382 OF STRANGE RUMOURS 



Nothing can be positively asserted ; but I 

 believe, myself, that we are on the eve of a most 

 interesting ethnological and geographical discovery, 

 that will at once afford a solution to all the strange 

 and improbable accounts which have reached us 

 respecting the inhabitants of Central Africa. What 

 we hear of dwarfs, cannibals, and communities of 

 monkeys, may, perhaps, prove to be merely a 

 muddied stream of information, conveyed to us 

 through the medium of ignorant and barbarous 

 tribes ; but which may have a foundation of an 

 unexpected character, in the existence of a nation 

 in this situation ; which, almost physically separated 

 from the rest of the world by impassable deserts 

 and unnavigable rivers, has continued in its original 

 integrity that perfect condition of society which, 

 once general, then almost extinguished, evidently 

 preceded the barbarism from which the present 



"that eats man," meaning of course, that the man being a 

 Mahomedan, was very wicked for wearing any part of such a 

 corpse-eating beast about his person. I met this very slave- 

 merchant, who had thus expressed himself, some weeks afterwards, 

 in the Red Sea, and as we were together on board the same vessel 

 for several days, our conversation was frequently upon Abyssinian 

 matters. I once recalled the scene of the so-called man-eater, 

 and he was astonished, certainly, when I told him it was reported 

 that the Dankalli were cannibals, and that the picture of this very 

 Galayla Muditu was taken with that idea, as a portrait of a man- 

 eater. Dankalli Mahomed, as he was then called, never came 

 afterwards to sit with me and my friend, Padre Antonio Foggart, 

 but he went through the process of sawing his throat, as if cutting 

 it with a knife, to intimate how any cannibal would be punished if 

 he appeared in their country. 



