NIGERIA UNDER FULANI RULE 401 the Fulani power tightened its hold only the more despotically upon such portions of the country as it could keep. A domination, which was established in the name of religion and justice, had fallen into tyranny, tempered only by the weakness or the moderation of personal rulers. Under Dan Fodio and Bello the conquering armies of the Fulani were enjoined to spread the true faith and to convert the pagans to Islamism. At a later period it was found more profitable to leave the pagans in a condition in which it was lawful to make slaves and to exact tribute, and Fulani wars degenerated into little more than slave-raiding expeditions. The judicial system of the Haussas, already founded on Mohammedan institutions, and adopted in the first instance by the conquerors, was allowed to fall into disuse. Courts continued to exist, but the Alkalis who should have presided over them and dispensed justice according to Koranic law, irremovable from their positions as the judges of Great Britain, were either disregarded, as in some cases by the great chiefs who held their own courts and gave decisions at their own will, or over-ruled by the emir, or worse still, subjected to the authority of the emir's favourite slaves, who decreed to their enemies inhuman punishments of their own invention. For the nails to be torn out with redhot pincers, for the limbs to be pounded one by one in a mortar while the victims were still alive, for important people who had offended to be built up alive gradually in the town walls, till, after a period of agony, the head of the dying man was finally walled up, were among the punishments well attested to have been inflicted in the decadence of Fulani power. It is said that a considerable number of the walls of Haussa towns are known by the people to have been so built up, and are even now called by the name of the most distinguished victims whose corpses they contain. Impalement and mutilation were among the penalties of lesser offences. Some of the Fulani emirs would themselves 2 c