occasions; and the married women wear a kind of
hood on their heads, made of blue cloth or silk, and cotton
handkerchiefs of different kinds and colours, and go barefooted."

[Footnote: Swearah or Mogadore is stated to contain above 36,000
souls, that is 30,000 Moors and 6,000 Jews. This calculation would
make Timbuctoo to contain 216,000 inhabitants. A statement which
deserves little credit.]

"The king and people of Timbuctoo do not fear and worship God like
the Moslem, but like the people of Soudan, they only pray once in
twenty-four hours, when they see the moon, and when she is not seen,
they do not pray at all. They cannot read nor write, but are honest.
They circumcise their children, like the Arabs. They have not any
mosques, but dance every night, as the Moors and Arabs pray."

"If however European expectation had been raised to an extraordinary
height respecting the size, riches, and importance of Timbuctoo, it
was likely to be still more luxuriantly feasted with the description
of another town of central Africa, in comparison of which Timbuctoo
must appear as a city of a second rate, and which Sidi Hamet
describes as being of the magnitude, that it took him a day to walk
round it."

"According to the statement of Sidi Hamet, he travelled with about
two hundred Moslem, to a large city called Wassanah, a place he had
never before heard of, nor which is to be found in any of the modern
maps of Africa. For the first six days, they travelled over a plain
within sight of the Joliba, in a direction a little to the south of
east, till they came to a small town called Bimbinah, where the river
turned more to the south-east, by a high mountain to the east. They
now left the river, and pursued a direction more to the southward,
through a hilly and woody country for fifteen days, and then came to
the river again. The route wound with the river for three days in a
south-easterly direction, and then they had to climb over a very high
ridge of mountains, thickly covered with very lofty trees, which took
up six days; from the summit, a large chain of high mountains was
seen to the westward. On descending from this ridge, they came
immediately to the river's bank, where it was very narrow and full of
rocks. For the next twelve days, they kept on in a direction
generally south-east, but winding, with the river almost every day in
sight, and crossed many small streams flowing into it. High mountains
were plainly seen on t