consuls in Egypt, was far more correct in his delineation of the Nile basin than Bruce himself, though D’Anville had published his map a year before Bruce’s arrival in Paris. [Illustration: BRUCE’S MAP OF THE NILE SOURCES.] On account of this chagrin, or for other reasons, Bruce delayed[30] the publication of his travels for seventeen years after his return to England. They were not published (in five volumes) until 1790. Strange to say, Bruce’s admirable work, though so truthful[31] and convincing as one reads it now, was received with universal incredulity in Great Britain. Among the stories selected for special derision was the account constantly repeated by Bruce of the Abyssinian custom of bleeding cattle and drinking their blood, and, still more, of cutting raw flesh off the living animal, which is then turned out to graze (or at least that is the flippant rendering of the contemporary critic). As a matter of fact, these customs had been already reported by the Jesuits from one to two hundred years previously, nor is there any reason to suppose that Bruce departed from the exact truth in describing contemporary Abyssinian customs. A hundred years later East African travellers like New, Von der Decken, Joseph Thomson, and the author of this book, noticed similar customs as regards blood-drinking on the part of the Masai and the Bantu races of Kilimanjaro and Kikuyu. The same writers constantly make allusion to the love of raw flesh on the part of most of the East African pastoral races, many of whom are more or less related to the Galas in blood (the foundation of the Abyssinian population is Gala). The actual truth about the cutting of steaks from the living animal seems to be this. It was sometimes customary (even if the custom has wholly died out at the present day) to slaughter a beast by degrees. The great arteries and the vital parts were avoided, and the palpitating, hot flesh was cut off strip by strip and devoured. But in all probability the creature was not as a general rule expected to live long after part of its flesh was removed. It was generally finished within two or three hours. Bruce, if I remember rightly, only relates one instance where, after two pieces of flesh had been removed from the buttocks of a cow, the skin was fastened up over the wound and the creature was driven on a little further to be finished on a later occasion. A summarised extract from Bruce’s travels gives a vivid description of the way the Abyssinians feasted on raw meat:--