Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 1.djvu/246

 enclosures are kept at a uniform heat, so as to hasten the secretion, which amounts to from about eighty to one hundred grammes every fourth day. The animals are fed on an exclusively flesh diet, consisting of choice morsels prepared in butter. To prevent the evil eye, strangers are forbidden to enter these preserves.

Like those of Gondar, the civilised Christian peoples of Shoa are mainly Amharinians, but they are separated from the body of the nation by lofty mountains. Whilst most of the Abyssinians live on the lands sloping towards the Blue Nile, those of Shoa occupy more especially the watershed of the Awash, a tributary of the Red Sea. Moreover, a large part of the plateau bounding Shoa towards the north is inhabited by peoples of Gulla origin. Hence, from an ethnological point of view, Shoa consists of a sort of isolated promontory. The Abyssinians, properly so called, are here surrounded by the Ilm-Ormas, by far the most numerous, but divided into several tribes, the alliances between which are broken or formed according either to momentous interests or the caprices of the chiefs. The customs of the Shoa peoples are the same as those of the Amharinians, with this difference, that the entire population is more abjectly subject to the king's will. There are few slaves properly so called, and the Christians are forbidden to sell the Negroes, although they themselves are little better than slaves whose property and lives are at the disposition of their masters. A few Felasha or Fenja communities are scattered throughout Shoa, and amongst these Abyssinian Jews is usually classed the sect of the Tabiban, which possesses a monastery in the immediate vicinity of xlnkober, in the midst of the Eraamret forests. They are greatly respected and feared by the surrounding peoples as wizards.

As in Abyssinia properly so-called, the Shoa Mahommedans have been forcibly converted. They were formerly very numerous, and the name of Jiberti, by which they are known throughout Abyssinia, is a reminiscence of their holy city of Jabarta in Ifat, which has since disappeared. Foreigners, more especially French and Italians, are relatively numerous in Shoa, and since the visits of Rochet, Lefebvre, Harris, Combes and Tamisier, Isenberg and Krapf, hundreds of missionaries, artisans, and merchants have presented themselves in the nomad court of the successors of Sehla Sellasieh; but hitherto the natives have benefited little by the European inventions. Powder and arms manufactories and mills have not succeeded, and the concessions made to strangers for the building of railways is merely a proof that the king of Shoa is desirous of entering into direct relations with his powerful foreign allies.

Scientific voyages of discovery in the Galla country, interrupted since that of the missionary Fernandez in the seventeenth century till the time of Antoine d'Abbadie, are also becoming more frequent, thanks to the extension of the Abyssinian power into these countries; but it is still a dangerous undertaking, and of the two Italians, Chiarini and Cecchi, who recently penetrated as far as Bongo, one succumbed to fatigue, whilst the other was with difficulty saved by the intervention of the chief of