Timbuctoo; but his majesty was so fierce an enemy to the Hebrew race, that he not only banished them his dominions, but made it a crime punishable with confiscation of property to have any commerce with them. Timbuctoo at this period contained a great number of judges, doctors, priests, and learned men, all of whom were liberally provided for by the prince; and an immense number of manuscripts were annually imported from Barbary, the trade in books being, in fact, the most lucrative branch of commerce. Their gold money, the only kind coined in the country, was without image or superscription; but those small shells, still current on the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, and in the islands of the Indian Ocean, under the name of cowries, were used in small transactions, four hundred of them being equivalent to a piece of gold. Of these gold pieces, six and two-thirds weighed an ounce. The inhabitants, a mild and gentle race, spent a large portion of their time in singing, dancing, and festivities, which they were enabled to do by the great number of slaves of both sexes which they maintained. The city was extremely liable to conflagrations, almost one-half of the houses having been burnt down between the first and second visits of our traveller,—a space of not more than eleven or twelve years. Neither gardens nor fruit-trees adorned the environs.
This account of the state of Timbuctoo in the beginning of the sixteenth century I have introduced, that the reader might be able to compare it with the modern descriptions of Major Laing and Caillé, and thus discover the amount of the progress which the Mohammedans of Central Africa have made towards civilization. I suspect, however, that whatever may now be the price of salt, the book trade has not increased; and that whether the natives dance more or less than formerly, they are neither so gentle in their manners nor so wealthy in their possessions.
