ASKIA MOHAMMED ABOU BEKR 189 lowest types known to humanity. They were for the most part cannibals, idolaters, and barbarians ; their country had been for centuries the place of exile for all that was basest in the Arabian Soudan ; their people, from the earliest ages of history, had been regarded as the lawful prey of the slave-hunter, only differing by the lesser value that was placed upon them from the elephants which they hunted in the impenetrable recesses of their tropical jungle. The territory of these lower tribes, extending for a couple of hundred miles inland from the coast, offered, under their existing conditions of transport, a practically impassable barrier to civilised exploration. The character of the inhabitants, and the deadly nature of the climate, did not encourage the expansion of European settlement. As will presently be shown, the coast settlements of Europe for four hundred years spread no farther than a few miles from the sea.

Direct commercial intercourse with the interior was never established over the difficult and unfrequented roads which penetrated towards the higher lands, and from this period the relations of Europe with West Africa were confined mainly to trade in three lucrative products of the coast — gold, ivory, and slaves. None of these required any high state of civilisation to produce. All were to be obtained in profusion in the belt which lay between the mountains and the sea. The knowledge of what lay beyond the mountains was lost to Europe by the cessation of intercourse between Africa and Spain. Approach, which could not be seriously attempted from the south, was rendered impossible from the north. The Soudan of the Arabs was visited no more by the outer world, and a civilisation which had been in touch for nearly a thousand years with the most highly cultivated centres of European life was silently buried in the sands of Africa.