I rewarded by finding themselves in a land where agriculture flourishes under favourable conditions.The interminable sand gives place to soil watered by innumerable rivers and streams ; the burning rays of the sun are tempered by cool breezes and frequent rain ; vegetation flourishes, and the earth brings forth plentiful harvests.Nature indeed seems anxious to make amends for the desolation with which she has covered so much of Northern Africa, by pouring out her gifts in the regions which fringe the southern edge of the Sahara Desert.Here lies a high plateau of pasture land, lightly covered with vegetation, needing little more than a scratching of the soil and a scattering of seed to produce crops capable of supporting a large population.Farther south, towards the equator, the plateau shades into broken ranges of rocky hills, and behind them lie dense forests and swamps, matted and choked with tropical vegetation, and sodden with malarial miasma.Bounded thus on the north by the desert, on the south by pathless forests, this narrow strip of favoured earth has attracted from earliest times wandering tribes and immigrants from far-off regions, who have either driven out, or intermarried with, the original inhabitants and settled on their land.Our earliest account of this region, so remote and so curiously severed from connection with Asiatic and European civilisation, is derived from Herodotus.Writing more than 500 years before the Christian era, he chronicles a story of five Nasamonian youths from the country bordering the Mediterranean, in the hinterland of what is now Tripoli, who started on a voyage of exploration across the desert in a south- westerly direction.Passing, so runs the story, first I I least for short periods, the climateof the Niger delta and its neighbourhood.Three years later Laird induced the Government to enter into a contract with him by which, in return for an annual subsidy, he undertook to place and keep on the Niger a steamer to ply between Fernando Po and the Middle river, and Dr. Baikie was sent out as Consular Agent with orders to establish himself at the confluence of the Niger ,and Benue rivers.Trading stations were established at three points on the river, but these soon incurred the hostility of the natives, who considered that their privileges were being interfered with.Steamers were fired on, and in i860 one of the factories was sacked and burnt.Although punishment was inflicted the following year by a British gunboat which was des- patched up the river, Laird's death at this juncture, coupled with other causes, removed the mainspring of commercial activity, and the trading stations were abandoned.Baikie, who had founded on this strip of land-which had been acquired in 1841 for the model farm -a settlement which was named Lokoja, continued to exercise his functions as Consular Agent, and established friendly relations with the natives, but he was now almost completely cut off from communi- cation with the coast.Occasionally he was visited at Lokoja by a British gunboat patrolling the river in pursuance of the Government's Anti-slavery Crusade, but the river was practically abandoned by merchant- men.He was, however, successful in establishing close communication with the Mahomedan Emir of Nupe, a vassal of the great Fulani Empire of the north, and with him he effected a commercial treaty.This Emir, in fact, sent a letter to the Queen with a
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