river turned more to the south-eastward, being deflected by a high mountain to the east. They now left the river, and travelling fifteen days through a hilly and woody country, they again came to the bank. Two very large towns, and numerous blacks, appeared on the opposite side. They next continued nearly S. E. for three days, the road winding with the banks of the river. They had now to climb a high ridge of mountains, which took them six days, and from the summit they observed a chain of mountains to the westward. Descending on the south side, they came again to the bank of the river, where it was narrow and full of rocks, that dashed the water dreadfully. They continued to travel S. E. for twelve days after leaving the mountains, during which time they had seen the river every day on their right hand, and had passed a great many small streams that emptied themselves into it-it was now very wide, and looked deep; had many canoes upon it, which were pushed along with flat pieces of wood. Fifteen days more, mostly in sight of the river, brought them to the walls of the city of Wassanah. The king came out to meet them, and invited the chief and the whole caravan to abide within a square enclosure near the walls of the city, where they remained two moons, exchanging their goods for slaves, gold, elephants' teeth, &c.

The river which passes Wassanah nearly in a south direction, is here no longer called Zolibib, but Zadi, and is so wide that a man can scarcely be seen on the opposite bank. The walls of the city are composed of large stones piled up like stone fences in Morocco, without clay or mud; it took Hamet a day to walk round them. The country is well cultivated, chiefly with rice; and the animals are oxen, cows and asses: they have no camels nor horses, mules, sheep nor goats; and he observed a great multitude of speckled fowls. Their houses, or rather huts of stone, are covered over with the large leaves of the date or palm-tree, 'or of another tree which looks very much like a date tree, and bears a fruit as large as my head, which has a white juice in it sweeter than milk; the inside is hard, and very good to eat; the trees that bear this big fruit grow in abundance in this country, and their fruit is very plenty.'-No better description could possibly be given of the cocoa-nut; and yet Adams was ridiculed for saying that he had seen cocoa-nuts growing at Tombuctoo, because he happened to describe the leaf as resembling that of an apple-tree; and because it is generally supposed that this tree can flourish only near the sea. Yet Mr. Dupuis says, he has always understood from the natives of Barbary, who had visited Tombuctoo, that the cocoa-nut grew there.

The king or chief is called Oleeboo, which means, in the negro talk, good sultan.' His dress is not unlike that of the king of Tombuctoo, only he wears on his head a very high hat made of canes,

coloured very handsomely, and adorned with fine feathers. He rides on the back of a huge beast called Elfement, (el feel, an elephant,) three times as thick as my great camel, and a great deal higher, with a very long nose and great teeth, and almost as black as the negroes. Neither the king nor the people pray like the Moslemins, but jump about, fall down, tear their faces as if they were mad, when any of their friends die; and they make a feast at new moons and dance all night; they are very hospitable, and I hope,' says Sidi, 'the time is near, when the faithful, and they that fear God and his prophet, will turn them to the true belief, or drive them away from this goodly land.' We must give the following passage in Sidi's own words, or rather we should say in the words

of Mr. Riley.

'The inhabitants catch a great many fish; they have boats made of great trees, cut off and hollowed out, that will hold ten, fifteen, or twenty negroes, and the brother of the king told one of my Moslemin companions who could understand him, (for I could not,) that he was going to set out in a few days with sixty boats, and to carry five hundred slaves down the river, first to the southward and then to the westward, where they should come to the great water, and sell them to pale people, who came there in great boats, and brought muskets and powder, and tobacco, and blue cloth, and knives, &c.; he said it was a great way, and would take him three moons to get there, and he should be gone twenty moons before he could get back by land, but should be very rich.' We saw a great many of these people who had been down the river to see the great water, with slaves and teeth, and came back again: they said, the pale people lived in great boats, and bad guns as big as their bodies, that made a noise like thunder, and would kill all the people in a hundred negro boats, if they went too near them.'-p. 341.

