which were growjng, jnosse^ and lichens.: trees o f . considerable sjze also grow from between. them. . On, almost all the, hills that I approached, d e te r s ,of huts were .seen in spheral places towards the centre, and sometimes quitej at the summit; generally on the flats ¡of the ridges. At the base of these mountains,, and also at a considerable elevation, on their sides, are incumbent ¡masses of what appeared to be the, decomposed fragments of primitive rocks recompounded, and united anew by a species of natural cement. At some distance from the base of those, .which I ascended from the valley of Mora, were collections ,of quartzose rocks, of great variety and colour; fragments of hornblende and several large abutments of porphyroidal rocks. About one hundred yards above the spring which I have before mentioned, in, a space between two projecting masses of rock, were numerous shells, some petrified and finely preserved, while others were perforated by insects, worm-eaten, and destroyed: they were confusedly mixed with fragments of granite, quartz, sand and clay ; and in some cases adhered to pieces of the composition rocks : the greater part were of the oyster kind. Various specimens of these, with pieces of every variety of the structure of the hills, I had collected, but they were all lost in the general confusion of the .battle; and on the return of the army I was unable to do more than procure a few specimens of the northernmost part of the mountains; and the half of these were lost by my negro. Of the extent of this chain, or rather these groups of mountains, I can form no idea, except from the information of the Mandara people. I have met with a man who (by the way) wanted to persuade me that he was a son of Hornemann by his slave, although, from his appearance, he must have been born ten years before that unfortunate traveller entered this country. He said he had been twenty days south of Mandara, to a country called Adamowa, which he described as being situated in the centre of a plain surrounded by mountains ten times higher than any we could see; that he went first to Mona or Monana, which was five days, and then to Bogo, which was seven more ; and here; for one Soudan tobe, the sultan gave him four slaves. After eight‘days’ travelling from this latter Country, he arrived at Adamowa. These people, he says (that is, the Kerdies on the hills; for Adamowa itself is occupied by Felatahs), eat the flesh of horses, mules,’ and asses, or of any wild’ animal that they k ill: nobody but the sultans and their children are' clothed; all the rest of the nation go naked; the men sometimes wear a skin round the loins, but the women nothing. This man( who was called Kaid-Moussa-ben-Yusuf (Hornemann’s name),’Spoke to me of several extensive lakes which he had seen in this journey, and also described with great clearness a river running between two very high ridges of the mountains, which he crossed previous to arriving at Adamowa. This river he declared to run from the West, and to be the same as the Quolla or Quana at Nyffe, Kora, and at Raka, but not the same as the river at Kano, which had nothing to do with the Shary, and which ran into the Tchad; but the main body of the water ran on to the south of Begharmi, was then called the D’Ago, and went eastward to the Nile. Kaid-Moussa was a very intelligent fellow, had visited Nyffe, Raka, Waday, and Darfur ; by which latter place also, he said this river passed. He was most particularly clear in all his accounts, and his statement agreed in some points with the information a Shouaa named Dreess-boo-Raas-ben-aboo-Deleel had given me; therefore I was the more inclined to pay attention to it. To the south of this river, the population is entirely Kerdy, until the Great Desert. This desert is passed several times in the year by kafilas with white people, not Christians, who bring goods from the great sea : some of these reach Adamowa. He himself saw white loaf sugar, such as the merchants brought here from Tripoli to the sheikh, and a gun or two, with metal pots and pans, and arrack (rum). The inhabitants v
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