TIMBUCTOO THE MYSTERIOUS.
TO few men has come such an opportunity as came to M. Felix Dubois, the first explorer of literary skill to' step the streets of Timbuctoo. Imbert, a French sailor captured by the Moors, saw Timbuctoo in 1670, but died in. captivity; and Mango Park, if be ever saw Timbuctoo, which is doubtful, perished at the Boussa Rapids near the month of that river whose fame be spread in Europe. Park started, for his last expedition in 1805. Rene Caillie, in disguise,. reached Timbuctoo in April, 1528; he was the first European to come back from Timbuctoo. Laing reached Timbuctoo• in August, 1828, only to fall a victim to his want of tact; he was murdered by the Berabichs, a Moorish tribe, at the instigation of the chief of the town. Barth, having survived his comrades (the English expedition), reached the Mysterious- City in 1853 ; but he saw next to nothing of Timbuctoo, owing to his clumsy mistake in ignoring the authorities, be irritated the inhabitants, and was warned to keep to his house. Caillie's fourteen days were used to more purpose than Barth's sojourn of a month. Barth had his opportunity and lost it, and Caillie, from want of sufficient education, was com- pelled in a sense to forego it. M. Dubois, equipped with the necessary observation, tact, learning, and, above all, the- historical sense, and gifted with the imagination of a literary artist, has availed himself to the fall of his chance, and given. to us the key of a great mystery.
The choice of a person to write of " Timbuctoo the Mysterious "* could not have fallen on a better man than a Frenchman gifted with powers of research, imagination, and the grand style. Some men can travel and explore, possessed of all possible determination and courage, and yet lack that splendid enthusiasm which paints for others the marvels of an • Timbuctoo the Mysterious. By FElix Dubois. Trmslated from the French by Diaua White. With 153 Illustrations and 11 Maps and Plans. London r William Heinemann.
unknown country. Our author, as his first sight of the Niger shows, possessed that valuable enthusiasm, feeling all the fascination that the great river of Central Africa exercised over Mango Park. After drawing for us a painful picture of the route from Dionbaba, the last railway station, to Barn- maku, and its laborious transport difficulties, he describes his approach to the Niger :—" The narrow path widens suddenly; its rocky sides are flung right and left like the leaves of a door. There is the Djoliba,' says my historical servant, as .calmly as if he were announcing Dinner is served.' It is an impressive spectacle from the height of the road that still clings to the hilL A vast horizon lies at my feet bathed in the splendours of a tropical sunset, and down there, in a plain of gold and green and red, shines a silver trail bordered by a line of darkness. There it is, a mere vapour, the dream of a 'river in a valley of dreams, and the dark line is the hills by which it flows, almost invisibly. God is great' as they say here. There is no disillusion, as is so often the case in the realisation of the unknown. I can scarcely take my eyes from the serenely majestic panorama that is spread before me." Again, when afloat on the Niger and pressing forward to the longed-for goal of Timbuctoo, he tries to realise for us his sensation of the great river :—" The Niger, with its vast and misty horizons, is more like an inland ocean than a river. Borne along upon it, scarcely seeing land, the traveller is carried away by those endless dreams which haunt the in.. finitudes of the sea. Its waters break upon its banks in the monotonously cadenced waves of the Mediterranean shores; and when winds, grown to violence in the desert, swell its waves into a great race, sea-sickness will convince the most rebellious that the river Niger is of kin to oceans." And he is no less happy in his appreciation of those Bosos belonging to the aquatic population of the river, who, with that cheerful alacrity of the negro, paddled the white man's canoe unweariedly, though the reason of his haste was an enigma to them. Says M. Dubois, "Moreover, my very eagerness to press forward was unintelligible to them. Time has neither value nor meaning for them ; they do not even know their own ages, and their life is merely a road, sometimes long, • sometimes short, but in any case leading nowhere." And as the banks continuously unfold before the traveller, he ob- served the kindly welcomes and ever-ready laughter of the -river population, who one and all, from "the strange childish forms, with the great heads and stomachs balanced on the slender limbs, of the negro babies," to the solitary fisher, made him the military salute. " This form of salutation," says the philosophic Frenchman, "seems to be the only thing that our civilisation has brought them so far. Poor souls! when the rest has followed they will have ceased to laugh." How inimitable and how French is this, with its mingling of the profound and the trivial, the humorous and the cynical.
