3i6 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY faces when they desired to turn themselves towards home.

While access to the civilised world was barred to the western portion of the Soudan, the most easterlystates, Bornu and Haussaland, still kept their touch through the Tripoli- Fezzan route with the old markets of Egypt and Arabia. Whatever they had of external civilisation still came to them by that route from the north-east, and the influence permeated through them to the rest of the Soudan. But the influence was the influence of Turkey, and it is unnecessary to dwell on the difference between the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth century onwards, and the civilisation of the Egyptian and the Arab which it had overthrown.

Rome in the great days of the republic might as fitly be compared with Italy after the conquest by the Huns.

Nevertheless, though cut off in the sixteenth century, alike by the triumph of Mohammedanism in the east, and by the downfall of Mohammedanism in the west of Europe, from all true touch with northern centres of civilisation, the Soudan could not unlearn the lesson of centuries. It continued to keep its face turned blankly to the north. I have endeavoured to show that throughout its history the touch of the Soudan with the world had been maintained ever through the desert to the north. Everything that was interesting, its new races, its religions, its science, its literature, its commerce, its wars, had come to it from the north. It faced north to civilisation. And behind it to the south there had always been the unknown, the barbaric, the uninhabitable.

It is no doubt this last qualification which maintained the character of the equatorial region in regard to the other two. From about the latitude of 7° southwards the climate of the Western Soudan became practically uninhabitable for those finer races which, whether they derived their origin from Egypt or elsewhere, required a good climate in which to attain to their natural limits of perfection. The Copts have a saying that "in the