CONQUESTS OF SONNI ALI 179 cannibals. Sonni AH carried his arms no farther. The pagans of the Gold Coast were left unmolested by his victories, and it is probable that the naked savages who received the Portuguese at Elmina and Achem, with heads surmounted by the grinning masks of wild beasts, and no other covering but a palm-leaf fringe, were as ignorant a hundred years later of the existence of Songhay as they were in i486. The Benins were at this time the most powerful and the most civilised among the coast natives, and they were known to the Portuguese as ** an extremely cruel people who lived upon human flesh."

The conquest of Mossi placed Sonni AH in the position of having subdued all those enemies of Melle whom he found in arms at the time of his accession. He was virtually the master of the Mellestine, though Melle itself still preserved a nominal independence, and the town of Aiwalatin enjoyed a quasi-separate position apart from the subdued province of Walata upon the frontier. He now turned his arms against the east. A campaign against Borgu, which lies south of Gurma on the Eastern Niger, was only partially successful. Details are wanting, but the people of Borgu were able at a later period to boast that they had never been conquered. Some other conquests took place, of which it is difficult to identify the localities, and in 1492 he undertook a campaign against the Fulani of Gurma, lying also in the bend of the Eastern Niger, between Borgu and his capital of Gago.

This was his last campaign. Here, though successful, he lost his life. He died, not as so great a soldier would have wished to die, under the spears of his enemies, but by a trivial accident of fate. He was drowned in the sudden flood of a stream on his return from his victorious expedition. His death occurred far from the capital, and the hand of ancient Egypt is for a moment visible in the circumstance that his sons, who were present, immediately disembowelled the body and filled it with honey, that it might be safely transported to take its place in the tombs of his fathers.