Five Weeks in a Balloon
“There’s Kabra!” exclaimed the doctor, joyously; “there is the harbor
of Timbuctoo, and the city is not five miles from here!”
“Then, sir, you are satisfied?” half queried Joe.
“Delighted, my boy!”
“Very good; then every thing’s for the best!”
In fact, about two o’clock, the Queen of the Desert, mysterious
Timbuctoo, which once, like Athens and Rome, had her schools of learned
men, and her professorships of philosophy, stretched away before the
gaze of our travellers.
Ferguson followed the most minute details upon the chart traced by
Barth himself, and was enabled to recognize its perfect accuracy.
The city forms an immense triangle marked out upon a vast plain of
white sand, its acute angle directed toward the north and piercing a
corner of the desert. In the environs there was almost nothing, hardly
even a few grasses, with some dwarf mimosas and stunted bushes.
As for the appearance of Timbuctoo, the reader has but to imagine a
collection of billiard-balls and thimbles—such is the bird’s-eye view!
The streets, which are quite narrow, are lined with houses only one
story in height, built of bricks dried in the sun, and huts of straw
and reeds, the former square, the latter conical. Upon the terraces
were seen some of the male inhabitants, carelessly lounging at full
length in flowing apparel of bright colors, and lance or musket in
hand; but no women were visible at that hour of the day.
“Yet they are said to be handsome,” remarked the doctor. “You see the
three towers of the three mosques that are the only ones left standing
of a great number—the city has indeed fallen from its ancient splendor!
At the top of the triangle rises the Mosque of Sankore, with its ranges
of galleries resting on arcades of sufficiently pure design. Farther
on, and near to the Sane-Gungu quarter, is the Mosque of Sidi-Yahia and
some two-story houses. But do not look for either palaces or monuments:
the sheik is a mere son of traffic, and his royal palace is a
counting-house.”
“It seems to me that I can see half-ruined ramparts,” said Kennedy.
“They were destroyed by the Fouillanes in 1826; the city was one-third
larger then, for Timbuctoo, an object generally coveted by all the
tribes, since the eleventh century, has belonged in succession to the
Touaregs, the Sonrayans, the Morocco men, and the Fouillanes; and this
great centre of civilization, where a sage like Ahmed-Baba owned, in
the sixteenth century, a library of sixteen hundred manuscripts, is now
nothing but a mere half-way house for the trade of Central Africa.”
The city, indeed, seemed abandoned to supreme neglect; it betrayed that
indifference which seems epidemic to cities that are passing away. Huge
heaps of rubbish encumbered the suburbs, and, with the hill on which
the market-place stood, formed the only inequalities of the ground.
When the _Victoria_ passed, there was some slight show of movement;
drums were beaten; but the last learned man still lingering in the
place had hardly time to notice the new phenomenon, for our travellers,
driven onward by the wind of the desert, resumed the winding course of
the river, and, ere long, Timbuctoo was nothing more than one of the
fleeting reminiscences of their journey.
“And now,” said the doctor, “Heaven may waft us whither it pleases!”
“Provided only that we go westward,” added Kennedy.
“Bah!” said Joe; “I wouldn’t be afraid if it was to go back to Zanzibar
by the same road, or to cross the ocean to America.”
“We would first have to be able to do that, Joe!”
“And what’s wanting, doctor?”
“Gas, my boy; the ascending force of the balloon is evidently growing
weaker, and we shall need all our management to make it carry us to the
sea-coast. I shall even have to throw over some ballast. We are too
heavy.”
“That’s what comes of doing nothing, doctor; when a man lies stretched
out all day long in his hammock, he gets fat and heavy. It’s a
lazybones trip, this of ours, master, and when we get back every body
will find us big and stout.”
“Just like Joe,” said Kennedy; “just the ideas for him: but wait a bit!
Can you tell what we may have to go through yet? We are still far from
the end of our trip. Where do you expect to strike the African coast,
doctor?”
“I should find it hard to answer you, Kennedy. We are at the mercy of
very variable winds; but I should think myself fortunate were we to
strike it between Sierra Leone and Portendick. There is a stretch of
country in that quarter where we should meet with friends.”
“And it would be a pleasure to press their hands; but, are we going in
the desirable direction?”
“Not any too well, Dick; not any too well! Look at the needle of the
compass; we are bearing southward, and ascending the Niger toward its
sources.”
“A fine chance to discover them,” said Joe, “if they were not known
already. Now, couldn’t we just find others for it, on a pinch?”
“Not exactly, Joe; but don’t be alarmed: I hardly expect to go so far
as that.”
At nightfall the doctor threw out the last bags of sand. The _Victoria_
rose higher, and the blow-pipe, although working at full blast, could
scarcely keep her up. At that time she was sixty miles to the southward
of Timbuctoo, and in the morning the aëronauts awoke over the banks of
the Niger, not far from Lake Debo.
CHAPTER FORTIETH.
Dr. Ferguson’s Anxieties.—Persistent Movement southward.—A Cloud of
Grasshoppers.—A View of Jenné.—A View of Ségo.—Change of the
Wind.—Joe’s Regrets.
