HAUSSALAND AND THE NILE VALLEY 225 between the parallels of 10° and 17°; and taking into consideration the fact that Mohammedan states now stretch continuously across it from Bornu to Fashoda, it seems in no way improbable that, at a period when the trade of Ethiopia was important enough to extend down the Valley of the Nile and across the difficult desert road from Thebes to Murzuk in the north, trade may also have found channels of extension along the fertile territories to the west.

In corroboration of the view that the trade and influence of Meroe may have extended farther west than has as yet been ascertained by modern exploration, I may mention a fact told me by Zebehr Pasha, when, during his confinement at Gibraltar in 1886, he related to me the history of the foundation of his ephemeral empire in the Bahr-el-Ghazal. It was that, having occasion to act as the military ally of a certain native king Tekkima, whose territory lay somewhere south and west of the spot marked upon modern maps as Dem Suleiman or Dem Zebehr — that is, presumably about 8° N. and 25° E., he was informed that he had to fight against magicians, who habitually came out of the earth, fought, and then disappeared. A careful system of scouting disclosed to him the fact that they came from under ground, and when, after cutting off their retreat and conquering them, he insisted upon being shown their place of habitation, he found it to be deeply buried in the sand, a wonderful system of temples **far finer," to use the words in which he described it, "than modern eyes have seen in the mosques of Cairo and Constantinople." It was, he said, such work of massive stone as was done only by the great races of old. Through this underground city of stone there ran a stream, and by the stream his native antagonists lived in common straw native huts. ''Were your people, then," he asked them, **a nation of stonecutters?" And they said, '* Oh, no! This is not the work of our forefathers, but our forefathers found it here, and we have lived for many generations in these huts." p