or houses; they live in tents or cottages made of straw or clay, very rarely building with stone.  Their villages, or towns, consist of these huts; yet even of such villages they have but few, because the grandees, the viceroys, and the emperour himself, are always in camp, that they may be prepared, upon the most sudden alarm, to meet every emergence in a country, which is engaged, every year, either in foreign wars or intestine commotions.  Aethiopia produces very near the same kinds of provision as Portugal, though, by the extreme laziness of the inhabitants, in a much less quantity.  What the ancients imagined of the torrid zone being a part of the world uninhabitable, is so far from being true, that the climate is very temperate.  The blacks have better features than in other countries, and are not without wit and ingenuity.  Their apprehension is quick, and their judgment sound.  There are, in this climate, two harvests in the year; one in winter, which lasts through the months of July, August, and September; the other in the spring.  They have, in the greatest plenty, raisins peaches pomegranates, sugar-canes, and some figs.  Most of these are ripe about lent, which the Abyssins keep with great strictness.  The animals of the country are the lion, the elephant, the rhinoceros, the unicorn, horses, mules, oxen, and cows without number.  They have a very particular custom, which obliges every man, that has a thousand cows, to save every year one day’s milk of all his herd, and make a bath with it for his relations.  This they do so many days in each year, as they have thousands of cattle; so that, to express how rich a man is, they tell you, ‘he bathes so many times.’

“Of the river Nile, which has furnished so much controversy, we have a full and clear description.  It is called, by the natives, Abavi, the Father of Water.  It rises in Sacala, a province of the kingdom of Goiama, the most fertile and agreeable part of the Abyssinian dominions.  On the eastern side of the country, on the declivity of a mountain, whose descent is so easy, that it seems a beautiful plain, is that source of the Nile, which has been sought after, at so much expense and labour.  This spring, or rather these two springs, are two holes, each about two feet diameter, a stone’s cast distant from each other.  One of them is about five feet and a half in depth.  Lobo was not able to sink his plummet lower, perhaps, because it was stopped by roots, the whole place being full of trees.  A line of ten feet did not reach the bottom of the other.  These springs are supposed, by the Abyssins, to be the vents of a great subterraneous lake.  At a small distance to the south, is a village called Guix, through which you ascend to the top of the mountain, where there is a little hill, which the idolatrous Agaci hold in great veneration.  Their priest calls them together to this place once a year; and every one sacrifices a cow, or more, according to the different degrees of wealth and devotion.  Hence we have sufficient proof, that these nations always paid adoration to the deity of this famous river.