212 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY before his father. The Askia, taking hold of his son's arm, said: "Heavens! how can an arm Hke this allow mosquitoes to devour me, and frogs to leap upon me, when there is nothing which so revolts me ? " Ismail, the son of that Miriam who was married after the great campaign of Melle, was an upright but not brilliant representative of his father's stock. He replied with grief that he could do nothing. The Askia answered by telling him where there was a secret stock of money ; who were the men that he could trust ; how he was to come into touch with them ; and, sitting in his miserable dungeon in all the feebleness of blind old age, the still unconquered monarch planned and dictated a scheme by which his unworthy nephew was removed from the throne he had usurped, and Ismail was seated upon it in his place. Under the protection of Ismail the old Askia returned with honour to his palace, and died there in 1538 at an age which cannot have been far short of a hundred.

Ismail reigned only two years, and was succeeded ii 539 by his brother Ishak, a cruel but very able prince, who, after a reign of nearly ten years, was succeeded in his turn by another brother, Askia Daouad, the most distinguished of all the great Askia's sons. Askia Daouad reigned from 1548 to 1582. After him three more Askias of the next generation brought this brilliant period of the history of the Soudan to an end. When Ishak, the son of Askia Mohammed, was at the height of his power, Muley Hamed, the Sultan of Morocco, called upon him to give up his right to the great western salt mine of Tegazza. His spirited answer, read by the light of subsequent history, has a prophetic ring. ** The Hamed who makes such a demand," he replied, ''can hardly be the great Emperor of Morocco; the Ishak who can listen to it is not I. That Ishak has still to be born." The Ishak who would listen was born in the next generation of Askias, and it was under Ishak II. in 1591 that the salt mines were taken,