138 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY Batuta also notices with censure the extreme servility which the Sultan of Melle exacted from the nobles and others by whom he was surrounded, and here, too, there is a resemblance to Aztec manners which is striking. '* When the Sultan, seated in the Hall of Audience, calls any one before him," says Ibn Batuta, "the person summoned immediately divests himself of his fine clothes, puts on shabby garments, and, taking off his turban, covers his head with a dirty cap. He then enters the presence barefooted, with his trousers rolled half-way up his legs, listens with an air of profound submission to what the Sultan has to say, and covers his head and shoulders with dust, exactly as one might do who was performing his ablutions with water." Ibn Batuta s commentator, Ibn Djozay, adds to this passage a note to the effect that the Secretary of State, who was present when Mansa Musa's ambassadors were received at Fez by Abou el Haen, told him that on all state occasions, when the ambassador had audience of the Moorish Sultan, he was accompanied by an attendant carrying a basket of dust, and every time that the Sultan said something gracious to him he covered himself with dust.

Prescott, in describing the ceremonial of the court of Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor of Mexico, at the time of the Spanish conquest, says that when ambassadors from foreign states were introduced, ** whatever their rank, unless they were of blood royal, they were obliged to submit to the humiliation of shrouding their rich dress under the coarse mantle of nequeUy and entering barefoot, with downcast eyes, into the presence." This custom of taking off the sandals and covering fine clothes with a mantle of the coarsest stuff which was made in Mexico, was imposed equally on all the nobility of Montezuma's capital. The Mexican's mode of obeisance was not to throw dust upon the head, but, bowing to the earth, to touch it with the right hand. The Aztecs were, it will be remembered, though not negroes, a dusky or copper-