THE PHARAOHS IN HAUSSALAND 231 immense stores, worthless to them, of gold and emeralds and sapphires. Finally, after an absence of eleven years, he reached Nubia — showing that, in his day at least, communication was supposed to be possible between the Niger and the Nile along the parallels of the fertile belt — and he re-entered Egypt, having built monuments or otherwise "left traces of himself" in every country through which he passed.

The account, of which I have given the essential geographical points, seems clearly to indicate that this Pharaoh on his return from the west followed the Tripoli-Fezzan route into the desert. The town upon which he marched may have been the town of Kaougha or Kau-Kau, which appears to have existed in ancient times somewhere near to the site of the present town of Kuka on Lake Chad ; but remembering that the Arab name of the Niger is the " Huad el Nichar," or Black Water, and that the account of the expedition has been taken by Arab writers from the Coptic, it is equally probable that the town where he got the black stone and the bananas may have been that very town of Gao on the Niger, also called Kaougha, the antiquity of which has been so often alluded to. He marched ** thence" into the Soudan and the country of the cannibal Dem-Dems. This at least identifies the locality of a portion of this expedition, for every early Arab writer has located the Dem-Dems in the country to the south and south-east of Gao, spreading down the western side of the river and across the river into the hills to the south of the Haussa States, known later as Bowshy, Bowsher, or Jacoba, and now included in British Northern Nigeria under the name of Bautchi. In these hills the cannibals have survived even to our own day, but on the western side of the river they have long since been driven out, and their place has been taken by the peoples of Gurma and Borgu, or, as this latter province was often called by early Arab writers, Barkou. Here again the coincidence of name is at least striking. A Pharaoh of the name of Barkhou, of whom it is said that he left a trace of