The aspect of Timbuktu in nowise realised the glowing anticipations of the traveller. Instead of the wealthy and powerful city, touched with the glamour of the shining orient, which he had been taught to expect, there lay before him only a collection of miserable mud buildings, among which rose several mosques, looking imposing only in comparison with the rude huts around them. To the north-east and south spread the immensity of the great desert as one vast plain of burning, repellent sands, over which the silence of death brooded, except where pariah dogs or loathsome vultures feasted on the carrion or offal thrown out of the town. Such was the place in which Commerce had established her Central African emporium, and gathered together the trading veins and arteries which ramified more or less throughout the whole of North-eastern Africa. Here, too, amid these dreary wastes, Moslem learning had made her seat; and here the religion of Islam had found an abiding centre from which to radiate its influence into the most barbarous depths of negro Africa. Seen thus in relation to its surroundings, its position, and its functions, the mud huts and rudely built mosques which compose it acquire a tinge of the sublime, and strike the imagination more even than the stupendous wonders of a London or a Paris. For a fortnight Caillé--secure in his disguise--remained in Timbuktu, after which he set forth with a caravan to cross the desert to Morocco. Along no other part of the Sahara does the desert appear in such a terror-striking aspect. Through one tract the caravan had to travel with all possible expedition for ten days, not a drop of water being obtainable. The privations endured were indescribable, men and animals alike being reduced to the direst extremity before water was reached and their tortures assuaged. Further north similar experiences awaited them, till the caravan arrived at the River Dra. Thence the march was performed with comparative comfort by way of Tafilet and the Atlas to Fez and Tangier, where Caillé arrived on the 18th August 1828. [Illustration: TIMBUKTU.] With Lander’s descent of the Niger from Bussa to the sea, the course of Niger enterprise received a new development and impetus. The glowing accounts brought back by its explorers of the rich lands and powerful civilised kingdoms through which it flowed found eager hearers in England; and now that an entrance had been found by which the heart of these promising regions could be reached, such hearers were not slow to act and test in a practical fashion the commercial value of the great waterway. In this new movement Macgregor Laird, of Liverpool, was the leading spirit. Under his instructions two steamers were specially constructed for the work. Laird himself took command, and with him were associated Lander, and Lieutenant Allen of the navy, with Dr. Briggs and Mr. Oldfield as medical attendants.