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Askia Mohammed was also known as Askia the Great. The security of Songhay was undermined when Arabs from Morocco invaded and captured the key trading city of Timbuktu in 1591. Thus ended the last of the three great empires of West Africa.
These boys when grown ran away and founded a new dynasty in Songhay, that of the Sonnis, in 1355. Seventeen of these kings reigned, the last and greatest being Sonni Ali, who ascended the throne in 1464. Sonni Ali was a soldier and began his career with the conquest of Timbuktu in 1469. He also succeeded in capturing Jenne and attacked the Mossi and other enemies on all sides.
Nothing could be seen of the Trans-Saharan Railway constructing on the plans of Duponchel a long ribbon of iron destined to bind together Algiers and Timbuktu by way of Laghouat and Gardaia, and destined eventually to run down into the Gulf of Guinea. Then the "Albatross" entered the equatorial region below the tropic of Cancer.
Italy is a delightful place to remember, to think and talk about. And is it not the same with England? Let us go there as a tourist only as a tourist. How attractive one finds its conveniences, and even its conventionalities, provided one knows, for an absolute certainty, that one will never be constrained to dwell among them. What lovely things one could say about England, in Timbuktu!
They were weary of fighting in a quarrel of which they knew little and about which they cared less; they longed for a sight of the wives and the children they had left behind them in Fez or Touggourt or Timbuktu. Because they had been kept on duty in Europe, while the French white troops were being rapidly demobilized and returned to their homes, the Africans were sullen and resentful.
But Major Toutée, a few years ago, when assailed by hostile natives, made a safe journey with his boats through the rapids; and Captain Lenfant, in 1901, carried 500,000 pounds of supplies up the river and through the rapids to the French stations between Bussa and Timbuktu. He had a small, flat-bottomed steamboat and a number of little boats propelled by fifty black paddlers.
Twenty palm-thatched, beehive huts sheltered its black population, while a half-dozen goat skin tents in the center of the clearing housed the score of Arabs who found shelter here while, by trading and raiding, they collected the cargoes which their ships of the desert bore northward twice each year to the market of Timbuktu.
"Don't bore me in Michaelish babble," she told him. "I want to go see Aunt Peggy." "Go then," she told him. "She's in Kansas. The walk should be good for you. Be careful not to take the detour to Timbuktu."
Dromedaries cannot endure the damp climate near the Niger, which especially in winter overflows its banks for a long distance. Therefore they are led back through the Sahara. They thrive on the dry deserts. The constantly blowing north-east trade-wind dries up the Sahara, and in certain regions years may pass without a drop of rain. The name Timbuktu has a singular sound.
A day will come when the negroes of Timbuktu will listen to Mozart's and Beethoven's music and feel that it belongs to them, as truly as it ever did to the citizens of Munich or of Vienna. The folk song lies at the opposite pole from universal music. It is music which smacks most of the soil whereon it has been produced.
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