At Roo we left the direct road which leads to Buré, the residence of the governor of Damot, towards which place the route of the army was directed; so I took leave, as I hoped, for ever of my brethren the Galla, but still continued to drive the horse before me. We turned our face now directly upon the fountains of the Nile, which lay S. E. by S. according to the compass. At a quarter before noon we saw the high sharp-pointed mountain of Temhua, standing single in the form of a cone, at about 18 miles distance, and behind this the mountain of Banja, the place where Fasil almost exterminated the Agows in a battle soon after his return to Buré, and to revenge which the king’s last fatal campaign was undertaken in Maitsha, terminated by his retreat to Tigrè.
Here Strates, whilst amusing himself in the wood in search of new birds and beasts for our collection of natural history, fired his gun at one of the former, distinguished by the beauty and variety of its plumage. I stopt to make a rough sketch of it, which might be finished at more leisure: this was scarcely done, and we again moving forwards on our journey, when we heard a confusion of shrill, barbarous cries, and presently saw a number of horsemen pouring down upon us, with their lances lifted up in a posture ready to attack us immediately. The ground was woody and uneven, so they could not make the speed they seemed to desire, and we had just time to put ourselves upon our defence with our firelocks, musquets, and blunderbusses in our hands, behind our baggage. Woldo ran several paces towards them, knowing them by the cry to be friends, even before he had seen them, which was, Fasil ali, Fasil ali—there is none but Fasil that commands here. Upon seeing us without any marks of discomposure, they all stopt with Woldo, and by him we learned that this was the party we had passed commanded by the Lamb, who, after we had left him, had heard that five Agow horsemen had passed between the army and his party, and from the shot he had feared they might have attempted something against us, and he had thereupon come to our assistance with all the speed possible.
Thus did we see that this man, who, according to our ideas, seemed in understanding inferior to most of the brute creation, had yet, in executing his orders, a discernment, punctuality, activity, and sense of duty, equal to any Christian officer who should have had a like commission; he now appeared to us in a quite different light than when we first had met him; and his inattention, when we were with him, was the more agreeable, as it left us at our entire liberty, without teazing or molesting us, when he could be of no real service, as every Amharic soldier would have done. On the other hand, his alacrity and resolution, in the moment he thought us in danger, exhibited him to our view as having on both occasions just the qualities we could have desired. We now, therefore, shewed him the utmost civility, spread a table-cloth on the ground by the brook, mixed our honey and liquid butter together in a plate, and laid plenty of teff bread beside it. We invited the Lamb to sit down and breakfast with us, which he did, each of us dipping our hand with pieces of bread alternately into the dish which contained the honey; but Strates, whose heart was open, for he felt very gratefully the Lamb’s attention to save him from being murdered by the Agows, pulled out a large piece of raw beef, part of the bullock we killed at Kelti, which he had perfectly cleared from all incumbrance of bones, this he gave to the Lamb, desiring him to divide it among his men, which he did, keeping a very small proportion to himself, and which he ate before us. Drink we had none, but the water of the brook that ran by, for my people had finished all our other liquors at Kelti after I was in bed, when they were taking their leave of Guebra Mariam, Ozoro Esther’s servant.
It was now time to pursue our journey; and, to shew our gratitude for the real service this Lamb intended to have rendered us, I gave him four times the quantity of tobacco he had got before, and so in proportion of every other trifle; all these he took with absolute indifference as formerly, much as if it had been all his own; he expressed no sort of thanks either in his words or in his countenance; only while at breakfast said, that he was very much grieved that it had been but a false alarm, for he heartily desired that some robbers really had attacked us, that he might have shewn us how quickly and dexterously he would have cut them to pieces though there had been a hundred of them. I mentioned to Woldo my obligations to the Lamb for his good wishes, but that things were quite as well as they were; that I had no sort of curiosity for such exhibitions, which I did not however doubt he would have performed most dexterously.
We were now taking leave to proceed on our journey, and my servant folding up the table-cloth, when the Lamb desired to speak to Woldo, and for the first time ventured to make a request, which was a very extraordinary one; he begged that I would give him the table-cloth to cover his head, and keep his face from the sun. I could not help laughing within myself at the idea of preserving that beautiful complexion from sun-burning; but I gave him the cloth very readily, which he accordingly spread upon his head, till it covered half his face; he then got upon his horse and rode quietly away. Before he went, he detached fifteen men, Woldo said he did not know where, but by what he had gathered, and the route they had taken, he was sure that detachment was meant for our service, and to protect us on the right of our route, not having yet sufficiently quieted his own mind about the five Agows that passed between the army and his post the night we were at Kelti; these, however, being poorly mounted and armed, would not have found their account in meddling with us, though we had no wishes to shew our dexterity in destroying them, as our friend the Lamb was so desirous of doing, and we after discovered they were not quite so despicable as they were represented, nor were they Agows. All this passed in much less time than it is told. We were on horseback again in little more than half an hour; our friends were, like us, willing to meet and willing to part, only I ordered Strates to suspend his firing for that day, lest it should procure us another interview, which we by no means courted.
