ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the letters of Major Alexander Gordon Laing to Hanmer Warrington and to James Bandinel. Sheikh Babani of Ghadames was in charge of Gordon Laing's caravan to Tuat and beyond. In Ghadames, where there was no lack of merchants familiar with the Sudan, the fruits of his enquiries led him again to revise his opinion on the probable solution to the problem he had set out to solve. The people of Ghadames had rebelled in 1810 and had not yet forgotten the crippling fine of 20,000 mithqals of gold and 20,000 mahbubs they had been forced to pay to Yusuf. The town of Ghadames, which has changed little since Laing's day, appears to be composed of houses piled on top of each other to which the only access is by the seemingly subterranean tunnels running beneath them. This curious form of town-planning who found it very difficult to take such a town by surprise or by storm.
