IBN BATUTA IN MELLE 133 easy to buy on the way. There was no need, Ibn Batuta says, to make any provision : food was plentiful, villages succeeded each other at short distances, and the inhabitants were always willing to sell anything that was required.

About half-way between Ghana and Melle Ibn Batuta and his companions reached the large town of Zaghari, principally inhabited by black merchants called Ouandjaratah, who remind us of the Noughamarta mentioned by El Bekri. In most of the towns there was a white quarter — in all of them Ibn Batuta notes the presence of white men. Zaghari was the centre of a great corn country, whence millet was exported to the frontier. From it the party struck the Niger at the point at which Segou now stands.

We get at this stage of the journey a description of the course of the Niger which is worth quoting. Some of the principal towns upon the river are first mentioned, including Zaghah. This town had adopted Islam, Ibn Batuta says, at a very early period. It had a king of its own who paid tribute to Melle, and its inhabitants were distinguished by their great zeal in the study of science.

''From Zaghah," he continues, *'the river flows down to Timbuctoo and Gao ; thence to Muri or Muli, a place which forms part of the country of the Smiyyown (or Cannibals) and is the most distant limit of Melle. The river then flows down from Muri to Nupe, one of the most important countries of the Soudan, whose sovereign is among the greatest kings of the country. No white man enters Nupe, because the blacks would kill him before he arrived there." The course of the Lower Niger, where the river flowed through the territories of the cannibals and entered the swampy districts of the coast, was wholly unknown to Arab geographers, and Ibn Batuta accepted the common theory, which supposed that the Benue was a continuation of the Niger, and that below Nupe the river turned eastward to join the Nile.

There is a noticeable increase of respect in the tone