granting that it is a dream, it is a dream which may have material consequences. The idea of the persons who are supporting Mr. Mackenzie is to get behind the great desert barrier which divides Mediterranean Africa from the more fertile centre, and attack the continent from the west, at a point where the Canary Islands give, or would give, if they belonged to anybody but the Portuguese, an admirable basis of action. They are fertile, they belong to Europe, they can be reached from London in six days, and they are only eighty miles from the thickest section of the African continent. Africa can be entered here without interference from barbarous kings, for the dominions of the Morocco sultan do not extend so far south; or from savage populations, for there are none; or from the climate, which, though not a good one, is too dry to be dangerous. Explorers or traders may die from want of water, but they will not die of miasma, or the fevers it produces. The traveller landing at the old mouth of the Belta, between Cape Bojador and Cape Juby, has before him a straight and practicable road across the desert to Timbuctoo, in the very heart of the West-African continent, but only eight hundred miles away. Suppose, merely for argument, that a railway existed from the mouth of the Belta to Timbuctoo — twice the length, that is, of the railway from London to Edinburgh — Southampton would be within seven days' journey — fifteen hundred miles by water and eight hundred by land — of the heart of West Africa, and of Timbuctoo, a city from which the trader, if he were protected there, could trade by caravan with three-fourths of the continent, and descend the Niger at will. That is not an enticing prospect, so far as commerce is concerned, though they talk of indigo, and cotton, and oils — except to a few firms which like little trades and one hundred per cent. profit better than great trades and five per cent. — and there will be no railway, but the explorer, once on the Belta, will recognize two geographical possibilities. It is more than probable, after the experiments of General Daumas, that the sinking of fifteen or twenty artesian wells would turn the way from Cape Juby to Timbuctoo into a safe, easy, and not very tedious caravan route, by which the people of the great region which looks to Timbuctoo as its centre would habitually communicate with Europe. They now pass through Morocco by a path two thousand miles long, but this is a far shorter, much easier, and much safer way, if only water could be readily and certainly obtained, and the probability that it could is very great. There are no tribes to stop them, no kings to tax them, and the Atlantic at the end. Such a caravan route, with the safe communication it would ensure, would cost a mere trifle, would attract a trade which might be important among third-class trades, and would be a regular door of communication with the far interior of Western Africa, — with the little-known lands where, from the little evidence as yet obtained, the negro seems to have reached some capacity of understanding that peace will pay him a great deal better than war; and this speculation, which is not "dreamy," or "wild," or even foolhardy, is well worth the cost and trouble and danger of an expedition. If it is worth while to spend a little money and a competent explorer or two and some energy on exploring any place, it is worth while to spend them on a short route between the heart of Western Africa and the Atlantic; and, the end considered, there can be neither absurdity nor recklessness in the idea of traversing the eight hundred miles of desert which it is requisite to know. Mr. Giffard Palgrave did infinitely more than that in Arabia. If the tsetse-fly is there, as somebody is sure to say he is, he will not bite a camel; if the desert robber is dangerous, he will not kill anybody who subscribes at home; and if there is no water, — well, we shall know the fact, and know better how to manage the next effort. The advantage to be gained is worth the risk, but the promoters dream dreams to which this advantage is trivial, and as they include engineers, their dreams should have a hearing. They think it possible to reopen the inland sea which, as they are convinced, on evidence of great weight, once connected the centre of Western Africa with the Atlantic Ocean. Their belief is that the vast depression in the desert of Sahara known as El Juff, and certainly once the bed of a sea, being even now so encrusted with salt that vegetation will not live, was once filled by the water of the Atlantic through a fiord jutting into the continent through the valley of the Belta, and now shut off from the ocean by a bar of sand eight miles across. This bar, formed by the Belta, once cut through, they believe that a ship might steam from Southaminon to Timbuctoo, above the old ocean-bed, now
