Bú-Bakr indeed might have been called a patriot in every sense of the word. Although a loyal subject, and humbly devoted to his sultan, nevertheless he beheld with the deepest mortification the decline of his native country from the former wealth and importance it had enjoyed previous to the time when ʿAbd el Kerím Sabún, the sultan of Wádáy, conquered it, plundered its treasures, made the king tributary, and led numbers of the inhabitants into slavery. Thus the whole well-being of the country had been annihilated, and not only their wealth in silver and cattle had disappeared, but the ruin and decay extended even, as he considered, in his melancholy frame of mind, to nature,—whole districts which had been formerly under cultivation and covered with villages being now changed to a wilderness, and regions which had formerly been well supplied with water suffering now the extreme of drought. Worms, he told me, were devouring their crops and vegetables, dooming them to starvation. All this was true as far as regarded the present state of the country; for though I cannot say whether its physical condition was ever much more favourable, still as to its government and political importance there certainly was a time when Bagírmi enjoyed greater prosperity. It might seem indeed as if the country was visited by Divine chastisement, as a punishment for the offences of their ancestors and the ungodly life of their former ruler. In no country in the whole extent of Negroland which I have travelled over have I seen such vast numbers of destructive worms, and such a predominance of ants, as in Bagírmi. There is especially a large black worm called “hallu-wéndi,” as long as the largest grub, but much bigger, which, swarming in millions, consumes an immense proportion of the produce of the natives. Bú-Bakr showed me also another far smaller, but not less voracious insect, which they call “kunjungjúdu,” a beetle about half an inch long, and of a yellow colour; but the poor natives, like the inhabitants of other countries in the case of the locust, do not fail to take their revenge, for when the insect has grown fat and big at their expense, they devour it themselves,—a habit which may be one of the numerous relics of their former pagan existence, it being still a general custom with the Sókoró to eat a large species of beetle called “dernána.”