their
own, having the lower lip brought out and hung down even to the breast,
red and bleeding and disclosing their teeth which were larger than the
common, their eyes black, prominent, and fierce-looking."

For this treachery the trade was broken off three whole years, till the
great want of salt compelled the injured negroes to resume, and since
then the business had gone on as before.

The gold thus gained is carried by the men of Melli to their city, and
then portioned out in three parts; one part goes by the caravan route
towards Syria, the other two thirds go to Timbuctoo, and are there
divided once again, part going to Tunis, the head of Barbary, and part
to the regions of Marocco, over against Granada, and without the strait
of the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar). And to those parts come
Christian merchants, and especially Italians, to buy the gold in
exchange for merchandise of every sort. For among the negroes and
Azaneguys there is no coinage of gold or of silver, no money token of
metal, but the whole is simply matter for exchange.

From the trade, Cadamosto changes to discourse of the politics of the
natives, their manners and customs. Their government for the most part
is not monarchy, but a tyranny of the richest and most powerful caste.
Their wars are waged only with offensive arms, light spears and swords;
they have no defensive armour, but use horses, which they sit as the
Moors do. Their ordinary garments are of cotton.

The plague of excessive drought during all the year, except from August
to October, is aggravated at certain seasons by the worse plague of
locusts, "and I myself have seen them flying by troops upon the sea and
shore like an army, but of countless number." After this long digression
Cadamosto comes back to the Gulf of Senegal. "And this," says he, "is
the chief river of the Region of the Negroes, dividing them from the
Tawny Moors." The mouth of the estuary is a mile wide, but an island
lying in mid-channel divides the river into two parts just where it
enters the sea. Though the central channel is deep enough, the entrance
is made difficult to strangers by the shallows and sand banks on either
side; every six hours the river rises and falls with the flow and ebb of
the ocean, and where it pours out its waters into the sea, the flux and
reflux of waters reaches to a distance of sixty miles, as say the
Portuguese who have watched it. The Senegal is nearly four hundred miles
beyond