Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 3.djvu/204

182 this observation, Taguzait, or Guza, though really the base of Lamalmon, is not a quarter of a mile high.

minutes before nine o'clock we pitched our tent on a small plain called Dippebaha, on the top of the mountain, above a hundred yards from a spring, which scarcely was abundant enough to supply us with water, in quality as indifferent as it was scanty. The plain bore strong marks of the excessive heat of the sun, being full of cracks and chasms, and the grass burnt to powder. There are three small villages so near each other that they may be said to compose one. Near them is the church of St George, on the top of a small hill to the eastward, surrounded with large trees.

passing the Tacazzé we had been in a very wild country, left so, for what I know, by nature, at least now lately rendered more so by being the theatre of civil war. The whole was one wilderness without inhabitants, unless at Addergey. The plain of Dippebaha had nothing of this appearance; it was full of grass, and interspersed with flowering shrubs, jessamin, and roses, several kinds of which were beautiful, but only one fragrant. The air was very fresh and pleasant; and a great number of people, passing to and fro, animated the scene.

met this day several monks and nuns of Waldubba, I should say pairs, for they were two and two together. They said they had been at the market of Dobarké on the side of Lamalmon, just above Dippebaha. Both men and women, but especially the latter, had large burdens of provisions an their shoulders, bought that day, as they