There is so much that is dark and dismal about this missionary effort, inwardly I mean. All the African world is black to it, black with sin, black with lust, black with cruelty. And there is its besetting misfortune—it is alien. It preaches an alien God; a White God, not a Black God. The God that is imported here has nothing African about Him. How can He appeal to Africa?

I saw a week ago in an English paper (about two months old) that there is to be a crusade against Islam in Nigeria. Emissaries are to come out and check this poisonous growth. That, too, is very strange to read … out here, as one listens to the call to God in the evening, and in the morning, pealing out to the stars. These people are worshipping the God of Africa. It seems they ought to worship the God of Europe; and yet there is more evidence of spiritual influence out here, than in our great congested cities. With the cry of the African priest, the faithful bows his body to the earth—out here. The day before I left England, I heard the bells ringing out in an old cathedral city. Their note was both beautiful and sad. It was a spacious building, arched and vaulted, noble in proportions. It might easily have held seven hundred worshippers. There were many people in the streets. Yet, when the bells had ceased to ring, there were less than a dozen worshippers within.

All is silent in the camp. The fires have gone out. Over the thatched roofs the bombax towers upwards to the majestic heavens. The whole countryside is flooded with a soft, delicate effulgence, and the Great White Road appears as a broad ribbon of intenser light, winding away, away into the infinite beyond.

It is eleven o’clock. One wonders if London is looking quite so spiritual just now, with its flaming lights, its emptying theatres, its streets thronged with jostling, restless crowds.

* * *

CHAPTER VI

A RAGOÛT OF THINGS SEEN AND FELT

Some things detach themselves, as it were, from the general background, rooting themselves in memory. Such, the rise in the road beyond which the first of the great Mohammedan towns of the north lay concealed. Bida, the capital of the Nupes, the centre of an active trade, known for its handsomely embossed, if unsubstantial, brassware; known, too, for its rough glass bangles of black or dull blue, made out of nothing more romantic than old bottles melted in native furnaces kept going by the blowers who, when the stuff is sufficiently liquid, twirl it round a stick until the desired shape is attained; known, too, for its special species of kola—the labozhi, highly esteemed throughout Nigeria, requiring shade and a rich, deep loamy soil to bring it to perfection. Until the British occupation the cultivation and sale of the labozhi kola were the prerogative of the ruler, the Emir, who must now be content with a tenth of the crop, and let his subjects have a chance. Past a Fulani cattle encampment; past flat country covered with rice fields; past rustling fields of guinea corn ready for the cutter, with heads towering eleven feet in height; past clumps and dotted specimens of shea butter trees, in the branches of many of which are fixed calabashes for the bees; past the weird red clay monuments of the white ants dotting the plain; along the rough pitted, red dusty road, and so on until the rise. And then, between us and the rambling city, with its decaying walls, its wide central avenue, and its umbrageous trees, its masses of blue robed men and women with their henna-dyed teeth and picturesque head-dress, a cloud of dust, and borne down the wind blowing towards us the blare of trumpets and the rattle of drums.