e great Prince of the Negroes. There they gave us one
hundred and eighty pounds worth of gold, in exchange for our goods. The
lord of the country had a negro with him named Buka, who knew the tongue
only of Negroland, and finding him perfectly truthful, I asked him to go
with me to Cantor and promised him all he needed. I made the same
promise to his chief and kept it.

[Illustration: THE BORGIAN MAP OF 1450. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]

"We went up the river as far as Cantor, which is a large town near the
river-side. Farther than this the ships could not go, because of the
thick growth of trees and underwood, but here I made it known that I had
come to exchange merchandise, and the natives came to me in very great
numbers. When the news spread through the country that the Christians
were in Cantor, they came from Tambucatu in the North, from Mount Gelu
in the South, and from Quioquun, which is a great city, with a wall of
baked tiles. Here, too, I was told, there is gold in plenty and caravans
of camels cross over there with goods from Carthage, Tunis, Fez, Cairo
and all the land of the Saracens. These are exchanged for gold, which
comes from the mines on the other side of Sierra Leone. They said that
range ran southwards, which pleased me very greatly, because all the
rivers coming from thence, as far as could be known, ran westward, but
they told me that other very large rivers ran eastward from the other
side of the ridge.

"There was also, they said, East of these mountains, a great lake,
narrow and long, on which sailed canoes like ships. The people on the
opposite sides of this lake were always at war; and those on the eastern
side were white. When I asked who ruled in those parts, they answered
that one chief was a negro, but towards the East was a greater lord who
had conquered the negroes a short time before.

"A Saracen told me he had been all through that land and had been
present at the fighting, and when I told this to the Prince, he said
that a merchant in Oran had written him two months before about this
very war, and that he believed it.

"Such were the things told me by the negroes at Cantor; I asked them
about the road to the gold country, and who were the lords of that
country. They told me the King lived in Kukia, and was lord of all the
mines on the right side of the river of Cantor, and that he had before
the door of his palace a mass of gold just as it was taken from the
earth, so large that twenty