While they stopped at Wassanah it rained every day. This incidental mention of the constant rains is favourable to the veracity of Sidi Hamet's narrative. He left Tombuctoo in the month of Shual, (December,) which is the dry season; he arrived in March, when the sun crosses the line into the northern latitudes; and he remains before Wassanah all April and May, having had the sun on both sides of him, and consequently, during the very height of the rainy season. The negroes were very kind and hospitable; they fed them well with rice and barley, milk, and meat. The people of the caravan received, in exchange for their goods, three hundred slaves, and a great many teeth, dazzling stones, and shells, and gold; and with these they returned the same way they had come, which took them three moons, including stoppages.

If Sidi Hamet, in presence of his brother, Mr. Willshire, and Mr. Savage, told this story, which Riley took down on the spot, we see no reason whatever to call in question the general truth of it;-if no such story was told, and we are to consider the whole as

a fiction of Riley, not only his American friends, but Mr. Willshire also, must have egregiously mistaken his character, and with so many persons able to refute it, he must be the most impudent man alive:→→ we cannot think so meanly of him or of them. It is greatly to be regretted that our vice-consuls at Mogadore will not give themselves the trouble to question those numerous Moorish merchants and Arab free-booters who have travelled in Soudan, and to compare theirseveal accounts. Mr. Dupuis, we understand, has promised to collect and transmit a statement of this kind, which may throw considerable light on this mysterious country; in the mean time let us see what can be made out from the expedition and information of Sidi Hamet. The whole of the ground travelled over by this Arab from Kabra, (adding three days for the descent of the mountainous country, which was six in the ascent,) occupied him sixty days; the first six in the direction of east, a little southerly, the remainder generally about south-east. As they travelled with asses, we cannot give more than fifteen English miles a day, which, with frequent stoppages, and good feed, this animal will easily perform. This calculation, on a rough estimate, would place the city of Wassanah in about lat. 7° N. long. 14° E. At the end of six days, from Tombuctoo or Kabra, a chain of mountains running S. E. deflected the river from its easterly course into that direction. =These mountains continue to accompany the river for twenty-seven days, when the country became more flat, and several small streams fell into the great river from the eastward.

That the chain of mountains, whose situation corresponds pretty nearly with the Jibbel Kumri of Abulfeda, should be found to stretch away to the southward, is more consistent with the physical geography of Africa, as far as regards the distribution of its mountainous ranges, than that great belt of three thousand miles in extent which some modern geographers, by uniting the mountains of Kong with those of Kumri, (on what authority we know not,) have stretched across the continent of Africa from east to west, appearing on the charts like a large cornelian necklace. Such a continued chain, in this direction, is not only not analogous to the general arrangement of African mountains, far as they are known, but is totally unlike any thing on the rest of the globe ;-whereas, a south-easterly range naturally falls in with the direction of the elevated regions of Nubia, Sennaar, and Abyssinia, in North Africa, and with those chains of mountains which stretch behind Mosambique to the southward, as far as the Cape of Good Hope.

Such a chain as we are supposing will clear up, as we conceive, some difficulties respecting the long disputed course of the Niger: we say disputed, because though Mr. Park, from ocular evidence, has proved its course to be to the eastward as faras Silla, yet from the testimony of Edressi and Abulfeda, supported by more modern

