Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 1.djvu/219

Rh tainment. Indeed there is very little use for this institution in Upper Egypt, as long as rich Arabs are there, much more charitable and humane to stranger Christians than the Monks.

is in a large and cultivated plain. It is nine miles over to the foot of the mountains, all sown with wheat. There are, likewise, plantions of sugar canes. The town, as they said, contains above 10,000 people, but I have no doubt this computation is rather exaggerated.

waited upon the Shekh Hamam; who was a big, tall, handsome man; I apprehend not far from sixty. He was dressed in a large fox-skin pelisse over the rest of his cloaths, and had a yellow India shawl wrapt about his head, like a turban. He received me with great politeness and condesension, made me sit down by him, and asked me more about Cairo than about Europe.

Rais had told him our adventure with the saint, at which he laughed very heartily, saying, I was a wise man. and a man of conduct. To me he only said, "they are bad people at Dendera;" to which I answered, "there were very few places in the world in which there were not some bad." He replied, "Your observation is true, but there they are all bad; rest yourselves however here, it is a quiet place; though there are still some even in this place not quite so good as they ought to be."

Shekh was a man of immense riches, and, little by little, had united in his own person, all the separate districts