conflagration Christian symbols and Pagan idols alike disappeared in one fell holocaust. To a race so educated and nurtured, so steeped in fiery ardour and unquenchable faith, and so imbued with the paramount importance of their mission--provided, moreover, as regards the practical part of their work, with the drought-enduring camel, hitherto unknown in Africa--the so-called impassable desert was no barrier to the performance of the task divinely set them. Only for him who turned back did hell yawn. For him who went forward it might be death, but it was death with Paradise gained. In this spirit the terrors of the Sahara were faced, and faced only to be conquered; and ere the ninth century gave place to the tenth, the land of the negroes was reached, and the forces of Islam set themselves in array against those of heathendom. For the first time the Niger basin was now brought into direct relation with Northern Africa. The actual time when this was accomplished is still a matter of some doubt, though the statement is quoted by Barth that within less than a hundred years of the commencement of the Mohammedan era, schools and mosques were established in the negro kingdom of Ghana or Ghanata, to the west of Timbuktu. More incontestable is the statement of the Arab writer, Ebn Khaldun (A.D. 1380), that trading relations existed about 280 A.H. or 893 A.D. between the Upper Niger and Northern Africa. When these were first established we are not informed. The vital forces which had found no barrier in the fierce nomads and physical difficulties of the Sahara, and had carried the disciples of Mohammed to the borders of the Sudan, met a check to their sweeping progress where one would have least expected it. Half the secret of the success of Islam had been that principle in the creed which was calculated to attract and inflame the ardent imaginations and easily excited temperaments of the Berber tribes of the north. With these Mohammedanism required but little aid from fire and sword for the spread of its tenets. It had but to be preached to be believed, making every hearer not only a convert but a missionary aflame with enthusiasm for the cause of God and Mohammed. Such, however, was not the case when Islam came face to face with the undeveloped lethargic minds of the barbarous blacks of the Sudan. The intellect of the negro had to be prepared for the reception of the new spiritual doctrines. For a time a hard and fast line existed between Islam and Heathendom more or less closely coinciding with that drawn between Berber and Negro, Sahara and Sudan.