of the sun and returned without having learnt anything." Then the
Wanderers were sent back to their prison till a west wind arose, when
they were blindfolded and put on board a boat, and after three days
reached the mainland of Africa. Here they were put ashore, with their
hands tied, and so left. They were released by the Berbers, and after
their reappearance in Spain, a "street at the foot of the hot bath in
Lisbon," concludes Edrisi, "took the name of Street of the Wanderers."

On the other extremity of the Moslem world, on the south-east coast of
Africa, there was more real progress. By Edrisi's day that important
addition of Arabic travellers and merchants to the geographical
knowledge of the world, by the remarkable trade-ventures of the
Emosaids, had been already made.

It had taken long in the making.

[Illustration: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO EDRISI. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]

About A.D. 742, ten years after the battle of Tours, the Emosaid family,
descended from Ali, cousin and son-in-law of Mahomet, tried to make
Said, their clan-chieftain, Ali's great-grandson, Caliph at Damascus.
The attempt was foiled, and the whole tribe fled, sailed down the Red
Sea and African coast, and established themselves as traders in the Sea
of India. First of all, Socotra seems to have been their mart and
capital, but before the end of the tenth century they had founded
merchant colonies at Melinda, Mombasa, and Mozambique, which, in their
turn, led to settlements on the opposite coasts of Asia. Thus the trade
of the Indian Ocean was secured for Islam, the first Moslem settlements
arose in Malabar, and when the Portuguese broke into this _mare
clausum_, in 1497-8, they found a belt of "Moorish" coast towns, from