The flow of the river was, at that point, divided by large islands into
narrow branches, with a very rapid current. Upon one among them stood
some shepherds’ huts, but it had become impossible to take an exact
observation of them, because the speed of the balloon was constantly
increasing. Unfortunately, it turned still more toward the south, and
in a few moments crossed Lake Debo.
Dr. Ferguson, forcing the dilation of his aërial craft to the utmost,
sought for other currents of air at different heights, but in vain; and
he soon gave up the attempt, which was only augmenting the waste of gas
by pressing it against the well-worn tissue of the balloon.
He made no remark, but he began to feel very anxious. This persistence
of the wind to head him off toward the southern part of Africa was
defeating his calculations, and he no longer knew upon whom or upon
what to depend. Should he not reach the English or French territories,
what was to become of him in the midst of the barbarous tribes that
infest the coasts of Guinea? How should he there get to a ship to take
him back to England? And the actual direction of the wind was driving
him along to the kingdom of Dahomey, among the most savage races, and
into the power of a ruler who was in the habit of sacrificing thousands
of human victims at his public orgies. There he would be lost!
On the other hand, the balloon was visibly wearing out, and the doctor
felt it failing him. However, as the weather was clearing up a little,
he hoped that the cessation of the rain would bring about a change in
the atmospheric currents.
It was therefore a disagreeable reminder of the actual situation when
Joe said aloud:
“There! the rain’s going to pour down harder than ever; and this time
it will be the deluge itself, if we’re to judge by yon cloud that’s
coming up!”
“What! another cloud?” asked Ferguson.
“Yes, and a famous one,” replied Kennedy.
“I never saw the like of it,” added Joe.
“I breathe freely again!” said the doctor, laying down his spy-glass.
“That’s not a cloud!”
“Not a cloud?” queried Joe, with surprise.
“No; it is a swarm.”
“Eh?”
“A swarm of grasshoppers!”
“That? Grasshoppers!”
“Myriads of grasshoppers, that are going to sweep over this country
like a water-spout; and woe to it! for, should these insects alight, it
will be laid waste.”
“That would be a sight worth beholding!”
“Wait a little, Joe. In ten minutes that cloud will have arrived where
we are, and you can then judge by the aid of your own eyes.”
The doctor was right. The cloud, thick, opaque, and several miles in
extent, came on with a deafening noise, casting its immense shadow over
the fields. It was composed of numberless legions of that species of
grasshopper called crickets. About a hundred paces from the balloon,
they settled down upon a tract full of foliage and verdure. Fifteen
minutes later, the mass resumed its flight, and our travellers could,
even at a distance, see the trees and the bushes entirely stripped, and
the fields as bare as though they had been swept with the scythe. One
would have thought that a sudden winter had just descended upon the
earth and struck the region with the most complete sterility.
“Well, Joe, what do you think of that?”
“Well, doctor, it’s very curious, but quite natural. What one
grasshopper does on a small scale, thousands do on a grand scale.”
“It’s a terrible shower,” said the hunter; “more so than hail itself in
the devastation it causes.”
“It is impossible to prevent it,” replied Ferguson. “Sometimes the
inhabitants have had the idea to burn the forests, and even the
standing crops, in order to arrest the progress of these insects; but
the first ranks plunging into the flames would extinguish them beneath
their mass, and the rest of the swarm would then pass irresistibly
onward. Fortunately, in these regions, there is some sort of
compensation for their ravages, since the natives gather these insects
in great numbers and greedily eat them.”
“They are the prawns of the air,” said Joe, who added that he was sorry
that he had never had the chance to taste them—just for information’s
sake!
The country became more marshy toward evening; the forests dwindled to
isolated clumps of trees; and on the borders of the river could be seen
plantations of tobacco, and swampy meadow-lands fat with forage. At
last the city of Jenné, on a large island, came in sight, with the two
towers of its clay-built mosque, and the putrid odor of the millions of
swallows’ nests accumulated in its walls. The tops of some baobabs,
mimosas, and date-trees peeped up between the houses; and, even at
night, the activity of the place seemed very great. Jenné is, in fact,
quite a commercial city: it supplies all the wants of Timbuctoo. Its
boats on the river, and its caravans along the shaded roads, bear
thither the various products of its industry.
“Were it not that to do so would prolong our journey,” said the doctor,
“I should like to alight at this place. There must be more than one
Arab there who has travelled in England and France, and to whom our
style of locomotion is not altogether new. But it would not be
prudent.”
“Let us put off the visit until our next trip,” said Joe, laughing.
“Besides, my friends, unless I am mistaken, the wind has a slight
tendency to veer a little more to the eastward, and we must not lose
such an opportunity.”
The doctor threw overboard some articles that were no longer
of use—some empty bottles, and a case that had contained
preserved-meat—and thereby managed to keep the balloon in a belt of the
atmosphere more favorable to his plans. At four o’clock in the morning
the first rays of the sun lighted up Ségo, the capital of Bambarra,
which could be recognized at once by the four towns that compose it,
by its Saracenic mosques, and by the incessant going and coming of the
flat-bottomed boats that convey its inhabitants from one quarter to
the other. But the travellers were not more seen than they saw. They
sped rapidly and directly to the northwest, and the doctor’s anxiety
gradually subsided.
“Two more days in this direction, and at this rate of speed, and we’ll
reach the Senegal River.”
“And we’ll be in a friendly country?” asked the hunter.