The first great surprise that awaited M. Dubois, and gave him some inkling of the grandeur of those ancient empires -of the Niger, was the town of Jenne. The landscape had hitherto lacked something to redeem it from the monotony of vast expanses of meadows scarcely relieved by the hovels of the riverside dwellers. But at the beginning of the great fertile deltas which the Niger maintains by regular flooding, he came to this famous town, which even better than Tim- buctoo has preserved the architecture of the Songhois. The traveller, coming straight from the purely negro character of the Niger and its races, was confronted not only with a town, but with an architecture so extraordinary and yet not unfamiliar, that for a time he was bewildered. " At last," he tells us, "I recall these majestically solid forms, and the memory is wafted to me from the other extremity of Africa. Their prototypes rise upon the banks of another great river, but no life is associated with their image." This comparison with the cities of the Pharaohs was fully borne out by the researches of the French traveller and the traditions of the people themselves, who one and all pointed to the East when asked where they had come from, thus giving one more example of the law of migration. That the connection with Egypt was direct, and not due to Mahommedan civilisation, as Barth thought, seems hardly to need pointing out. The Arabian conquest in the seventh century destroyed ancient • Egypt, and probably drove the Songhois into the desert; but as Islamism did not obtain in the Soudan till the eleventh century, the exiles would scarcely have waited to revive a dead architecture from a totally different civilisation. They undoubtedly took Egyptian ideas with them. The journey was a long one, but there is nothing in the history of migrations more evident than the extraordinary force of that instinct. M. Dubois then gives us a short sketch of the three Songhois dynas- ties. The first, founded by the leader of the emigration, lasted six hundred years, and it is to be noted that a Moor who visited the Niger in the fourteenth century, when the Dia dynasty was drawing to a close, speaks of the beautiful Egyptian garments worn in the country. Towards the end of the second dynasty, Ali the Conqueror extended the Empire, and began his series of victories by the conquest of Timbuctoo. Askia the Great, who usurped the throne on the death of Ali, founded the th ird dynasty and a system of government so sound that it lasted during furious internecine struggles fora century. The Songhois Empire at the height of its glory extended from Thegazza to Bammaku, and from Lake Chad to the Atlantic Ocean. While the seat of the Songhois Empire was at Jenne, Askia had his Sheik-ul-Islam at Timbuctoo. The Askia dynasty, after emulating the crimes of the Czesars, lasted till the end of the sixteenth century, when the Moors overthrew it. But the Moors soon lost their rich conquest, and in the eighteenth century the Soudan was independent. The various nomads of the desert then proceeded to play their part in the warfare of the desert, and began an endless series of captures, murders, surprises, accompanied by a system of terrorism that lasts even now.
Jenne alone seems never to have been taken or pillaged, and is practically intact, and shows us a truly remarkable architecture. The material is the sun-dried clay of the neigh- bourhood, and the huge walls are built with a slope, and are ornamented with a curious triangular battlement. The gate- ways are pylonic, and so are the numerous buttresses that adorn the great facades, and the pyramidal form is suggested everywhere. The only Moorish additions were the windows with shutters, and further architectural ideas would be crushed by their inability to stand the torrents of rain. The ponderous Egyptian forms, with the aid of successive rough castings, are almost intact.
The first sight of Timbnetoo was as impressive as that of Jenne, but once inside the imposing walls our traveller found the place in ruins and apparently deserted. Only the doors of the various houses, massive, bound with iron and studded with enormous nails, revealed a possible solution of the mystery. A few days' succession of visitors, and much studying of chronicles, human and documentary, enabled M. Dubois to reconstruct the history of Timbuctoo. The houses contain great wealth and there is a great trade, but such was the fear of the Touaregs that the doors were always closed and the merchants wore the meanest of garments. The Touaregs, a part of the Berbers of Algiers, are those nomads, driven south by conquest, whose existence in the desert and whose contact with the riches of travelling caravans has converted them into a race of ignoble robbers absolutely devoid of any principle whatsoever ; they are known as "The Abandoned of God." One of their last victims was the unfortunate Marquis de Mores. Unaccustomed to the glare and sand of the desert, they have adopted a headdress con- sisting of two veils ; one covers the throat and mouth, like the consumptive's comforter, and the other hangs down over the eyes. Not the least remarkable feature of Timbuetoo are these veiled men. As great a curse to the caravans of the desert as the Thugs are to the Indian merchants, it seems that these degenerate desceLdants of the once brilliant Moorish race founded Timbuctoo ! Situated on the edge of the desert and just on the rim of the fertile floodings of the Niger, what was originally a sort of camp became a natural halting-point for caravans, and a great half-way house for the river trade and the far-off towns of Tuat and Tripoli, Ghadames and Fez. Under Askia the Great, Timbuctoo formed part of the Songhois Empire, and the nomads were subdued. Its wealth was due to the merchants of Jenne, and it reached its culminating splendour with that town, and declined at the Moorish invasion, becoming once more a prey to the Touaregs. But the vitality of the city has endured, and it is still a great market, retaining some industries derived from Moorish art that are famous now. It was the Timbuctoo of the Askia dynasty, the Timbuctoo of the sixteenth century,
that had such a world-wide fame, the mingling of Songhois civilisation with Arabian attracting the learned of Northern Africa. So great was the fascination of the town, that it might well be compared to the Paris of the Americans; and many who reached Timbuctoo after long travels stayed years, and some never returned at all.
Now it is no longer necessary for the merchant to wear his oldest slippers, or for the very slaves to hide their jewellery when they go to fetch water, and we may hope, with M. Dubois, that the fame of Timbuctoo will once more wax great. The golden era when each traveller brought back marvellous accounts of his wanderings is almost over, but it has been temporarily revived by M. Dubois in one of the most fascinating books of its kind that has been given to the world of late years. It is not too long, it is thoughtful but not heavy, and it abounds with those touches of the skilful writer which add to the most striking facts. It is also plenti- fully illustrated, and affords us a startling insight into one of the most curious phases of Egyptian and Arabian civilisation that can be seen anywhere, a phase embodied in the tradition of Jenne and the ruins of "Timbuctoo the Mysterious," the once-famous Queen of the Soudan.
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