92 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY amongst the white women many were remarkable for their beauty. The service of the households would appear to have been done by negroes, and the rich merchants of Audoghast owned sometimes as many as a thousand slaves. There were especially clever negress cooks who were worth loo apiece, and who knew how to prepare most appetising dishes, the flesh of camel calves stewed with truffles, maccaroni dressed with honey, nut cakes, and all kinds of sweetmeats.

Between the years 961 and 971, that is, a hundred years earlier than the date of El Bekri's writing, Audoghast formed the centre of a Berber state which was ruled by a prince of the Senajah tribe whose name was Tin Yeroutan. More than twenty black kings acknowledged his rule and paid tribute to him, and his empire extended over an inhabited country which it required two months to march through from end to end. He was able to put in the field an army of no less than 100,000 men mounted upon trained camels. When the King of Macina, a Berber frontier state situated south of his territory upon the Niger, asked for help against a powerful black neighbour, he sent him 50,000 mounted men. The whole country from Audoghast to the Atlantic coast was in those days in the possession of the Berbers. Certain tribes, amongst whom were the Beni Goddala and the Lemtunah, destined afterwards to give the dynasty of the Almoravides to Spain, retained their independence on the western coast, and as nomads continued for a long time to haunt the more westerly of the two roads to Negroland. All these tribes of the desert wore the double veil, the nicaby which concealed the upper part of the face, and the litham, which concealed the lower in such a way that only the orbit of the eyes was visible. "Never," El Bekri says, '* in any circumstances did they take off the veil, and if by accident a man's veil had been taken off he would have been quite unrecognisable by his parents." When it happened in battle to a warrior the body could not be identified. *'The veil," he adds, "is a thing which they