130 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY scribed by El Bekri, taking the westernmost branch which led through the ''Salt City" of Tegazza. It is unnecessary to reproduce his description, to which allusion has been made in an earlier chapter. It is chiefly interesting as serving to prove the accuracy of El Bekri's description given from the reports of Spanish merchants three hundred years earlier, and to illustrate incidentally the continuity of life and tradition which left the conditions of travel upon the road practically unchanged after the lapse of so long a time. El Bekri's account, gathered from the experience of travellers passing over the road in 1052, might equally have been written by Ibn Batuta in 1352, and the account given by Ibn Batuta have been given by El Bekri. Indeed, in one respect, Ibn Batuta's account j carries the imagination even further back, for his description of the town of Tegazza, in which the houses and the mosque were built of slabs of salt, recalls the description given by Herodotus of the salt towns of the ** Land of Dates." The whole of these desert stopping-places lay within the limits assigned by Ibn Khaldun to the Mellestine. Ibn Batuta crossed the frontier of Melle proper at Aiwalatin, the capital of the old kingdom of Ghanata. But the Ghana of El Bekri's day had fallen low. Ibn Batuta found it occupied largely by Berbers, descendants of the Morabites, whose degeneracy gave him cause for amazement. Mohammedan as they called themselves, they had fallen into habits which scandalised him. He felt, as unfortunately many a white man since then has had sorrowful occasion to feel in similar circumstances, that these white men did not sustain the dignity of their race in the presence of the blacks by whom they were surrounded and to whose rule they bowed. The black viceroy who received the merchants of the caravan with which Ibn Batuta travelled remained seated while they stood before him. He spoke to them through an interpreter, not because he did not understand, or because they were not close enough for him to hear, but