Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 3.djvu/319

Rh sustenance, but their trade, their tribute to the king, and the maintenance of a great part of the capital, depends upon honey and butter, the common food of the better sort of people when they do not eat flesh; it composes their drink also in mead or hydromel. Now, this country, when uncultivated, naturally produces lupines, and the blossoms of these becoming food for the bees, gives the honey such a bitterness that no person will eat it, or use it any way in food or for drink.—After the king had bestowed the village of Geesh upon me, though with the consent of Fasil its governor, that egregious shuffler, to make the present of no use to me, sent me, indeed, the tribute of the honey in very large jars but it all tasted so much of the lupines that it was of no earthly use whatever. Their constant attention is to weed out this bitter plant; and, when any of those countries are desolated by war, we may expect a large crop of lupines immediately to follow, and, for a time, plenty of bad honey in consequence. It is, then, this destructive bean that Pythagoras, who, it is said, ate no flesh, regarded as an object of detestation; it was equally so among the Abyssinians and Egyptians for the same reason. Both nations, moreover, have an aversion to hogs flesh, and both avoid the touch of dogs.

is here I propose to take notice of an unnatural custom which prevails universally in Abyssinia, and which in early ages seems to have been common to the whole world. I did not think that any person of moderate knowledge in profane learning could have been ignorant of this remarkable custom among the nations of the east. But what still more surprised me is the least pardonable part of the whole, was the ignorance of part of the law of God, the earliest