The brutish hyæna was not so to be deterred. I shot one of them dead on the night of the 31st of January, and, on the 2d of February, I fired at another so near, that I was confident of killing him. Whether the balls had fallen out, or that I had really missed him with the first barrel, I know not, but he gave a snarl and a kind of bark upon the first shot, advancing directly upon me as if unhurt. The second shot, however, took place, and laid him without motion on the ground. Yasine and his men killed another with a pike; and such was their determined coolness, that they stalked round about us with the familiarity of a dog, or any other domestic animal brought up with man.
But we were still more incommoded by a lesser animal, a large, black ant, little less than an inch long, which, coming out from under the ground, demolished our carpets, which they cut all into shreds, and part of the lining of our tent likewise, and every bag or sack they could find. We had first seen them in great numbers at Angari, but here they were intolerable. Their bite causes a considerable inflammation, and the pain is greater than that which arises from the bite of a scorpion; they are called gundan.
On the 1st of February the Shum sent his people to value, as he said, our merchandise, that we might pay custom. Many of the Moors, in our caravan, had left us to go a near way to Hauza. We had at most five or six asses, including those belonging to Yasine. I humoured them so far as to open the cases where were the telescopes and quadrant, or, indeed, rather shewed them open, as they were not shut from the observation I had been making. They could only wonder at things they had never before seen.
On the 2d of February the Shum came himself, and a violent altercation ensued. He insisted upon Michael’s defeat: I told him the contrary news were true, and begged him to beware lest it should be told to the Ras upon his return that he had propagated such a falsehood. I told him also we had advice that the Ras’s servants were now waiting for us at Lamalmon, and insisted upon his suffering us to depart. On the other hand, he threatened to send us to Ayto Tesfos. I answered, “Ayto Tesfos was a friend to Ayto Aylo, under whose protection I was, and a servant to the Iteghé, and was likelier to punish him for using me ill, than to approve of it, but that I would not suffer him to send me either to Ayto Tesfos, or an inch out of the road in which I was going.” He said, “That I was mad;” and held a consultation with his people for about half an hour, after which he came in again, seemingly quite another man, and said, he would dispatch us on the morrow, which was the 3d, and would send us that evening some provisions. And, indeed, we now began to be in need, having only flour barely sufficient to make bread for one meal next day. The miserable village on the clift had nothing to barter with us; and none from the five villages about the Shum had come near us, probably by his order. As he had softened his tone, so did I mine. I gave him a small present, and he went away repeating his promises. But all that evening passed without provision, and all next day without his coming, so we got every thing ready for our departure. Our supper did not prevent our sleeping, as all our provision was gone, and we had tasted nothing all that day since our breakfast.
The country of the Shangalla lies forty miles N. N. W. of this, or rather more westerly. All this district from the Tacazzé is called, in the language of Tigré, Salent, and Talent in Amharic. This probably arises from the name being originally spelled with (Tz), which has occasioned the difference, the one language omitting the first letter, the other the second.
At Addergey, the 31st day of January, at noon, I observed the meridian altitude of the sun, and, at night, the passage of seven different stars over the meridian, by a medium of all which, I found that the latitude of Addergey is 13° 24´ 56´´ North. And on the morning of the 1st of February, at the same place, I observed an immersion of the second satellite of Jupiter, by which I concluded the longitude of Addergey to be 37° 57´ east of the meridian of Greenwich.
On the 4th of February, at half past nine in the morning, we left Addergey: hunger pressing us, we were prepared to do it earlier, and for this we had been up since five in the morning; but our loss of a mule obliged us, when we packed up our tent, to arrange our baggage differently. While employed at making ready for our departure, which was just in the dawn of day, a hyæna, unseen by any of us, fastened upon one of Yasine’s asses, and had almost pulled his tail away. I was busied at gathering the tent-pins into a sack, and had placed my musket and bayonet ready against a tree, as it is at that hour, and the close of the evening, you are always to be on guard against banditti. A boy, who was servant to Yasine, saw the hyæna first, and flew to my musket. Yasine was disjoining the poles of the tent, and, having one half of the largest in his hand, he ran to the assistance of his ass, and in that moment the musket went off, luckily charged with only one ball, which gave Yasine a flesh wound between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. The boy instantly threw down the musket, which had terrified the hyæna and made him let go the ass; but he stood ready to fight Yasine, who, not amusing himself with the choice of weapons, gave him so rude a blow with the tent-pole upon his head, that it felled him to the ground; others, with pikes, put an end to his life.
We were then obliged to turn our cares towards the wounded. Yasine’s wound was soon seen to be a trifle; besides, he was a man not easily alarmed on such occasions. But the poor ass was not so easily comforted. The stump remained, the tail hanging by a piece of it, which we were obliged to cut off. The next operation was actual cautery; but, as we had made no bread for breakfast, our fire had been early out. We, therefore, were obliged to tie the stump round with whip-cord, till we could get fire enough to heat an iron.
What sufficiently marked the voracity of these beasts, the hyænas, was, that the bodies of their dead companions, which we hauled a long way from us, and left there, were almost entirely eaten by the survivors the next morning; and I then observed, for the first time, that the hyæna of this country was a different species from those I had seen in Europe, which had been brought from Asia or America.