112 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY which it produces. It forms an island of about 300 miles in length by 150 in breadth, which the Nile [Niger] surrounds on all sides, and at all seasons. Towards the month of August, when the heat is extreme and the Nile overflows its bed, the island, or the greater part of the island, is inundated for a regular time. When the flood decreases, natives from all parts of the Soudan assemble and come to the country to seek for gold during the fall of the water. Each gathers the quantity of gold great or small which God has allotted to him, no one being entirely deprived of the fruit of his labour. When the waters of the river have returned to their bed every one sells the gold he has found. The greater part is bought by the inhabitants of Wargelan, and some by those of the extreme west of Africa, where the gold is taken to the mints, coined into dinars, and put into circulation for the purchase of merchandise. This happens every year. ... In Wangara there are flourishing towns and famous fortresses. Its inhabitants are rich. They possess gold in abundance, and receive productions which are brought to them from the most distant countries of the world." Like the inhabitants of Ghana, they wore mantles and veils. They were entirely black. The whole of the country owed allegiance to Ghana, in the name of whose sovereign the Khotbah was read and government was carried on.

The change of dynasty in Ghana between the eleventh and twelfth centuries altered little, therefore, in the habits or prosperity of the country. It serves principally to illustrate the alternating rule of black and white sovereigns, which was apparently accepted without difficulty in the Soudan.

It was perhaps rather in the other political event of the campaign to which allusion has been made than in the substitution of Berber for native rule in Ghana that a prophetic eye would have seen the little cloud destined some day to overspread the fair horizon of Ghana's future. This was the foundation of Timbuctoo by the Tuaregs in the year 1087.