On the sands at Guet n’dar tumult prevails. A confused throng, composed of every type of negro, is gathered together, uttering a babel of all the languages of the Soudan. There, throughout the year, is held a great market, crowded with people from all parts of Africa, and every imaginable article is offered for sale—precious things, absurd things, merchandise useful and fantastic, the most incongruous wares, gold and butter, meat and unguents, live sheep and manuscripts, prisoners and porridge, amulets and vegetables. One side of the picture is framed by an arm of the river, St Louis in the background, with its straight lines, its Babylonian terraces, its white limewash splashed with brick red, and here and there the yellow crest of a palm tree, erect against the blue sky. On the other side lies Guet n’dar, the negro ant heaps, with its thousands of pointed roofs. Close by caravans are halting, camels lying on the sand, Moors unloading their bales of ground nuts and their fetish pouches of wrought leather. Pedlars of both sexes are crouched on the sand, laughing and quarrelling, jostled and trodden upon, they and their wares, by their customers. “_Hou! dièndé m’pât!_” ... (women selling sour milk out of goatskins sewn together, with the hair on the inner side). “_Hou! dièndé nébam!_” (butter sellers—women of the Peuhle tribe, with great, three-cornered chignons, ornamented with copper discs—diving with both hands for their merchandise into vessels of hairy goatskin—rolling it between their fingers into little grimy balls, sold at a halfpenny each—then wiping their paws on their hair). “_Hou! dièndé kheul!... dièndé khorompolé_” (women selling simples, little bundles of enchanted herbs, lizard tails, and roots with magic properties). “_Hou! dièndé tchiakhkha!... dièndé djiareb!_” ... (women squatting on the ground selling grains of gold, fragments of jade, amber beads, silver frontlets—all spread out on the ground on pieces of dingy linen and trodden upon by the customers). “_Hou! dièndé guerté!... dièndé khankhel! dièndé jap-nior ..._” (women selling pistachios, live ducks, absurd eatables, meat dried in the sun, sweet pastes, devoured by flies). Women selling salt fish, pipes, things of every description; old jewels; old dirty verminous pagnes robbed from the corpse; Galam butter, used for frizzling the hair; little old tails of hair, cut or torn from the heads of dead negresses, and plaited and gummed ready for use just as they are. Women selling grigris, amulets, old guns, gazelles’ dung, old copies of the Koran, annotated by pious Marabouts of the desert; musk, flutes, old silver-handled daggers, old iron knives that have already been plunged into men’s vitals; tom-toms, giraffes’ horns, and old guitars.