Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/282

 places, and opened to the travellers a view of the tremendous abyss below, which few persons could look upon without giddiness. Here they were compelled to unload their baggage, and by slow degrees crawl up the hill, carrying it a little at a time on their shoulders round those chasms which intersected the road. The acclivity became steeper, the paths narrower, and the breaches more frequent as they ascended. Scarcely were their mules, though unloaded, able to scramble up, and fell perpetually. To enhance their difficulty and danger, large droves of cattle were descending, which, as they came crowding down the mountain, threatened to push their whole party into the gulf. However, after vast toil they at length succeeded in reaching the small plain near the summit, where both man and beast halted simultaneously, perfectly exhausted with fatigue.

The air on Lamalmon was pleasant and temperate, and their appetite, spirits, and cheerfulness, which the sultry poisonous atmosphere of the Red Sea coasts had put to flight, returned. Next morning they ascended the remainder of the mountain, which was less steep and difficult than the preceding portion, and found that the top, which seemed pointed from below, spread into a large plain, part in pasture, but more bearing grain. It is full of springs, and seems, says Bruce, "to be the great reservoir from whence arise most of the rivers that water this part of Abyssinia. A multitude of streams issue from the very summit in all directions; the springs boil out from the earth in large quantities, capable of turning a mill. They plough, sow, and reap here at all seasons; and the husbandman must blame his own indolence, and not the soil, if he has not three harvests. We saw in one place people busy cutting down wheat; immediately next to it others at the plough, and the adjoining field had green corn in the ear. A little farther it was not an inch above the ground."