i8 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY

era yet to come. Be this as it may, the traditions of the

Eastern Soudan of the present day would seem to be derived from the same sources as those of Egypt and

Arabia, while the nations lying towards the western end of the fertile belt have been more strongly imbued with the influence of the Western Arabs, who in comparatively

modern times carried civilisation into Spain. This theory, amply illustrated by the history of the Western Soudan, receives further support from the philological studies of

M. Fresnel, who asserts that the alphabet of the Eastern Soudan is the regular alphabet of Arabia, while the alphabet of the Western Soudan is the alphabet of / Morocco.^

In addition to the influence of the Western Arabs, there was, at a period shortly after the Hegira, an immigration

from Arabia under a leader called Abou Zett, which appears to have crossed the Red Sea at the Straits of Bab-el-

Mandeb, and to have spread westward along the fertile belt. The tradition of this immigration is vivid in Kor- dofan, Darfour, and Wadai. It is said to have extended through the entire belt of Negroland, and, as a later chapter will show, some members of it are believed to

have reached the bend of the Middle Niger, but the tradition grows fainter in the territories west of Chad.

The influence of Egypt, also perceptible in the Western Soudan, is naturally strongest in the territories which lie nearest to the eastern caravan route across the desert. The meeting ground in which it would appear to have overlapped with the more modern influence of the Western

Arabs may perhaps be placed geographically upon the Bend of the Niger. Es-Sadi, a native writer born in Timbuctoo in the sixteenth century, states in his ** History of the Soudan" that ''the town of Kuka was in exist-

ence under the Pharaohs." The only town of Kuka now known to us is in Bornu, but as late as the sixteenth century a.d. there were two Kukas, one of them on the

middle Niger — and it is to this latter Kuka that Es- Sadi refers.