Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 2.djvu/28

12, though, when transported to India, they have constantly turned out men of confidence and trust, and the best troops those eastern nations have.

is a sixth, still less in number than even these, and not known on this Continent till a few years before. These were the Turks who came from Greece and Syria, and who were under Selim, and Soliman his son, the instruments of the conquest of Egypt and Arabia; small garrisons of whom were everywhere left by the Turks in all the fortresses and considerable towns they conquered. They are an hereditary kind of militia, who, marrying each others daughters, or with the women of the country, continue from father to son to receive from Constantinople the same pay their forefathers had from Selim. These, though degenerate in figure and manners into an exact resemblance to the natives of the countries in which they since lived, do still continue to maintain their superiority by a constant skill and attention to fire-arms, which were, at the time of their first appearance here, little known or in use among either Abyssinians or Arabians, and the means of first establishing this preference.

has been already observed, that the Mahometan Moors and Arabs possessed all the low country on the Indian Ocean, and opposite to Arabia Felix; and being, by their religion, obliged to go in pilgrimage to Mecca, as also by their sole profession, which was trade, they became, by consequence, the only carriers and directors of the commerce of Abyssinia. All the country to the east and north of Shoa was possessed and commanded chiefly by Mahometan merchants