as accompanied by several guards of horse and foot, and a
band of five men, three of whom carried a sort of drum, who sang
extemporary songs while they beat time; another carried a pipe made of a
reed, and a fifth blew on a buffalo's horn loud and deep-toned blasts.
As he advanced through the forest he was preceded by twelve pioneers,
who carried long forked poles, with which they kept back the branches as
the party moved forward; at the same time they pointed out any dangers
in the road.

The heat was intense. Into a lake at which they arrived the horses
rushed by hundreds, making the water as thick as pea-soup. As the
major's camel had not come up, he could not pitch his tent, and he was
compelled to lie down in the best shade he could find, and cover himself
completely with a cloth and a thick woollen bournous, to keep up a
little moisture, by excluding all external air.

After several days' march they arrived near the capital of Mandara,
whose sultan sent out several of his chiefs to meet them. Near the town
of Delow the sultan himself appeared, surrounded by about five hundred
horsemen. Different parties of these troops charged up to the front of
Barca Gana's forces, and, wheeling suddenly round, galloped back again.
They were handsomely dressed in Soudan _tobes_ of different colours--
dark blue and striped with yellow and red; bournouses of coarse scarlet
cloth, with large turbans of white or dark-coloured cotton. Their
horses were really beautiful--larger and more powerful than any seen in
Bornou. They managed them with great skill.

A parley was now carried on. This sultan was an ally of the sheikh, but
the people who were to be attacked were his own subjects, though, as
they were pagans, that mattered nothing.

Boo-Khaloum was, as usual, very sanguine of success. He said he should
make the sultan handsome presents, and that he was quite sure a Kerdie
or pagan town full of people would be given him to plunder.

The Arabs eyed the Kerdie huts, now visible on the sides of the
mountains, with longing eyes, and, contrasting their own ragged
condition with the appearance of the Sultan of Mandara's people in their
rich _tobes_, observed to Book-Haloum that what they saw pleased them;
they would go no further; this would do. They trusted for victory to
their guns--though many were wretched weapons, and their powder was
bad--declaring that arrows were nothing, and ten thousand spears of no
importance. "We