102 MY GEOGRAPHICAL GUIDE. 



none know better the value of a straightforward 

 tale to secure confidence and good opinion. Pro- 

 found judges of human nature from their habits 

 and occupation, no one speaks truth like a clever 

 cheating slave-dealer when it will suit his purpose. 

 One of them in particular, however, I chose to be 

 my geographical instructor, — an old man named 

 Ibrahim, a native of the city of Hurrah, who 

 possessed every mental requisite to have been 

 recognised as a first rate traveller, had he only 

 possessed opportunities to record the observations 

 he had made upon men and countries that he had 

 visited.* 



Ibrahim had evidently amused himself during 

 his journeys into slave districts by examining the 

 characters of the very different people with whom 

 he came in contact, and the striking contrasts he 

 observed had led his attentive mind to the con- 

 sideration of the probable causes for the anomalies 

 he witnessed of the black Shankalli, the red 

 Amhara, and the yellow Gonga, all inhabiting a 

 plateau of limited extent. In the course of his long 



* This individual figures in Major Harris's " Highland of 

 Ethiopia" as Hadjji Mahomed ; and the whole occurrence there 

 related happened during the journey to the coast in 1843. It is 

 difficult, therefore, to understand how it could be recorded as an 

 incident of a journey in 1841, and in an account stated to have been 

 written in the heart of Abyssinia. Numerous other instances of 

 this kind of interpolation of adventure could be pointed out which 

 would be immaterial, only, as I shall probably allude to the same 

 circumstances myself, of course I am anxious not to be supposed 

 to borrow them from the work of a cotemporary. 



