At length the day arrived, and long before dawn, by the light of lanterns, we struck camp, and in the bitter cold turned our horses’ heads to the north and set out for Marakesh. CHAPTER XI. TAFILET OR TAFILELT. Tafilet, Tafilelt, or Tafilalet, is said to derive its name, as already mentioned, from Filàl, a district in Arabia, and to have obtained its present form by the prefix _Ta_, a Berber word we know better in the form _Aït_, corresponding to the Arabic _Ulad_—“sons of.” The final _t_ is again of Berber derivation, and is also found under the form _at_ or _ta_, which appears to be a feminine termination. Thus the whole name may be said to signify “The sons of the Filàl (district),” the feminine noun being used instead of the word “district” or some such term. This addition of the prefix _T_ and the feminine termination I found to be in common use amongst the Berbers. The fact that the root of the name owes its derivation to Arabic sources naturally tends to convince one that the oasis must previous to this time have borne some other, and Berber, title—that is to say, before the invasion of this portion of the Sahara by the Arabs in 707 A.D. In seeking for an earlier name, one is at once led to think of Sijilmassa, an undoubted Amazigh or Shelha word, and which, even after the name Tafilet came into general use, existed as the name of the capital of the district until that town was destroyed toward the end of the last century. It was this double nomenclature, no doubt, that originally gave rise to discussions on the part of geographers from the middle ages until the latter half of this century as to Sijilmassa and Tafilet; for with that haphazard way in which natives use the name of a district for a town, and _vice versâ_, the two became hopelessly confused, until the visit of René Caillié to these parts in 1828 set matters somewhat at rest, although over and over again since that date the discussion has been revived. There is but little need nowadays to say much on that point. Caillié’s and Rohlfs notes, scanty though they are, yet valuable as being the only records we have of the visits of Europeans to Tafilet, have satisfactorily decided the question; and it is now well known that Sijilmassa, though the name often implied the district, was in reality the capital of the oasis of Tafilet, or, as it is more properly spelt, Tafilelt. Such geographers as Marmol, who in his ‘Africa,’ published in 1575-1599, speaks of Tafilet as a great city of Numidia, must have referred to Sijilmassa. Yet the question only last year was revived in Tangier in connection with the late Sultan Mulai el Hassen’s expedition to the Sahara.