Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 2.djvu/583

Rh of the mountains of Abyssinia, where every certain number of soldiers had small farms allowed them for that purpose by government; but still they could never bring up a crop in the Mazaga; and the progress of the miscarriage was this: Before the month of May all that black earth was rent into great chasms, trode into dust, and ventilated with hot winds, so as to be a perfect caput mortuum, incapable of any vegetation. Upon the first sprinkling of rain the chasms are filled up, and the whole country resembles dry garden-mould newly dug up. As the sun advances the rains increase; there is no time to be lost now; this is the season for sowing; let us suppose wheat. In one night's time, while the wheat is swelling in the ground, up grows an immense quantity of indigenous natural grass, that, having sowed itself last year, has lain ever since in a natural matrix, ready to start at the most convenient season. Before the wheat, or any grain soever can appear, this grass has shot up so high and so thick as absolutely to choke it. Suppose it was possible to hoe or weed it, the grass will again overtop the grain before it is an inch from the ground. Say it could be again hoed or cleared, by this time the rains are so continual, the black earth becomes a perfect mire. The rain increases, and the grain rots without producing any crop.

same happens to millet, or Indian corn; the rain rots the plant which is thrown down by the wind. It is equally destroyed if sown at the end of the rains; the grass grows up, wherever the ground is cleared, in a greater proportion, if possible, than in the beginning of the year; and the rain ceasing abruptly, and the sun beginning to be intensely hot the very day it passes the zenith, the earth is reduced to an