Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 4.djvu/497

Rh their very infancy. This being the case, this climate must have undergone a strange revolution, as Sennaar is but a small distance from where the ancients place the Macrobii, a nation so called from the remarkable length of their lives. But perhaps these were mountaineers from the frontiers of Kuara, being described as having gold in their territory, and are the race now called Galla. It is very remarkable, that, though they are Mahometans, they are so brutal, not to say indelicate, with regard to their women, that they sell their slaves after having lived with, and even had children by them. The king himself it is said, is often guilty of this unnatural practice, utterly unknown in any other Mahometan country.

in his reign the king is obliged, with his own hand, to plow and sow a piece of land. From this operation he is called Baady, the countryman or peasant; it is a name common to the whole race of kings, as Cæsar was among the Romans, though they have generally another name peculiar to each person, and this not attended to has occasioned confusion in the narrative given by strangers writing concerning them.

horse, mule, ass, or any beast of burden, will breed, or even live at Sennaar, or many miles about it. Poultry does not live there. Neither dog nor cat, sheep nor bullock, can be preserved a season there. They must go all, every half year, to the sands. Though all possible care be taken of them, they die in every place where the fat earth is about the town during the first season of the rains. Two greyhounds which I brought from Atbara, and the mules which