Those Moors who have no gum, and who cannot procure the means of subsistence at the port, force themselves into the camps of these poor creatures, live upon them, and devour the profits which they have made by the sale of their commodities. It is indeed an established principle, that this class should be continually plundered by the others. As commerce attracts to this spot a vast number of dealers and visiters, there is a perpetual bustle. While the trade lasts, the port is like a tumultuous fair; on one side are the camels and oxen of the caravans, driven out to graze or to the river to water; on another a flock of sheep, which a zenague is endeavouring to sell; here a caravan just arrived from the desert, with dealers besetting it and quarrelling with one another; laptots[35] fighting, and women squabbling; further on, hassanes on horseback, or mounted on camels, running to and fro, and heightening, by their violence, the confusion of all the groupes which were already too turbulent. On the 31st of July in the evening, the station-ship fires a gun, which is the signal for the close of the traffic and the departure of the vessels. Such of the Moors as have not sold their gum take it away, and dig holes in the ground, where they keep it till the next season. The remainder of the customs is paid at this time; for the dealers never pay in advance, lest the Moors should send off their gum to some other place, in order to obtain double dues. Neither is it till after the return of the station-ship to St. Louis that the king receives the allowance granted by government to insure the protection of the trade. She sails on the 1st of August, and all the merchant ships usually follow. On the 11th of May I embarked for St. Louis; my guide accompanied me, and we arrived on the sixteenth. I took every possible precaution on the way, to prevent him from having an interview with Schims, the chief of the Dawalache tribe;[36] but my efforts were frustrated, and they met in a village not far from his post. They had a long conversation together, in which Schims informed my marabout that I had been with him before I went to the Braknas, and that I had proposed to receive my education from him; entering at the same time pretty fully into his motive for not receiving me, which he said was founded upon the accounts he had heard of me. As soon as Schims perceived me, he dropped the subject and congratulated me on my conversion; I reproached him for his refusal to take me into his camp, and he then repeated what he had just said, and laid great stress upon the bad account that the _children of the Senegal_[37] had given him of me; but for this, he said, he should not have hesitated to receive me and to treat me as his own son.