[39]Here is one among many instances of tacit submission to the authority of the head of a tribe, though unfurnished with any express deputation from the government.
[40]Sultan Teraub used always to reside at Rîl, but the present monarch, or usurper, is induced by his fears to wander from place to place. The first place I saw him at was Heglig; the next was Tini; the third was Tendelti, where he passed about a year.
[41]The Fûrians, it may be remarked, distinguish the South part of their empire by this term, as well as the Egyptians.
[42]On the East of Fûr there is a particular tribe of Arabs, who curl their hair, as it were, in a bushy wig, resembling that of the antient figures in the ruins of Persepolis. It is probable that many fragments of antient nations may be found in the interior of Africa. Carthaginians expelled by the Romans, Vandals by Belisarius, &c. &c.
[43]In the market held at Cobbé, there are slaughtered ordinarily from ten to fifteen oxen, and from forty to sixty sheep; but all the villages, six or eight miles round, are thence supplied.
It is usual for the people of the town to lay in their annual stock of grain when cheapest, which is commonly about the month of December. At that time two, sometimes three mids (pecks) of millet (Dokn) may be had for a string of beads, worth about one penny sterling in Kahira.
[44]Fruit of India.
[45]Season of the rains.
[46]I remember to have borrowed, while at Damascus, a small quarto volume, written in easy Arabic, without either title or conclusion, which contained a kind of history of the progress of the (ashab) early propagators of Mohammedism, and which enumerated, if I mistake not, a tribe under the denomination of Fûr فور among their adversaries, after the taking of Bahnesé in Middle Egypt, and their consequent invasion of the more Southern provinces.
[47]If but a small quantity of rain fall, the agricultors are reduced to great distress; and it happened, about seven years before my arrival, that many people were obliged to eat the young branches of trees pounded in a mortar.