We had halted by the side of a small river which falls into the Assar; and a little before one o’clock we came to the Assar itself. The Assar, as I have already said, is the southern boundary of Aroossi, as Kelti is the northern; and as Aroossi is the southern district of Maitsha on the west side of the Nile, it follows that the Assar is the southern boundary of Maitsha.
On the other side of this river begins the province of Goutto, which, according to the ancient rules of government before Ras Michael destroyed all distinctions, depended on the province of Damot; whereas Maitsha belonged to the office of Betwudet since Fasil had appropriated both to himself by force, as well as the whole country of the Agows, which he had possessed by the same title ever since the battle of Banja: the inhabitants of Goutto are the ancient natives of that country; they are not Galla as those of Maitsha, but much more civilized and better governed. The language of the Agow and the Amharic are the two chiefly spoken in Goutto, though there are distant places towards the Jemma on the side of the Nile, where they speak that of the Falasha likewise. The people in Goutto are richer and better lodged than those of the neighbouring Maitsha; their whole country is full of cattle of the largest size, exceedingly beautiful, and of all the different colours; there are some places likewise where their honey is excellent, equal to any in the country of the Agows, but the greatest quantity of it is of low price and of little esteem, owing to the lupine flowers on which the bees feed, and of which a great quantity covers the whole face of the country; this gives a bitterness to the greatest part of the honey, and occasions, as they believe, vertigo’s, or dizzinesses, to those that eat it: the same would happen with the Agows, did they not take care to eradicate the lupines throughout their whole country.
All this little territory of Aroossi is by much the most pleasant that we had seen in Abyssinia, perhaps it is equal to any thing the east can produce; the whole is finely shaded with acacia-trees, I mean the acacia vera, or the Egyptian thorn, the tree which, in the sultry parts of Africa, produces the gum-arabic. These trees grow seldom above fifteen or sixteen feet high, then flatten and spread wide at the top, and touch each other, while the trunks are far asunder, and under a vertical sun, leave you, many miles together, a free space to walk in a cool, delicious shade. There is scarce any tree but this in Maitsha; all Guanguera and Wainadega are full of them; but in these last-mentioned places, near the capital, where the country grows narrower, being confined between the lake and the mountains, these trees are more in the way of the march of armies, and are thinner, as being constantly cut down for fuel, and never replanted, or suffered to replace themselves, which they otherwise would do, and cover the whole face of the country, as once apparently they did. The ground below those trees, all throughout Aroossi, is thick covered with lupines, almost to the exclusion of every other flower; wild oats also grow up here spontaneously to a prodigious height and size, capable often of concealing both the horse and his rider, and some of the stalks being little less than an inch in circumference. They have, when ripe, the appearance of small canes. The inhabitants make no sort of use of this grain in any period of its growth: the uppermost thin hulk of it is beautifully variegated with a changeable purple colour; the taste is perfectly good. I often made the meal into cakes in remembrance of Scotland.
The Abyssinians never could relish these cakes, which they said were bitter, and burnt their stomachs, as also made them thirsty. I do, however, believe this is the oat in its original state, and that it is degenerated everywhere with us. The soil of this country is a fine black mould, in appearance like to that which composes our gardens. The oat seems to delight in a moist, watery soil; and, as no underwood grows under the shadow of the trees, the plough passes without interruption. As there is likewise no iron in their plough, (for is it all composed of wood) the furrow is a very slight one, nor does the plough reach deep enough to be entangled with the roots of trees; but it is the north part of Maitsha, however, that is chiefly in culture; south of the Kelti all is pasture; a large number of horses is bred here yearly, for it is the custom among the Galla to be all horsemen or graziers.
All Aroossi is finely watered with small streams, though the Assar is the largest river we had seen except the Nile; it was about 170 yards broad and two feet deep, running over a bed of large stones; though generally through a flat and level country, it is very rapid, and after much rain scarcely passable, owing to the height of its source in the mountains of the Agows; its course, where we forded it, is from south to north, but it soon turns to the north-east, and, after flowing five or six miles, joins the Nile and loses itself in that river.