He did so, and my comrades accepted the loan thankfully, but the headman made some difficulty about the sovereign that I tendered through Musa, having never seen one before. However, the kola was lying on the ground and the coin looked like gold, so he fetched from his house a little pair of scales, and placing the sovereign in one pan, laid in the other a bronze weight, formed of a tiny elephant upon a pedestal, and a few scarlet jequirity seeds: by which process one pound sterling was found to be equal to twenty-one thousand _kurdi_. We spent that night in the village, sleeping in some stuffy malodorous houses lent us by the chief, and when we departed in the morning each of my companions carried on top of his bundle of merchandise a half load of kola, while I staggered under a full sack weighing upwards of sixty pounds, in addition to a smaller sack of cowrie shells--the “change” that had been due to me after the kola was paid for. CHAPTER XIII. THE GOLDEN POOL. In the course of a long journey on foot through an uncultivated country one acquires the faculty of unconsciously observing and generalising from certain geographical facts. By noticing the vegetation one can detect at a distance an invisible river or a change in the soil; in dense forest, the proximity of an unseen range of hills is inferred from rapidly-flowing streams with beds of shingle, and the general slope of the country can be judged, apart from particular inclines, from the average direction of the rivers. Now, very shortly after leaving Juábin, it became evident that we had entered a new watershed, for, whereas the streams had previously flowed mostly in a southerly direction, they now took a course for the most part towards the north-west, and were, moreover, increasing in size, the little rivulets giving place, as we travelled northward, to more considerable streams. It did not, therefore, cause me any surprise when, on the fifth day after leaving Juábin, we came to the brink of a large, slowly-flowing river. A river of any size is, however, always an object of interest to the traveller, and as we came out into the open space on the bank, we halted and looked about us curiously. The black, sluggish waters were spanned by a rude bridge formed of a single gigantic odúm tree, and on either bank, at each end of the bridge, was a high pile of sticks, while on the farther side of the river an opening in the trees showed that the road led into a village.