ot only agriculturists, we are fishermen
and hunters also. We have our boats; the Niger abounds in fish to an
extraordinary degree, and there are wonderful hauls at times. And even
the shooting and hunting would suffice to feed us; game is plentiful,
there are partridges and wild guinea-fowl, not to mention the
flamingoes, the pelicans, the egrets, the thousands of creatures who
do not prey on one another. Black lions visit us at times: eagles fly
slowly over our heads; at dusk hippopotami come in parties of three
and four to gambol in the river with the clumsy grace of negro children
bathing. But, after all, we are more particularly cultivators, kings
of the plain, especially when the waters of the Niger withdraw after
fertilizing our fields. Our estate has no limits; it stretches as far as
we can labor. And ah! if you could only see the natives, who do not even
plough, but have few if any appliances beyond sticks, with which they
just scratch the soil before confiding the seed to it! There is no
trouble, no worry; the earth is rich, the sun ardent, and thus the crop
will always be a fine one. When we ourselves employ the plough, when we
bestow a little care on the soil which teems with life, what prodigious
crops there are, an abundance of grain such as your barns could never
hold! As soon as we possess the agricultural machinery, which I have
come to order here in France, we shall need flotillas of boats in order
to send you the overplus of our granaries.... When the river subsides,
when its waters fall, the crop we more particularly grow is rice; there
are, indeed, plains of rice, which occasionally yield two crops. Then
come millet and ground-beans, and by and by will come corn, when we can
grow it on a large scale. Vast cotton fields follow one after the other,
and we also grow manioc and indigo, while in our kitchen gardens we have
onions and pimentoes, and gourds and cucumbers. And I don't mention the
natural vegetation, the precious gum-trees, of which we possess quite a
forest; the butter-trees, the flour-trees, the silk-trees, which grow
on our ground like briers alongside your roads.... Finally, we are
shepherds; we own ever-increasing flocks, whose numbers we don't even
know. Our goats, our bearded sheep may be counted by the thousand; our
horses scamper freely through paddocks as large as cities, and when
our hunch-backed cattle come down to the Niger to drink at that hour of
serene splendor the sunset, they