INTRODUCTORY 9

rivers of Haussaland, Lake Chad, the Shari, the lakes and rivers of Wadai and Darfour, the Bahr el Gazal, and the sources of the Nile, which, with their network of tribu-

taries, fertilise the land from the Atlantic Ocean to the mountains of Abyssinia. Other great lakes and rivers traverse the continent farther south. The waterways that

I have named suffice, with the Nile, to arrest the advance of the northern deserts and to place round them a border of luxuriant vegetation.

[ Thus in silent prehistoric ages the rough outlines of ^ the destiny of North Africa were traced. There was a fertile strip in the temperate zone, and near an easily navigable sea ; there was a great barren strip in the waterless desert near to nothing which could encourage human occupation ; there was another fertile strip in the

tropic zone well watered, but sealess — save at its western and eastern extremities, where on the western coast a

lack of good harbourage discouraged navigation — miasmic, of a climate very different from that of the strip upon the northern coast ; and, running north and south, connecting these three which lay parallel to one another, there was the wonderfully fertilised Valley of the Nile.

It was almost a foregone conclusion that one race should inhabit the coast and a wholly different race the tropics ; and that civilisation of a no less different sort should spring up in both zones. Separated as they were by the deserts, it was natural that connection between them should be maintained by that Valley of the Nile which has made itself immortal in the name

of Egypt. \ '^

It is accordingly to Egypt that we look for all our earliest information concerning the Land of Blacks, and

it is to Egypt, and through Egypt to Asia Minor and Arabia, that the blacks themselves trace their oldest traditions.

\ As it is impossible to appreciate the position of Western y Negroland in the history of the world without reference to the movements of other civilisations by which it was