Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/365

 when some large villages and cultivated tracts announce the approach to the twin cities of Garu and Sinder, standing on some rocky islets in mid-stream. On both sides of the river the plain is here studded with habitations, and yields an abundance of millet for the local consumption and for exportation to Timbuktu and the Tuareg country. The two insular cities comprise altogether several thousand houses, with a collective population estimated by Barth at sixteen or eighteen thousand. They enjoy a certain political independence, by taking advantage of the rivalries of the neighbouring Tuareg chief and the Haussa governor of Sai, over 120 miles lower down. The route through the independent Songhai territory, west of Sinder, leads to Doré, capital of Libtako, a province belonging at

least nominally to the Haussa kingdom of Gando. Doré, with a population of four thousand, mostly Songhais, is the most frequented market in the whole region comprised within the great bend of the Niger.

The town of Sai, meaning in the Songhai language "River," stands at the chief passage across the river below Burum. The transit is made in boats 40 to 45 feet long, formed by two hollow trunks placed end on end. The town lying on the low west bank exposed to inundations during the floods, consists of detached groups of huts divided into two sections by a depression alternately dry and filled with muddy water. It owes its importance chiefly to the intermediate position it occupied on the trade route between Sukoto and Timbuktu. It is also the natural