i;8 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY events in Spain, of which the immediate result was to close the interior of Northern Africa for four hundred years to Christian enterprise.

At the same time that the Portuguese sent embassies to the King of Timbuctoo they also sent an embassy to Mossi. They wished to conciliate his goodwill for their trade upon the southern coast. But the glory of Mossi was at an end. After driving him from Walata in 1480, Sonni Ali devoted himself for two years to the work of constructing the canal which was to join Timbuctoo with Aiwalatin. He was himself engaged in superintending the operations at a place in the desert called Chan - Fenez, when word was brought to him in 1482 that the King of Mossi had assembled all his forces, and was marching against Timbuctoo. Sonni Ali immediately abandoned the canal, and the place which it had reached when the news was brought to him was, we are told, the farthest point in the desert which it ever attained. Placing himself at the head of his troops, he marched against Mossi, and completely overthrew him in the year 1483. He followed up the victory by pursuing him to the farthest limits of his territories, and in 1485-86 he conquered the mountain territory to the south. By this conquest he carried Songhay arms far into the pagan belt. But the mountain range in which the Niger and the Senegal have their sources, at the back of Sierra Leone and Senegambia, and which runs from west to east between the tenth and eighth parallels of latitude, until it passes on to become the mountains of the Cameroons in German West Africa, would seem to have been always regarded as the natural southern boundary of the Nigerian Soudan. On the southern side of this range, usually known by the name of the Kong Mountains, the country assumes that swampy and tropical character which renders it apparently unfit for the habitation of the higher races. Its rivers run through belts of oil-palm and mangroves to the coast, and it has ever been the habitation of pagans and