other side, their heads just standing above the horizon, while on very clear days one could discern the dim and shadowy shape of the Adáklu--a solitary mountain some seventy miles distant in the interior.