If your ship lies to awhile off this country, long pirogues with pointed bows like fish-heads, and bodies shaped like sharks, are soon seen approaching. They are manned by negroes, who row standing. These pirogue men are tall and lean, of Herculean proportions, admirable build and muscular development, and their faces are those of gorillas. They have capsized ten times at least while crossing the breakers. With negro perseverance, with the agility and strength of acrobats, ten times in succession have they righted their pirogue and made a fresh start. Sweat and sea water trickle from their bare skins, which gleam like polished ebony. Here they are in spite of all, smiling with an air of triumph, and displaying their magnificent white teeth. Their costume consists of an amulet and a bead necklet, their cargo of a carefully sealed leaden box, which contains the mails. In this box also are orders from the governor for the newly arrived ship, and in it, too, are deposited papers addressed to members of the colony. A man in a hurry can safely entrust himself to these boatmen, secure in the knowledge that he will be fished out of the sea as often as necessary with the utmost care, and that eventually he will be deposited on the beach. But it is more comfortable to continue one’s voyage as far south as the mouth of the Senegal, where flat-bottomed boats take off the passengers and convey them smoothly by river to St Louis. This isolation from the sea is one of the chief causes of the stagnation and dreariness of this country. St Louis cannot serve as a port of call to mail-steamers or merchantmen on their way to the southern hemisphere. One goes to St Louis if one must, and this gives one the feeling of being a prisoner cut off from the rest of the world. II In the northern quarter of St Louis, near the mosque, there stood a little solitary house belonging to one Samba-Hamet, trader on the upper river. It was a lime-washed house. The cracks of its brick walls, the crevices in its heat-shrunken wood-work harboured legions of white ants and blue lizards. Two marabout cranes haunted its roof, clacking their beaks in the sunshine, and solemnly stretching out their featherless necks when anyone chanced to pass along the straight, unfrequented street. O the dreariness of this land of Africa! The slight shadow of a frail thorn palm moved in its slow daily course along the whole length of the heated wall; the palm was the only tree in the quarter, where no green thing refreshed the eye. On its yellowed fronds flights of those tiny blue or pink birds, called in France _bengalis_, would often come and perch. But all around lay sand, sand, nothing but sand. Never a tuft of moss, never a fresh blade of grass grew on the soil, parched by the burning breath of the Sahara. III