If they are ungrateful, they are also inhuman. They treat their slaves with barbarity; calling them by insulting names, beating them, and requiring a great deal of service in return for very little food, and having no other garment than a sheep-skin. I sometimes protested against the cruelty with which these wretches were treated. “They are slaves, they are infidels,” was the reply; “you see that they never pray; they know neither God nor the prophet.” I have seen slaves however who prayed with the utmost regularity, and were no better treated for it; neither did it save them from the degrading appellation of slaves. The office of the marabouts renders them more dissembling than the hassanes; they are less cruel, and more hospitable; but I have found repeatedly that they receive strangers unwillingly, rather from the fear of insult or pillage than from humanity. A European traveller who should not make up his mind to dissemble, as I did, if he were to escape the fanatic fury of the hassanes, would probably not be murdered by the marabouts; but they would forbid him to enter their tents; and they would afford him no sustenance; or if they gave him a little milk to save him from dying of hunger, it would be in the hope of being well paid. If a christian were to fall into the hands of the hassanes or zenagues, there is no kind of torture to which he would not be exposed. The marabouts wander less from the banks of the river, than the hassanes; they remove their camps less frequently, and never change their place except to seek pasturage. The zenagues, or tributaries, are the most wretched of the Moors; they are the serfs of the hassanes, and every hassane has more or fewer under his command. They exact from them annual contributions, consisting in general of a mator (about a quarter of a barrel) of millet, a calabash of butter, a few sheep-skins, and a _laize_ of stuff for a tent; or a cow and a calabash of butter from each. The tributaries pay with the utmost exactness; but their unjust and grasping lords always claim more than is due, and inflict the most horrible tortures to extort what they want. I have already mentioned how they drag them at the camel’s tail; but their cruelty goes still farther; if nothing can be got by torturing a poor zenague, his barbarous master not unfrequently stabs him. They are never safe from these tyrants, who pursue them even into their camps; where they sometimes take up their abode for days, and call for whatever they like.