MEMOIR OF BRUCE. 
76 
turn yellow and rot, the lakes to putrify and swarm 
with vermin, all this beauty suddenly disappears. 
Bare, scorched Nubia returns with its poisonous 
winds and moving sands, glowing and ventilated 
with sultry blasts, which are followed by a troop of 
terrible attendants — epilepsies, apoplexies, fevers, 
agues, and dysenteries of the most obstinate and 
fatal character.” 
The city itself, which covers a prodigious space 
of ground, was built of clay houses one story high, 
and the floors of earth. Bruce having a present to 
deliver from the sovereign of Abyssinia, had an 
interview with the king; he found his Nubian 
majesty at his toilette, which was performed by a 
slave rubbing him all over with a rancid compound 
of grease and butter, with which his head was 
dripping as if it had been plunged in water. 
His fame as a physician introduced him to the 
royal haram, in which were about fifty sable queens, 
whose only covering was a narrow piece of cotton 
rag round their middle. The favourite beauty was 
a sturdy dame about six feet high, and corpulent 
beyond all proportion. Next to the elephant and 
the rhinoceros, she appeared to Bruce one of the 
largest living creatures he had ever met with. Her 
features were of the true negro character. A ring of 
gold passed through her under lip, and weighed it 
down till it covered her chin like a flap, and left her 
teeth hare. The inside of her mouth was stained 
black with antimony. Her ears, to which heavy gold 
rings were appended, reached down to her shoulders, 
