i6 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY

buctoo, are the same which offered themselves to the

first civilised footprints that crossed the desert.

There are two principal roads across the desert, one through Tripoli and the Fezzan running due south to-

wards what is now Nigeria, taking the shape of a forked stick, to rest upon Lake Chad and the Niger; the other through Morocco, running again due south towards Tim- buctoo and the western end of Negroland. These two roads, as a glance at the map will show, mark the two narrowest parts at which the desert can be crossed, for in both instances the fertile land of the coast strip runs down in important promontories into the arid sands.

Both these roads were counted as a fifty days' journey from edge to edge of fertile land. They are, I believe, so counted still. It hardly needs to be added that one was the channel of Eastern and the other of Western

influence upon Negroland.

It is difficult now, when we are accustomed to regard the west coast ports as the natural channels of entrance into the Western Soudan, to remember that throughout the early history of Europe, and up to the period of the discovery of the passage of the Cape of Good Hope at the end of the fifteenth century, the approach to Negroland was by land. In the early periods of African history the navigation of the Atlantic was for all practical pur-

poses unknown. Equatorial Africa faced civilisation on the north. It looked northwards for all its finest inspira-

tion. The south represented to it only barbarism and obscurity. This fact, although difficult now for the ima-

gination to grasp, is of first importance in endeavouring to construct any true conception of Soudanese history. The Soudan was regarded as occupying the edge of the then known world. Homer, first of Europeans to men-

tion it, speaks of the Ethiopians as **the farthest removed of men, and separated into two divisions." Later Greek writers, borrowing their information from Egypt, carry the description somewhat further, and characterise the two divisions as Western and Eastern — the Eastern occupy-