EARLIEST EXPLORERS. 
15 
an account of liis own travels and also of the knowledge 
of Africa generally at the time. But by that period we 
had entered on a new era of African exploration. Ibn, 
before he set out for Central Africa, had traversed a 
great part of Asia, visited Zanzibar, Magdisho, Egypt, 
and other places, and met with many adventures. 
It was from Fez that Ibn Batuta commenced his 
peregrination through interior Africa. He went first to 
Segilmissa, which he describes as a handsome town, 
situated in a territory abounding with date-trees. 
Having joined a caravan, he came, after a journey of 
twenty-five days, to Thargari, which some manuscripts 
make Tagaza, and is, therefore, evidently the Tegazza 
of Leo Africanus, supposed by Major Bennel to be the 
modern Tishect, containing the mine whence Timbuctoo 
is chiefly supplied with salt. To our traveller the place 
appeared to contain no object desirable or agreeable : 
there was nothing but salt; the houses were built with 
slabs of that mineral, and roofed with the hides of 
camels. It even appeared to him that nature had 
lodged this commodity in regular tables in the mine, 
fitted for being conveyed to a distance ; but he probably 
overlooked an artificial process by which it is usually 
brought into this form. From Thargari he went in 
twenty days to Tashila, three days’ beyond which com¬ 
menced a desert of the most dreary aspect, where there 
was neither water, beast, nor bird, “ nothing but sand 
and hills of sand.” In ten days he came to Abu Latin, 
a large commercial town, crowded with merchants from 
various quarters of the continent. The manners of the 
people, as is indeed too common in the scenes of inland 
traffic throughout Africa, appeared to him very licen¬ 
tious, and wholly destitute of that decorum which 
usually marks a Mussulman residence. The women 
maintained a greater share of respectability than the 
other sex ; yet this did not prevent them from hiring 
themselves as temporary wives to those whom the 
pursuits of trade induced to visit Abu Latin. The 
editor has not hazarded a conjecture what place this is ; 
but on finding it in one manuscript called Ayulatin, and 
