INTRODUCTION ix 



Rhinoceros or a nearly allied form of it has left fossil 

 remains in Algeria and is still fomid within the equatorial 

 Nile basin. It has penetrated south along the eastern 

 side of Central Africa, but it does not appear to have 

 passed into the Congo basin or to have reached the regions 

 south of Algeria or west of Tibesti and Darfur. The 

 'Black' Rhinoceros with the pointed lip has pushed west- 

 ward to the lands round Lake Chad and into the basin of 

 the Shari, but seems never to have travelled as far west- 

 ward as the Niger or ever to have been found in true 

 West Africa. No zebra or wild ass, so far as we know, 

 ever left Algeria or the Nile basin to enter the Chad or 

 Congo regions. ^Many antelopes have in the near past 

 and present ranged between Mediterranean Algeria on 

 the north-west, the equatorial Nile basin, and southern 

 most Africa, but have not appeared in the western half 

 of Africa. 



The region therefore into which plunged the author 

 of this book, with the concurrence and assistance of an 

 educated Egyptian of Al Azhar University, has been of 

 great interest to all students of Africa. Rohlfs's visit had 

 almost become legendary and at best its reports were frag- 

 mentary and inconclusive. (The Kufara oasis was the 

 half-way house between the mysterious and recalcitrant 

 Negro kingdom of Wadai and the Mediterranean coast. 

 Wadai was the last of the great Negro States of Central 

 Africa to come under European supervision and controy^ 

 But even after Wadai — to the great benefit of North 

 Central Africa — was conquered by the French, and its 

 slave trade abolished, the oasis of Kufara remained for a 

 few more years a legendary district, perhaps mainly 

 created by the excited imagination of a thwarted German 

 explorer, who had already crossed Africa from the Medi- 

 terranean to the Benue and the Niger, but who had 

 scarcely penetrated to this secret land of water and palm 



