Page:A voyage to Abyssinia (Salt).djvu/228

 it may possibly arise from some ancient superstition or veneration of the waters, connected with the history of the Nile. An idea strongly confirmed by the circumstance of this people always selecting the banks of the great branches of this river for its residence.

On the 9th of October Mr. Pearce crossed the Tacazze at a ford, where the river is nearly three hundred yards in breadth, which brought him into the province of Samen, whence, after travelling about four miles up a steep ascent, he arrived at the village of Guinsa. On his road to that place he had fallen in with a wandering monk, named Dofter Asko, who proposed, after a short conversation, to join his party, to which Mr. Pearce, as he found him an agreeable companion, willingly consented. He proved to be a man of lively humour, who had acquired a more than ordinary share of the learning of the country, and possessing great natural talents, with an extraordinary degree of craftiness, made a practice of travelling from place to place, without any other object in view, than that of preying on the credulity of the inhabitants. On the present occasion he took upon himself, at Guinsa, to represent Mr. Pearce as a brother of the late Abuna Marcorius, and the son of the Patriarch of Alexandria; an artifice by which the country people became so completely his dupes, that they continually brought in presents of goats, honey, milk, and other articles of which the party stood in need, during the five days that they stayed in the place.

To his other accomplishments Dofter Asko also united that of a physician, and, when the sick applied for relief, he wrote a few characters on bits of parchment, which not only were supposed to cure the maladies under which they laboured, but likewise to act as charms against the agency of evil spirits. Agreeably to the system of quackery established throughout the world, this Abyssinian Katterfelto undertook also the cure of barrenness, and when consulted on these matters, an accommodating screen was affectedly put up, to give an air of propriety to the transaction, which on such occasions is so absolutely necessary to ensure the success of an empiric. He had gained by some means possession of a Latin book, which he professed to read, and pretended