154 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY waves of West and East may be discerned as clearly meeting each other in the Soudan. In the shock and amalgamation of the two forces, black civilisation attained the greatest height which it has ever reached in modern Africa. The gentle nature of the Soudanese black, inoculated with intellectual germs from a long forgotten civilisation, would seem to have allied itself in the Songhay race with the virility of the Arab, and a result was produced unlike anything which the world had seen.

The sixteenth century, so full of interest to contemporary Europe, was the period of fulfilment of this development. The halcyon days of the modern Songhay Empire lay between the years 1492 and 1592. The rise of the Songhay people dates, however, from a much earlier period. Though in the order of the great kingdoms of the Soudan as they came into touch with the outer world Songhay succeeds to Melle, it was as a matter of fact a far older kingdom. The first true chapter of its history, though lost to us, had been lived in the aspiration and the efforts of its people, and had resulted in its own conquest, long before modern influences had reached it, of a level of civilisation higher than that of any of the surrounding countries.

Hitherto we have taken the historians of the Western Arabs for our principal guides. In opening this new chapter of the history of the Soudan we abandon them and turn to local literature. From this point onward the Soudan has its own historians. Chief amongst them in regard to the history of Songhay is the author of the Tarikh-es- Soudan y or ** History of the Soudan," which has within the last few years been translated into French by M. Houdas, the eminent French Professor of the Oriental School of Languages. The book is a wonderful document, of which the narrative dealing mainly with the modern history of the Songhay Empire relates the rise of this black civilisation through the fifteenth and sixteenth