Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 3.djvu/104

84 men or beasts near it with great force and fierceness, so that I was obliged to stab it with a bayonet. It was of a dirty white; only the head and upper part of its wings were of a light brown.

the 22d, at eight in the morning, we left our station on the top of Taranta, and soon after began to descend on the side of Tigré through a road the most broken and uneven that ever I had seen, always excepting the ascent of Taranta. After this we began to mount a small hill, from which we had a distinct view of Dixan.

cedar-trees, so tall and beautiful on the top of Taranta, and also on the east side, were greatly degenerated when, we came to the west, and mostly turned into small shrubs and scraggy bushes. We pitched our tent near some marshy ground for the sake of water, at three quarters past ten, but it was very bad, having been, for several weeks, stagnant. We saw here the people busy at their wheat harvest; others, who had finished theirs, were treading it out with cows or bullocks. They make no use of their straw; sometimes they burn it, and sometimes leave it on the spot to rot.

set out from this about ten minutes after three, descending gently through a better road than we had hitherto seen. At half past four in the evening, on the 22d of November, we came to Dixan. Halai was the first village, so is this the first town in Abyssinia, on the side of Taranta. Dixan is built on the top of a hill, perfectly in form of a sugar loaf; a deep valley surrounds it everywhere like a