Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 1.djvu/463

Rh you drink it is more nauseous than the taste; yet one of these cisterns, cleaned and shut up with a door, might afford them wholesome sweet water all the year over.

the rains fall, a prodigious quantity of grass immediately springs up; and the goats give the inhabitants milk, which in winter is the principal part of their subsistence, for they neither plow nor sow. All their employment is to work the vessels which trade to the different parts of the coast. One half of the inhabitants is constantly on the Arabian side, and by their labour is enabled to furnilh with * dora, and other provisions, the other half who stay at home; and when their time is expired, they are relieved by the other half, and supplied with necessaries in their turn. But the sustenance of the poorer sort is entirely shell and other fish. Their wives and daughters are very bold, and expert fisher-women. Several of them, entirely naked, swam off to our vessel before we came to an anchor, begging handfuls of wheat, rice, or dora. They are very importunate and sturdy beggars, and not easily put off with denials. These miserable people, who live in the villages not frequented by barks from Arabia, arc sometimes a whole year without tasting bread. Yet such is the attachment to the place of their nativity, they prefer living in this bare, barren, parched spot, almost in want of necessaries of every kind, especially of these essential ones, bread and water, to those pleasant and plentiful countries on both sides of them. This preference we must not call strange, for it is universal: A strong attachment to our native

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 * Millet, or Indian corn.