After breakfast we proceeded to the selection of seventeen “boys,” who were to go up with our donkeys from Gallabat to Abyssinia. The character of the country beyond the frontier of the Soudan renders transit by camel impossible. It struck me as an interesting fact, not without a bearing upon the doctrine of Evolution, that the change from a flat or undulating to a mountainous region is here accompanied not only by a variation in the means of access, in the climate, in the flora and fauna, but in the race of inhabitants and the creed which they profess. In fact, the highlands of Abyssinia may be said to constitute “an island on the land,” if one may borrow the phrase which Darwin applied to the peaks of the Andes. And a similar peculiarity in the survival of types can be observed here as that to which the great biologist referred in the other connection. Mansfield Parkyns pointed out that the Abyssinians were, in his time, poor swordsmen, ridiculous in their practice of musketry and frequently wanting in genuine courage.[12] Their country has constantly been the scene of civil war and other dissensions. Indeed the Jews among them, to whom I shall refer in another chapter, at one time established a separate state in the “mountain fastnesses of Semien and Belusa, where, under their own kings and queens called Gideon and Judith, they maintained till the beginning of the seventeenth century a chequered and independent existence.”[13] In spite of these hindrances and deficiencies the Abyssinian people, government and creed, have survived among heights protected on one side by the sea and on the other by a tract of country which is uninhabitable and impassable from May to September, on account of the incessant torrential rains and the floods which they cause. If these favouring conditions had not existed, the Abyssinian nation would long ago have been “converted” to Islamism or exterminated, and in the former case they would have become assimilated by consanguinity to, if not merged in, the surrounding Arab and negroid tribes. As it is, the Abyssinians form, ethnologically, an entirely distinct race. This digression has carried me a long way from the “donkey-boys” at Gedaref. They were paraded to the number of a hundred for our inspection—Dongolis, Abyssinians, Tokrooris, Dinkas, Hadendowas, men from every clan in the district. An uglier-looking crowd I never beheld, and, as I gazed at the sinister, villainous faces, I hoped rather than believed that our choice of seventeen would not include robbers or murderers. We adopted the plan of choosing one or two men from each of the different races. Experience showed that the policy was sound, for no tribal quarrel was raised during our journey in Abyssinia. None of the groups was strong enough to commence a feud with confidence.