Violent fevers perpetually reign there. The inhabitants are of the colour of a corpse; and their neighbours the Shangalla, by constant inroads, destroy many of them, though lately they have been stopped, as they say, by the prayers of the monks, or, rather, by the smallpox, which has greatly reduced their strength and number, and exterminated to a man whole tribes of them. The Abyssinians, like all secluded and illiterate people, are highly superstitious. Jerome Lobo says that the whole country so swarms with churches, "that you can hardly sing in one without being heard in another;" and Alvarez states that sub-deaconship and inferior orders in the church are conferred even on infants at the breast. There is scarcely a monk in the hot, unwholesome monastery of Waldubba, a hermit who passes his life shivering on the bleak, solitary mountains, or a priest who has lived sequestered from society, who does not pretend that he is enabled to see and foretel what is to happen in future, from his perfect ignorance of the present and the past. All women who choose to renounce the society of men are allowed to assume the priestly character: they then wear a scullcap like men; and these priests, male and female, all pretend to possess charms, of a nature both offensive and defensive, the efficacy of which is almost universally believed in. Even the hyænas, which every night flock around Gondar, the capital of Abyssinia, attracted by the smell of carrion, are considered to be the human inhabitants of the neighbouring mountains, transformed by enchantment. The Abyssinians, almost to a man, are afraid of darkness, during which period they conceive that the world belongs to small vindictive genii. In the Synaxar, or history of their saints, one is said to have thrown the Evil One over a high mountain; and another to have had a holy longing for partridges, upon which a brace perched on his plate ready roasted! Salniel, the chief of their rebel angels, is supposed to be in stature "100,700 cubits, angelic measure;" his eyebrows are said to be three days' journey asunder; and it takes him just a week to turn his eyes!