190 NORTH-EAST AFRICA. 



enclosures are kept at a uniform heat, so as to hasten the secretion, which amounts 

 to from about eighty to one hundred grammes every fourth day. The animals 

 are fed on an exclusively flesh diet, consisting of choice morsels prepared in 

 butter. To prevent the evil eye, strangers are forbidden to enter these preserves. 



Inhabitants of Shoa. 



Like those of Goudar, the civilised Christian peoples of Shoa are mainly 

 .Ajnharinians, but they are separated from the body of the nation by lofty 

 mountains. Whilst most of the Abyssinians live on the lands sloping towards 

 the Blue Nile, those of Shoa occupy more especially the watershed of the 

 Awash, a tributary of the Red Sea. Moreover, a large part of the plateau 

 bounding Shoa towards the north is inhabited by peoples of Galla origin. Hence, 

 from an ethnological point of view, Shoa consists of a sort of isolated promontory. 

 The Abyssinians, properly so called, are here surrounded by the Ilm-Ormas, by far 

 the most numerous, but divided into several tribes, the alliances between which 

 are broken or formed according either to momentous interests or the caprices of 

 the chiefs. The customs of the Shoa peoples are the same as those of the Amhari- 

 nians, with this difference, that the entire population is more abjectly subject to the 

 king's will. There are few slaves properly so called, and the Christians are for- 

 bidden to sell the Negroes, although they themselves are little better than slaves 

 whose property and lives are at the disposition of their masters. A few Felasha or 

 Fenja communities are scattered throughout Shoa, and amongst these Abj^ssinian 

 Jews is usually classed the sect of the Tabiban, which possesses a monastery in the 

 immediate vicinity of Ankober, in the midst of the Emamret forests. They are 

 greatly respected and feared by the surrounding peoples as wizards. 



As in Abyssinia properly so-called, the Shoa Mahommedans have been forcibly 

 converted. They were formerly very numerous, and the name of Jiberti, by 

 which they are known throughout Abyssinia, is a reminiscence of their holy city 

 of Jabarta in Ifat, which has since disappeared. Foreigners, more especially 

 French and Italians, are relatively numerous in Shoa, and since the visits of 

 Rochet, Lefebvre, Harris, Combes and Tamisier, Isenberg and Krapf, hundreds of 

 missionaries, artisans, and merchants have presented themselves in the nomad court 

 of the successors of Sehla Sellasieh ; but hitherto the natives have benefited little 

 by the European inventions. Powder and arms manufactories and mills have not 

 succeeded, and the concessions made to strangers for the building of railways is 

 merely a proof that the king of Shoa is desirous of entering into direct relations 

 with his powerful foreign allies. 



Scientific voyages of discovery in the Galla country, interrupted since that of the 

 missionary Fernandez in the seventeenth century till the time of Antoine d'Abbadie, 

 are also becoming more frequent, thanks to the extension of the Abyssinian power 

 into these countries ; but it is still a dangerous undertaking, and of the two Italians, 

 Chiarini and Cecchi, who recently penetrated as far as Bongo, one succumbed to 

 fatigue, whilst the other was with difi&culty saved by the intervention of the chief of 



