is indeed the city of imagination, the Timbuctoo
of legends. Her sandy approaches are strewn with bones and carcasses
that have been disinterred by wild beasts, the remains of the camels and
other animals that have fallen and died in the last stages of the
journey.

The illusion of walls, produced by the distinctness with which the town
stands out from the white sand, disappears, and three towers at regular
intervals dominate the mass. The terraces of square houses are now
distinguishable, renewing the first impression of grandeur in immensity.
We enter the town, and behold! all the grandeur has suddenly
disappeared, though the scene is equally impressive on account of its
tragic character rather than its beauty. And this is the great
Timbuctoo, the metropolis of the Sudan and the Sahara, with its boasted
wealth and commerce! This is Timbuctoo the holy, the learned, that life
of the Niger, of which it was written, "We shall one day correct the
texts of our Greek and Latin classics by the manuscripts which are
preserved there." These ruins, this rubbish, this wreck of a town, is
this the secret of Timbuctoo the Mysterious? It is a city of
deliquescence.

Jenne had the vein of Egyptian civilisation; the origin of Timbuctoo has
to be sought in a different direction, for her past is connected with
the Arabian civilisation of Northern Africa--the world of the Berbers
and all those white people whom we have known under the name of Touaregs
in the Sahara, Kabyles in Algeria, Moors in Morocco and Senegal, and
Foulbes in their infiltrations into the Sudan, who had been crowded back
into the interior by the invasions of Phoenician and Roman colonists. So
also, when the Moors were driven out of Spain back to Morocco, to find
their ancient patrimony in the hands of Arabs, they were forced to
prolong their exodus into the south, and became nomads about the great
lakes on the left bank of the Niger, in the neighbourhood of Oualata and
Timbuctoo, carrying with them the name of Andalusians, which they bear
to the present day.

Touareg is a generic name for a large number of tribes descended from
the Berbers. Being driven into the desert, to the terrible glare of
which they were not accustomed, nor their lungs to its sandstorms, they
adopted the head-dress of two veils. Being perpetually kept on the
march, every social and political organisation disappeared, and they
gradually lost all notion of law and order. Like the Jews, and all