664 Report on Shoa [No. 140. 



131. The attending dance of the priesthood is any thing but a 

 relief to the picture ; the most uncouth attitudes and the most ungrace- 

 ful positions are selected, whilst the beard and the crutch and the 

 aged face are but in ill keeping with the mountebank jumps and 

 capers performed upon the occasion. During the merry-makings in 

 the palace and in the houses of the chiefs, the dance is also not dis- 

 tinguished by any less ludicrous effects, the votary seemingly enacting 

 the part of a gander justly infuriated at the discordant sound of the 

 music, shaking his wings and hissing in contempt of the fiddler's 

 art, whilst he shuffles about in a crouching position, and makes sundry 

 furious rushings and startings to possess himself of the obnoxious 

 instrument. 



132. The language of savages is generally highly metaphorical, 

 and they are not satisfied unless action be embodied to the eye by 

 color and character and form brought more vividly to the mind by 

 the assistance of allegory, but this nation is equally unsuccessful in 

 the personification of the spiritual, as in the abstract language of 

 Theology. 



The king and his chief singer form the only exceptions, the court 

 language being sparingly sprinkled with a few flowery speeches, and 

 the singer sometimes breaking out into crude allegorical sentences. 

 " Why should the Father of song be restrained from dancing before 

 the fathers of gold," he exclaimed when capering before the embassy 

 on the steps of the palace, and the saying was responded to with 

 shouts from the populace ; but the topics of discourse are always 

 scanty among an uneducated race, and after the daily salutations are 

 performed, nothing can be more rapidly stupid than the succeeding 

 conversations of the native of Shoa. 



133. Few but the priests and deptras can read or write, and many 

 among those learned scribes are more indebted to the memory of 

 their early youth, than to the page held in their hands for the forth- 

 coming rant. 



134. The ancient Ethiopic, which is also called Gees', remained 

 the language of the empire only until the 14th century of our era, and 

 in this idiom are written all the annals of her religion. It has now, 

 however, fallen into disuse, and the people of Tigri alone retain one of 

 its dialects. Amhara is generally spoken throughout the country. 



