HYiENA. 
197 
rocks, or in some gloomy retreat excluded from the 
light ; where it remains till the darkness is suf- 
ficient to favour its cruel and rapacious deeds. It 
then rushes from its hiding-place, ravages the sheep- 
fold, and destroys every thing within its reach with 
the most insatiable voracity. It inhabits Asiatic 
Turkey, Syria, Persia, and Barbary ; and is such a 
plague in Abyssinia that Mr. Bruce informs us 
Gondah was full of them from the time it became 
dark till the dawn of day. It is customary for this 
animal to seek its food in the midst of towns and 
cities. In those warm climates, where animal sub- 
stances soon become putrid, and where the in- 
habitants very frequently leave parts of slaugh- 
tered carcases exposed in the streets without burial, 
the hyaena is evidently of service ; since, by re- 
moving the nuisance, it not only rids the people 
of an offensive sight, but at the same time secures . 
them againt the pestilential effluvia which would 
soon arise from the dead bodies. “ Many a time 
in the night,” says Mr. Bruce, who was then re- 
siding at Gondah, “ when the king had kept me late 
in the palace, and it was not my duty to lie there, 
in going across the square from the king’s house, 
not many hundred yards distant, I have been ap- 
prehensive they would bite me in the leg. They 
grunted in great numbers about me, though I was 
surrounded with several armed men, who seldom 
passed a night without wounding or slaughtering 
some of them.” 
A very unwelcome visit which one of these bold 
