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THE SOURCE OF THE NILE. 125 
the whole country, and live in the fiffures of the earth. To 
Kill thefe, they fet fire to their firaw, the only ufe they 
make of it. | 
Tue cattle roam at difcretion through the mountains. 
The herdfmen fet fire to the grafs, bent, and brufhwood, 
before the rains, and an amazing verdure immediately fol- 
lows. As the mountains are very fteep and broken, goats 
are chiefly the flocks that graze upon them. 
; e ; : 
THE province of Tigré is all mountainous; and it has 
been faid, without any foundation in truth, that the Pyre- 
nees, Alps, and Apennines, are but mole-hills compared to 
them. I believe, however, that one of the Pyrenees above 
St John Pied de Port, is much higher than Lamalmon; and 
that the mountain of St Bernard, one of the Alps, is full as 
high as Taranta, or rather higher. Itis not the extreme 
height of the mountains in Abyflinia that occafions fur- 
prife, but the number of them, and the extraordinary forms 
they prefent to the eye. Some of them are flat, thin, and 
{quare, in fhape of a hearth-ftone, or flab, that {carce would 
- feem to have bafe fufficient to refift the action of the winds. 
Some are like pyramids, others like obelifks or prifms, and 
fome, the moft extraordinary of all the reft, pyramids pitch- 
ed upon their points, with their bafe uppermoft, which, if 
it was poflible, as it is not, they could have been fo formed 
in the beginning, would be ftrong objections to our recei- 
ved ideas of gravity.. 
Tuey tan hides to great perfection in Tigré, but for one 
purpofe only. They take off the hair with the juice of two 
plants, a fpecies of folanum, and.the juice of the kol-quall; 
We. Ub. qe both 
