EASTERN AND WESTERN INFLUENCE 157 of generosity, greater in that day than we can easily now imagine, is frequently noted in relation to the rich and learned men of Timbuctoo. Indeed, Ahmed Baba confesses that it sometimes amazed him to observe to what extent it was carried. " But this," he adds, **they did for the love of men." His father died in 1583, and the son mentions that he had studied under him for some years, and had obtained from him his diplomas as a licentiate in several subjects. He was himself born in 1556. His life and that of Es-sadi, therefore, cover a hundred years of a very important period of the history of the Soudan, of which they were able to write as contemporaries.

We turn now to the people with whom the Tarikh is principally concerned. The ancient capital of the Songhay Empire stood where Gao now stands upon the Eastern Niger, and was generally called Kaougha or Kaukau by the ancients. It was situated within the edge of the summer rains upon the course of the river, where, having turned southward from its most northerly extension, the Niger flows steadily from west, south-eastward towards the Gulf of Guinea. The Tarikh tells us that, according to tradition, it was from this town that Pharaoh obtained the magicians who helped him in the controversy which is related in the Twentieth Sourate of the Koran as having taken place between him and Moses. Barth, travelling through this neighbourhood in the middle of the nineteenth century, also heard at Burrum, a little town near Gao, that it had once been a residence of the Pharaohs. An older authority than either the Tarikh or Barth also, it will be remembered, speaks of a city in this place inhabited by black dwarfs, not, it is true, at a date so remote as that of Moses, but still at a period of very respectable antiquity ; for it is here that the young men of the adventure related by Herodotus found a city built upon a river which flowed from the west towards the east.