114 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY a meeting-place for travellers coming from different parts of the country. Then they made of it a store where they left food and other objects of necessary use, and they placed the store under the care of an old female slave called Timbuctoo. So homely, according to the apparently best-informed writers, was the origin of the afterwards famous name. But if Timbuctoo had the homeliness, she had also the purity of a simple origin. The town, founded by Mohammedans, was never sullied by pagan worship. " Upon its soil," we are told, *' no knee was ever bent, except to the Most Merciful " — a curious commentary, alas, upon certain subsequent passages of its history. At first the dwellings of the town were constructed simply of thorns and straw, later they grew into clay huts. Later still low walls were built all round them. Finally a mosque was erected large enough for the needs of the inhabitants. But though the site was never altered, and the foundation of Timbuctoo, the stronghold of Mohammedanism in the Soudan, may therefore be regarded as the direct outcome of the religious campaign of Abou Bekr, it was not for two hundred years that the real town of Timbuctoo, as it was known in its greatness to posterity, was built by one of the kings of Melle, himself a Mohammedan, though black, and two more centuries were added to these before Timbuctoo reached the summit of its prosperity and fame as the capital of the Songhay empire.

However much it may flatter the pride of the historians of Timbuctoo to represent it as the cause of the downfall of Ghana, it is evident that the rivalry between the two towns must have been of much later date than the Almoravide conquest of Ghana. Ghana was in a position to bear a very active part in such rivalry for many generations after its conquest by the Berbers of Abou Bekr's train. The conquest by which the independence of Ghana was overthrown was not in fact the conquest of Abou Bekr. Between the Almoravide campaign of the end of the eleventh century and the development of the greatness