, no doubt, is quite an art here, a splendid effort of will
and science and organization, as is needed to draw from this old soil
such crops as it can still produce. You toil a great deal, and you
effect prodigies. But, good heavens! how small your kingdom is! How can
you live here without hurting yourselves by ever rubbing against other
people's elbows? You are all heaped up to such a degree that you no
longer have the amount of air needful for a man's lungs. Your largest
stretches of land, what you call your big estates, are mere clods of
soil where the few cattle that one sees look to me like lost ants. But
ah! the immensity of our Niger; the immensity of the plains it waters;
the immensity of our fields, whose only limit is the distant horizon!"

Benjamin had listened, quivering. Ever since that son of the great river
had arrived, he had continued gazing at him, with passion rising in his
dreamy eyes. And on hearing him speak in this fashion he could no longer
restrain himself, but rose, went round the table, and sat down beside
him.

"The Niger--the immense plains--tell us all about them," he said.

"The Niger, the good giant, the father of us all over yonder!" responded
Dominique. "I was barely eight years old when my parents quitted
Senegal, yielding to an impulse of reckless bravery and wild hope,
possessed by a craving to plunge into the Soudan and conquer as chance
might will it. There are many days' march among rocks and scrub and
rivers from St. Louis to our present farm, far beyond Djenny. And I no
longer remember the first journey. It seems to me as if I sprang from
good father Niger himself, from the wondrous fertility of his waters.
He is gentle but immense, rolling countless waves like the sea, and so
broad, so vast, that no bridge can span him as he flows from horizon to
horizon. He carries archipelagoes on his breast, and stretches out arms
covered with herbage like pasture land. And there are the depths where
flotillas of huge fishes roam at their ease. Father Niger has his
tempests, too, and his days of fire, when his waters beget life in the
burning clasp of the sun. And he has his delightful nights, his soft and
rosy nights, when peace descends on earth from the stars.... He is the
ancestor, the founder, the fertilizer of the Western Soudan, which he
has dowered with incalculable wealth, wresting it from the invasion of
neighboring Saharas, building it up of his own fertile ooze. It is he
who ev