CHELICUT. 
281 
Nile ; an idea strongly confirmed by the circumstance of this 
people always selecting the banks of the great branches of this 
river for its residence. 
On the 9th of October Mr. Pearce crossed the Tacazze at a 
ford, where the river is nearly three hundred yards in breadth, 
which brought him into the province of Samen, w hence, after tra- 
velling about four miles up a steep ascent, he arrived at the 
village of Guinsa. On his road to that place he had fallen in 
with a wandering monk, named Dofter Asko, who proposed, 
after a short conversation, to join his party, to which Mr. Pearce, 
as he found him an agreeable companion, willingly consented. 
He proved to be a man of lively humour, who had acquired a 
more than ordinary share of the learning of the country, and 
possessing great natural talents, with an extraordinary degree of 
craftiness, made a practice of travelling from place to place, 
without any other object in view, than that of preying on the 
credulity of the inhabitants. On the present occasion he took 
upon himself, at Guinsa, to represent Mr. Pearce as a brother of 
the late Abuna Marcorius, and the son of the Patriarch of Alex- 
andria ; an artifice by which the country people became so com- 
pletely his dupes, that they continually brought in presents of 
goats, honey, milk, and other articles of which the party stood in 
need, during the five days that they stayed in the place. 
To his other accomplishments Dofter Asko also united that of 
a physician, and, when the sick applied for relief, he wrote a 
few characters on bits of parchment, which not only were sup- 
posed to cure the maladies under which they laboured, but like- 
wise to act as charms against the agency of evil spirits. Agreeably 
