They stain their cheeks and foreheads red or yellow on some occasions; and the married women wear a kind of hood on their heads, made of blue cloth or silk, and cotton handkerchiefs of different kinds and colours, and go barefooted." [Footnote: Swearah or Mogadore is stated to contain above 36,000 souls, that is 30,000 Moors and 6,000 Jews.

This calculation would make Timbuctoo to contain 216,000 inhabitants.

A statement which deserves little credit.] "The king and people of Timbuctoo do not fear and worship God like the Moslem, but like the people of Soudan, they only pray once in twenty-four hours, when they see the moon, and when she is not seen, they do not pray at all.

They cannot read nor write, but are honest.
They circumcise their children, like the Arabs.

They have not any mosques, but dance every night, as the Moors and Arabs pray." "If however European expectation had been raised to an extraordinary height respecting the size, riches, and importance of Timbuctoo, it was likely to be still more luxuriantly feasted with the description of another town of central Africa, in comparison of which Timbuctoo must appear as a city of a second rate, and which Sidi Hamet describes as being of the magnitude, that it took him a day to walk round it." "According to the statement of Sidi Hamet, he travelled with about two hundred Moslem, to a large city called Wassanah, a place he had never before heard of, nor which is to be found in any of the modern maps of Africa.