Abu Abdulla Mohamed was born at Ceuta in Morocco towards the end of the eleventh century. Being descended from a family named Idris, he came to be known as Al Idrisi. The branch of the family from which Idrisi sprang ruled over the city of Magala. He travelled in Europe and eventually settled at the Court of Roger II. in Sicily. Here he wrote his book on geography. He quotes the various authors whom he consulted in its compilation, and derived further information from travellers whose accounts he compared and tested. The title of his work is _The Delight of those who seek to wander through the Regions of the World_, and it is from the French translation of this work by Jaubert that the following notes on the countries lying beyond the western borders of India are taken. This account may be accepted as representing the condition of political and commercial geography throughout those regions at the end of the eleventh century, some eighty years or so after the borders of India had been periodically harried by Mahmud of Ghazni, and not very long before the Mongol host appeared on the horizon and made a clean sweep of Asiatic civilization. To the west of the Indian frontier in those early days lay the Persian provinces of Makran and Sejistan (Seistan), which two provinces between them appear to represent a great part of modern Baluchistan. The "Belous" were not yet in Baluchistan; they lived north of the mountains occupied by the "Kufs," with whom they are invariably associated in Arab geography. "The Kufs," says Idrisi, "are the only people who do not speak Persian in the province of Kerman. Their mountains reach to the Persian Gulf, being bordered on the north by the country of Najirman (?Nakirman), on the south and east by the sea and the Makran deserts, on the west by the sea and the 'Belous' country and the districts of Matiban and Hormuz." These are doubtless the "Bashkird" mountains, and the "species of Kurd, brave and savage" which inhabited them under the name of Kufs probably represent the progenitors of the present inhabitants. The "Bolous" or "Belous" lived in the plains to the north "right up to the foot of the mountains," and these are the people (according to Mr. Longworth Dames) who, hailing originally from the Caspian provinces, are the typical Baluch tribespeople of to-day.