This is the country explored successfully, for the first time, by Captain L. G. Binger, who cleared up the uncertainties of this region, more than thirty years ago, by a long wandering between the Niger and the Gulf of Guinea. It was Binger's travel which exploded the myth of the Kong mountains, the first notice of which was brought to Europe by Park, who had received a false report of their impassability. It was supposed that they formed a barrier to communication between the tropical forest and the Sudan. As a matter of fact the Kong mountains are only a line of low hills, but they are precipitous on the south side, and are singularly eroded into grotesque buttes and wild ravines.

Passing this natural boundary line, one leaves behind the Sudan, its red level plains, its sparse scrub, its clear atmosphere, and begins to enter the region of heavier forestation. Here, with the approach of the rainy season, the sky became overcast and rent with thunderstorms, and the air was humid and oppressive. It was towards sunset of such a day that I reached the little post of Darakolondougou. Here I was welcomed by the chief of the subdivision-a hearty, likable officer, who was a native of the Hautes Pyrennées, and had passed his life in the service. With him, as a visitor, was a fellow official—a young man of delicate face and refined manners, who was a graduate of the University of Toulouse. A "courrier" had arrived two days before, and the broad table in the garden was piled with French newspapers and magazines. We sat in the dusk while dinner was being prepared, and they gave me

the news of all the world. For two months I had been without letters, had seen no newspapers, had met no person with information from the outside. These are some of the things which they told me had occurred while I traveled across West Africa, indifferent to Europe and America: President Wilson had died; Lenin had died, and the city of Peter the Great had been renamed "Leningrad"; the Conservative ministry in England had resigned and a Labor government was in office under Mr. Ramsay MacDonald; England had accorded independence to Egypt; Ghandi had been released from prison in India; the monetary currencies of Europe were continuing their melancholy decline, and in some cases had ended in debâcle; plans for the Olympiad progressed hopefully; a French football team had defeated some other team; and a famous California sprinter had injured his leg and could not run in the international games!

Their long recital of public affairs made me acutely and unhappily conscious that my holiday already lay behind me; that I was soon to find myself absorbed again in the concerns of men of my own race; that I had about reached the turn of the road. Our “apéritif" was finished. Food was brought on. Quiet evening sounds came to us from the huts and camps that surrounded us. The soft hoof-beats of a drove of cattle could be heard passing along the road, guided southward to market by their Fula herdsmen. Immediately in front of me lay the belt of thick tropical forest, and beyond that the sea.

I treasure the memories of that evening with those

two kindly fellows as almost the last that I was to spend outside the confines of civilization. The next day brought me to the rail-head at Bouaké. Thence it was only a day's ride to the lagoons at Abidjan and to the coast at Grand Bassam.

CHAPTER XI

THE BLACK VETERAN

HE conquests which European leaders have effected over the African peoples, particularly since 1884, have been accomplished almost entirely through the use of Africans themselves. African soldiers have borne the brunt of the fighting, not only in French West Africa, but throughout most of the continent as well. In the British re-occupation of the Sudan under Kitchener, battalions of British soldiers were lent by the English Government to stiffen the lines of Egyptians and Sudanese, but, with this exception, South Africa, alone, has been a theater of warfare in which white troops were mainly employed. In the British-Boer war both sides disdained, or felt it to be impolitic, to employ colored forces, and the struggle became what Kipling's Indian character described as a "sahib's war". In German Southwest Africa, also, the German Empire used German troops to destroy the Herreros. Elsewhere, in the main, blacks have been enlisted to conquer blacks.

When Anglo-French relations were strained and competition over the frontiers of Nigeria and Dahomey became so acute as to threaten hostilities, both French and British organized Negro forces to settle this dispute. In British territory this was the origin of the