ADMINISTRATION OF THE MELLESTINE 151 in the East. Haussaland and Bornu drew their civilisation more directly from Eastern sources, and belong to another chapter of history, with which we have yet to deal.

The Mellestine took a wider extension as it spread north into the desert, and Tekadda, which is on nearly the same parallel as Aiwalatin, may perhaps be taken as forming, at the end of the fourteenth century, its most easterly development in the desert. Here, as will be seen, the frontier of the Mellestine trenched upon the territory of Gober and the Haussa States, and the authority claimed over Tekadda was at a future period the cause of the friction.

Ibn Batuta, who confined his journey entirely to the Mellestine, went from Gago north-eastward to Tekadda, where he gives some description of the copper mines. At Tekadda he received an order from the new Sultan of Morocco, who had succeeded Abou el Hagen, to return to court and give an account of his wanderings. He turned his steps north-westward, abandoning the Tripoli-Fezzan road where it branched off towards Ghat, and made his way with a friendly caravan to Touat, thus reversing the road which the Emperor Musa had followed on his famous pilgrimage. From Touat the road to Sidjilmessa and Fez was easy, except for the incident of a very heavy snowstorm which overtook the caravan shortly after leaving Sidjilmessa ; and having seen practically the whole of the black empire, which at first he so much despised as to have been tempted to turn back on the frontier, Ibn Batuta re-entered Fez in the early days of January 1354.

The curiosity which his travels excited at the court of Fez was, it is said, so great that the Sultan himself wished to hear his adventures, and after listening to him for several consecutive nights, ordered that the whole should be drawn up and made into a book. This was done, and the account, as it now exists, was finished on December 13, 1355.

This may be regarded as the period at which Melle