. . . He is the ancestor, the
founder, the fertilizer of the Western Soudan, which he has dowered with
incalculable wealth, wresting it from the invasion of neighboring
Saharas, building it up of his own fertile ooze. It is he who every year
at regular seasons floods the valley like an ocean and leaves it rich,
pregnant, as it were, with amazing vegetation. Even like the Nile, he has
vanquished the sands; he is the father of untold generations, the
creative deity of a world as yet unknown, which in later times will
enrich old Europe. . . . And the valley of the Niger, the good giant's
colossal daughter. Ah! what pure immensity is hers; what a flight, so to
say, into the infinite! The plain opens and expands, unbroken and
limitless. Ever and ever comes the plain, fields are succeeded by other
fields stretching out of sight, whose end a plough would only reach in
months and months. All the food needed for a great nation will be reaped
there when cultivation is practised with a little courage and a little
science, for it is still a virgin kingdom such as the good river created
it, thousands of years ago. To-morrow this kingdom will belong to the
workers who are bold enough to take it, each carving for himself a domain
as large as his strength of toil can dream of; not an estate of acres,
but leagues and leagues of ploughland wavy with eternal crops.
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