We have been taught to regard Africa as a dark, stolid continent, unawakened, unvisited by the agencies and influences that have transformed the world from age to age.  Yet it was in northern and northeastern Africa that within historic periods three of the most powerful and brilliant civilizations were developed,—­the Egyptian, the Carthaginian, the Saracenic.  That these civilizations had more than a surface contact with the interior, we know.  To take the most ancient of them, and that which longest endured, the Egyptian, the Pharaohs carried their conquests and their power deep into Africa.  In the story of their invasions and occupancy of the interior, told in pictures on temple walls, we find the negro figuring as captive and slave.  This contact may not have been a fruitful one for the elevation of the negro, but it proves that for ages he was in one way or another in contact with a superior civilization.  In later days we find little trace of it in the home of the negro, but in Egypt the negro has left his impress in the mixed blood of the Nile valley.

The most striking example of the contact of the negro with a higher civilization is in the powerful medieval empire of Songhay, established in the heart of the negro country.  The vast strip of Africa lying north of the equator and south of the twentieth parallel and west of the upper Nile was then, as it is now, the territory of tribes distinctly described as Negro.  The river Niger, running northward from below Jenne to near Timbuctoo, and then turning west and south to the Gulf of Guinea, flows through one of the richest valleys in the world.  In richness it is comparable to that of the Nile and, like that of the Nile, its fertility depends upon the water of the central stream.  Here arose in early times the powerful empire of Songhay, which disintegrated and fell into tribal confusion about the middle of the seventeenth century.  For a long time the seat of its power was the city of Jenne; in later days it was Timbuctoo.

This is not the place to enlarge upon this extraordinary piece of history.  The best account of the empire of Songhay is to be found in the pages of Barth, the German traveler, who had access to what seemed to him a credible Arab history.  Considerable light is thrown upon it by a recent volume on Timbuctoo by M. Dubois, a French traveler.  M. Dubois finds reason to believe that the founders of the Songhese empire came from Yemen, and sought refuge from Moslem fanaticism in Central Africa some hundred and fifty years after the Hejira.  The origin of the empire is obscure, but the development was not indigenous.  It seems probable that the settlers, following traders, penetrated to the Niger valley from the valley of the Nile as early as the third or fourth century of our era.  An evidence of this early influence, which strengthened from century to century, Dubois finds in the architecture of Jenne and Timbuctoo.  It is not Roman or Saracenic or Gothic, it is distinctly