My stay in Ágades was too short to justify my entering into detail about the private life of the people, but all that I saw convinced me that, although open to most serious censure on the part of the moralist, it presented many striking features of cheerfulness and happiness, and nothing like the misery which is often met with in towns which have declined from their former glory. It still contains many active germs of national life, which are most gratifying to the philosophic traveller. The situation, on an elevated plateau, cannot but be healthy, as the few waterpools, of small dimensions, are incapable of infecting the air. The disease which I have mentioned in my diary as prevalent at the time of my sojourn was epidemic. Besides, it must be borne in mind that the end of the rainy season everywhere in the tropical regions is the most unhealthy period of the year.[195] [Footnote 166: Sultan Bello’s “Enfák el Misúri fi taríkh belád el Tekrúri,” in Denham and Clapperton’s Travels, Appendix, vol. ii. p. 162. I myself have a copy of the same extracts from this work of Bello.] [Footnote 167: Marmol, Descripcion dell’ Africa, vol. iii. fl. xxiv. b.: “Agadez es una provincia . . . ay en ella una ciudad del proprio nombre, que a sido edificada de ciento y sesenta años a este parte.”] [Footnote 168: Leo Africanus, l. vii. c. 9.: “Edificata dai moderni re (?) ne’ confini di Libia.” The word “re” is very suspicious.] [Footnote 169: See the extracts of Bábá Ahmed’s “Taríkh e’ Sudan,” sent by me to Europe, and published in the Journal of the German Oriental Society, 1855. This statement agrees exactly with an interesting passage in Sultan Bello’s “Enfák el Misúri,” which has been unaccountably omitted by Saláme in the translation appended to Denham and Clapperton’s Travels.] [Footnote 170: Bello took an erroneous view of the subject in supposing all the five tribes to have come from Aújila. Only one of them was originally from that place; and the names of the five tribes as mentioned by him are evidently erroneous. (See the following note.) The error in deriving all these five tribes from Aújila originated, probably, in the general tradition that the whole nation of the Berbers had spread over North Africa from Syria by way of the oasis of Aújila.]