[515] English and Styrian razors are also largely imported.
[516] Chap. viii.
[517] Athenæus (i. 27) speaks of the Thracian dance in arms, ‘men jumping up very high with light springs, and using Swords.’ At last one of them strikes another, so that it seemed to everyone that the man was wounded.
[518] Marocco, page 66 (Milano, Treves, 1876).
[519] Hence the ardent desire of the Abyssinians, when first visited by Europeans, to obtain civilised Swords. Father F. Alvarez (Hakluyt Soc. 1881), who lived in Abyssinia between 1520 and 1527, shows the Barnagais (Bahr-Negush, or sea-ruler) begging the Portuguese ambassador for his rich Sword and ornaments, ‘as the great lords have few Swords’ (chap. xxx.). Prester John (the Negush or Emperor) displays ‘five bundles of short Swords with silver hilts,’ taken from the Moslems (chap. cxiii.). The King of Portugal sends as a present to Prester John ‘first a gold Sword with a rich hilt,’ and a good fencer, Estevam Pallarte.
[520] Anthrop. Coll. p. 184.
[521] Gorilla-land, p. 227.
[522] Quenching in oil or grease instead of water is a common practice. The workman still ‘adds to the water a thin cake of grease, or pours over it hot oil, through which the steel must pass before it enters the water, for by these means it is prevented from acquiring cracks and flaws.’ (Beckmann, loc. cit. ii. 330.)
[523] Specimens of all these weapons are in the Lane-Fox Collection, Nos. 1088 to 1100.
[524] The Cataracts of the Congo, p. 234.