Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 3.djvu/88

68 along with them, descending from the tops of the high mountains of Habesh, with their flocks to pasture, on the plains below near the sea, upon grass that grows up in the months of October and November, when they have already consumed what grew in the opposite season on the other side of the mountains.

change of domicil gives them a propensity to thieving and violence, though otherwise a cowardly tribe. It is a proverb in Abyssinia, "Beware of men that drink two "waters," meaning these, and all the tribes of Shepherds, who were in search of pasture, and who have lain under the same imputation from the remotest antiquity.

Shiho were once very numerous; but, like all these nations having communication with Masuah, have suffered much by the ravages of the small-pox. The Shiho are the blackest of the tribes bordering upon the Red Sea. They were all clothed; their women in coarse cotton shifts reaching down to their ancles, girt about the middle with a leather belt, and having very large sleeves; the men in short cotton breeches reaching to the middle of their thighs, and a goat's skin cross their shoulders. They have neither tents nor cottages, but either live in caves in the mountains under trees, or in small conical huts built with a thick grass like reeds.

party consisted of about fifty men, and, I suppose, not more than thirty women; from which it seemed probable the Shiho are Monogam, as afterwards, indeed, I knew them to be. Each of them had a lance in his hand, and a knife at the girdle which kept up the breeches. They