CHAPTER X BERBER AND BLACK These two roads, forming together the great western caravan route to the Soudan, led each to a separate and typical objective. The stopping-place of the easterlybranch was Audoghast ; the stopping-place of the more westerly branch was Aiwalatin. Audoghast was about fifteen days north of the present position of Timbuctoo.

It lay, therefore, between 21° and 22° N. lat., and whether Cooley or Barth is right as to its exact position, it was well outside the belt of the Soudan proper, while Aiwalatin, or Walata, between the seventeenth and eighteenth parallels, lay on the edge of the summer rains, and was the frontier town, and at one time the capital of the great black kingdom of Ghana. These two towns represented two elements in the life of the Soudan, and are therefore worth dwelling upon. The one represented the Berber, the other the black, element, which are to be found constantly side by side. Audoghast was a type of the Berber state, lying not in but on the northern edge of the Soudan, fronting the black races and having intercourse with them, but preserving a semi-separate existence. Aiwalatin was a type of the purely black state lying in the heart of the fertile belt. Each of these states in turn would seem to have paid tribute to the other ; each in turn was ruled by princes of the opposing race ; each had its periods of independence. The Soudanese author of the Tarikh-es-Soudan tells us that forty-four white princes had ruled over Ghana before the great black princes arose. In the early part of the eleventh century Audoghast was tributary to