NEGROLAND AND WESTERN ARABS 85 deserts which reach across Africa to Zanzibar. In his day the TripoH-Fezzan route would appear to have been closed. *' Whatsoever they get," he says, " comes to them from the western side, because of the difficulty of entering their country from any other quarter." This scant notice is only interesting as showing that, although intercourse with the Arabs had already begun by the western route, it was not in the middle of the tenth century sufficiently active to be regarded in the higher circles of the learned as having serious importance.

The step from this writer to the next who has preserved for us any contemporary knowledge of Negroland, is the more remarkable. Ibn Haukal died in 968. Just a hundred years later, in 1067, a book was written that gives us a description as vivid as the description of Ibn Haukal is bare. The name of the book is usually translated as " Roads and Realms." It treats of the whole of North Africa, but of Negroland in special detail, and the intimate knowledge which it displays serves to indicate the development of intercourse with the Soudan which must have taken place under the Ommeyades. The author, whose long Arabic name is usually shortened to El Bekri, was the son of a prince of Huelva, who, as a consequence of civil war in Spain, sold his principality to the Prince of Seville in or about the year 105 1. He then went as a rich man to live at Cordova, taking with him his son, the famous El Bekri. The exact date of El Bekri's birth is doubtful, but the best authorities put it at 1028. It was the moment of the break-up of the Ommeyade power in Spain, when petty courts were establishing themselves in the principal towns. On the northern frontier of Mohammedan Spain the Christians, gaining daily strength, were before the end of the century to be led to victory by the immortal Cid, while in the far south of Western Africa that army of the Al Moravides was drawing together upon the banks of the Senegal, which was first to bring regeneration to unconscious Spain.

In the meantime the life of the pleasant courts, which