102 
TRAVELS IN AFRICA. 
Chap. XXV. 
continued to show me the same disinterested friend- 
ship which I had experienced from him before. Sidi 
*Ali was the son of Mohammed, the former sultan of 
Fezzan, and last of the Welad Mohammed, who was 
killed by Mukni, the father of Yusuf, Mr. Eichardson's 
interpreter. 
This man, whom it would have been far better for 
us to have employed as our agent from the beginning, 
had testified his interest in my welfare by sending me 
a fat ram as a present, and now accompanied me most 
kindly, in order to exert his influence in my behalf 
with the governor. On my second visit to Kan6 on 
my return from Timbuktu, in the latter part of 1854, 
when I was still more destitute than in 1851, I placed 
myself directly under his protection, and made him 
my agent at the moment when the state of my affairs 
rendered considerable credit desirable. 
It was a very fine morning; and the whole scenery of 
the town in its great variety of clay houses, huts, sheds, 
green open places affording pasture for oxen, horses, 
camels, donkeys, and goats, in motley confusion, deep 
hollows containing ponds overgrown with the water- 
plant the Pistia stratiotes, or pits freshly dug up in order 
to form the material for some new buildings, various 
and most beautiful specimens of the vegetable king- 
dom, particularly the fine symmetric gonda or papaya, 
the slender date-palm, the spreading alleluba, and 
the majestic rimi or silk cotton-tree (Bombast) — the 
people in all varieties of costume, from the naked slave 
up to the most gaudily dressed Arab, — all formed a 
