io6 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY beyond which comes Kanem, a country of the idolaters. The names of the early kings of Bornu all began with '' Du." It is therefore presumable that El Bekri was correctly informed as to the position of Bornu, which at that time probably overran Haussaland ; but he gives us no information with regard to it. This silence on the part of a Spanish Arab, so generally well informed as El Bekri, seems to confirm the theory that the countries eastward of the Bend of the Niger derived their civilisation largely from Egypt vid the Tripoli- Fezzan route, scarcely used at this time by the Western Arabs.

El Bekri makes no mention at all of Nupe, one of the oldest and most important of the purely native kingdoms, nor of Borgu, also a kingdom of great antiquity, which is said to have derived an early Christianity from the Copts of Egypt.

The waters of the Niger at the northern part of its course divided the Land of the Blacks, he tells us, from the territories of the Berbers on its northern banks. As the operations of these Berber tribes precede, in point of date, the rise of the kingdom of Melle, it may be well to turn for a moment to the eastern development of that Desert Kingdom which gave the Almoravide dynasty to Spain.