When we pursued our march in the afternoon, our road lay through a fertile country, where the cultivation was divided between millet and sesamum, till we reached the first group of the village of Bákadá, which consists of four distinct hamlets. Here my companions wanted to procure quarters for me; but fortunately the head man of the village refused them admittance, so that they were obliged to seek for hospitality in another hamlet, and it was my good luck to obtain quarters in the house of a man who forms one of the most pleasing recollections of my journey. This was Háj Bú-Bakr Sadík, a spare old man, of very amiable temperament, to whom I became indebted for a great deal of kindness and valuable information. While I pitched my tent in his small courtyard, he was sitting close by, and was informing me in very good Arabic, that he had thrice made the pilgrimage to Mekka, and seen the great ships of the Christians on the Sea of Jedda. He remembered minutely all the different localities which he had visited in the course of his long wanderings. Delighted that by chance I had fallen in with such a man, I sent away the next morning my horseman Gréma ʿAbdú, and the two messengers, to the capital, in order to inform the lieutenant-governor that the chief of Búgomán had refused obedience to his direct order and denied me admittance into the town, and to ask him what was to become of me now. Sending him at the same time a present, I begged him urgently to allow me either to enter the capital or to retrace my steps to Bórnu. Gréma promised me that he would return the next morning with a decisive answer. However, he did not keep his promise, but remained absent full seven days, although the distance from the capital was only about ten miles. It was therefore very fortunate that I had the company of Bú-Bakr Sadík, for no other person would have been able to give me such an insight into the character and the history of these regions as this man. He drew a spirited picture of the great national struggle which his countrymen had been carrying on against Bórnu, he himself having taken part in several battles. He boasted, and with reason, that slaves of his master had twice beaten the sheikh Mohammed el Kánemí, and that the sheikh had only gained the victory by calling to his assistance Mústapha el Áhmar and Mukní, the two succeeding sultans of Fezzán, when, by destroying the towns of Babáliyá and Gáwi, and by taking possession of the capital, he made himself temporary master of the country. He described to me with delight how his countrymen had driven back the Felláta who were endeavouring to establish the Jemmára in their country, and that they had undertaken afterwards a successful expedition against Bógo, one of the settlements of that nation.