In this work of releasing the Faithful from their bondage to heathen taskmasters, and bringing new light in a forcible fashion to the barbarous and breechless natives, the Fulah did not stop till from every village of the Central Sudan there was heard in the grey dawn of the tropic morning the stentorian voice of the negro Mueddin, announcing that prayer was better than sleep--bringing from out the faintly illumined houses the devout Moslems to humble their faces in the dust, and acknowledge their utter faith in and dependence on Allah. No less thoroughly was the material welfare of the people cared for. “The laws of the Koran were in his (Othman’s) time strictly put in force, not only among the Fillahtah (Fulah), but the negroes and the Arabs; and the whole country, when not in a state of war, was so well regulated, that it was a common saying that a woman might travel with a casket of gold upon her head from one end of the Fillahtah dominions to the other.” So wrote Clapperton a few years after the death of Othman, as eye-witness of the wonderful revolution effected by the Fulah. Unhappily the religious fervour of the remarkable leader speedily developed into religious mania, and ended in his death in 1817. On the death of Othman, the huge empire he had raised was divided between his sons Bello and Abd Allahi. To the former was given Sokoto and all the east and south, while to the latter fell the western provinces along the Niger, with Gandu as capital. The countries to the west of the Niger, including Massina, became independent under Ahmed Lebbo, one of Othman’s lieutenants, who conquered that region immediately before the death of Othman. CHAPTER XXV. _NEW ENTERPRISES AND NEW THEORIES._ As we have seen, Park’s second expedition was fruitful in nothing but disaster, and the legacy of experience that helps others to success. The journal Isaaco brought back from the Niger did not add anything to our knowledge of the river, and so little did Amadi Fatuma’s narrative supplement it as to the results of the voyage down the stream to Bussa, that in the map attached to the published journal and biographical notice in 1816, Park’s furthest point is placed only some eighty miles to the E.S.E. of Timbuktu, instead of nearly 700 miles in a straight line S.E.