authorities, it can scarcely be doubted that the Nile of the Negroes, or, as Abulfeda also calls it, the Nile of Ghana, as well as all the waters falling from the west of Nubia and Sennaar, run to the westward. It is true, as Major Rennel has observed, that these opinions furnish no proofs of continuity of course: certainly not; but they furnish a strong presumption, and go very far to establish the fact, that the Niger, or Nile of the Negroes, has two courses, one from the west to east, by Silla and Tombuctoo; the other from east to west, through Wangara, Ghana and Kassina. If these two courses, which are in fact two distinct rivers, meet at all, they must meet in some common receptacle, as an inland sea or lake; this is Major Rennel's argument against the course of the river at Kassina being to the westward, because, he says, we have not heard of any such receptacle. By Sidi Hamet's narrative they do not meet on this side Wassanah, and consequently the notion of such a receptacle is rendered unnecessary; it moreover reconciles the contradictory opinions that have been maintained respecting the opposite directions in which the Niger has been represented to flow; by separating the two streams, not with a lake, but by an intermediate ridge of elevated ground; by this interposition of a southeastern range of mountains, the Niger of the West is sent off to the southward, leaving the Niger of the East to find its way on the opposite side of this range, to the sea of Soudan, (if any such exists,) or to the lakes or swamps of Ghana and Wangara, which remain in their conjectural position undisturbed; and whose waters are as free to escape to the southward, or to be evaporated according to Major Rennel's hypothesis, as if no such chain of mountains existed. Still the important question arises, Where are we to look for the termination of that Niger which flows past Tombuctoo? Sidi Hamet's information, if correct, would also decide that point in the way that Park had determined it in his own mind, from the best information we may be well assured, which he could collect at Sansanding; and which, in our review of his last journey, (No. XXV.) we examined at some length.-To that Number we must refer for the arguments made use of to obviate the objections urged against the hypothesis of the identity of the Niger and the Congo; objections which, in our opinion, we there completely over-ruled. The probability, we understand, of this identity has not been weakened, but, on the contrary, very much strengthened by the late Captain Tuckey's discoveries and observations up the majestic Congo or Zaire, and the information which he obtained from the natives in the interior. That collected at Wassanah by Sidi Hamet goes at once to decide this curious question. He tells us that the boats with slaves go down the river, first to the southward and then to the westward, when in three moons they come to the great water. The distance is somewhat more than from Tombuctoo to Wassanah; the stop

pages occupy, at least, one third of the journey; they seldom exceed, in boat navigation, twenty miles a day; and if the river maintains (as described by Sidi Hamet, and, as it is said, also by Captain Tuckey) the same character, of being frequently interrupted by rapids and bristled with rocks, frequent portage is unavoidable. With these allowances, the course and distance of the Niger, Zolibib, or Zadi, would lead to the discharge of its waters into the ocean about the 6th parallel of southern latitude. This is certainly curious, and, at all events, offers a new view of the subject;-whether a true or false one, we were in hopes would soon have been decided by Major Peddie; but he too has fallen a victim to zeal for African discovery: the second in command, Lieutenant Campbell, an intelligent officer, has however, as we understand, proceeded from the head of the river Nunez across the mountains towards Bammakoo, where Park embarked on the Niger; a hope therefore still remains that the interesting question of the termination of the Niger will yet be solved.

The last extract we shall make from this interesting volume is the account of an attack by Arab robbers of the great united caravan from Tombuctoo to Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Fez, which the two brothers accompanied.

"Our caravan consisted of about fifteen hundred men, most of us well armed with double-barrelled guns and scimitars, and we had about four thousand camels. It was a long journey to the next well; so we stopped here six days peaceably, having encamped in a valley a little distance west of the pond or lake. We had always made the camels lie down in a circle, placing the goods in the centre, and the men between the camels and the goods; we had two hundred men on guard, and always ready for any emergency. In the night of the sixth day, about two hours after midnight, we were attacked by a very large body of wandering Arabs: they had got to within a few yards of us before they were discovered, and poured in a most destructive fire of musketry, at the same time running in like hungry tigers, with spears and scimitars in their hands, with dreadful yellings :-they threw the whole caravan into confusion for a moment; but we were in a tight circle, formed by the camels, which with the guards kept them off for a short time, till the whole of our men seized their arms and rallied. The battle now raged most furiously; it was cloudy and very dark; the blaze of the powder making only a faint light, whilst the cracking of musketry, the clashing of swords, the shouts of the combatants, and the bellowings of the wounded and frightened camels, together with the groans of the wounded and dying men, made the most dreadful and horrid uproar that can be conceived; the fight continued for about two hours, hand to hand, and breast to breast, when the assailants gave way and ran off, leaving their dead and wounded on the field of battle. We remained with our arms in our hands all night. I was wounded with a ball in my thigh, and Seid with a dagger on bis breast." They then (Riley says) showed me their scars. "In the