Neither their luxuries nor necessaries were the same as those of Europe. And indeed Europe, at this time, was probably inhabited by shepherds, hunters, and fishers, who had no luxury at all, or such as could not be supplied from India; they lived in woods and marshes, with the animals which made their sport, food, and cloathing. The inhabitants of Africa then, this vast Continent, were to be supplied with the necessaries, as well as the luxuries of life, but they had neither the articles Arabia wanted, nor those required in India, at least, for a time they thought so; and so long they were not a trading people. It is a tradition among the Abyssinians, which they say they have had from time immemorial, and which is equally received among the Jews and Christians, that almost immediately after the flood, Cush, grandson of Noah, with his family, passing through Atbara from the low country of Egypt, then without inhabitants, came to the ridge of mountains which still separates the flat country of Atbara from the more mountainous high-land of Abyssinia. By casting his eye upon the map, the reader will see a chain of mountains, beginning at the Isthmus of Suez, that runs all along like a wall, about forty miles from the Red Sea, till it divides in lat. 13°, into two branches. The one goes along the northern frontiers of Abyssinia, crosses the Nile, and then proceeds westward, through Africa towards the Atlantic Ocean. The other branch goes southward, and then east, taking the form of the Arabian Gulf; after which, it continues southward all along the Indian Ocean, in the same manner as it did in the beginning all along, the Red Sea, that is parallel to the coast. Their tradition says, that, terrified with the late dreadful event the flood, still recent in their minds, and apprehensive of being again involved in a similar calamity, they chose for their habitation caves in the sides of these mountains, rather than trust themselves again on the plain. It is more than probable, that, soon after their arrival, meeting here with the tropical rains, which, for duration, still exceed the days that occasioned the flood, and observing, that going through Atbara, that part of Nubia between the Nile and Astaboras, afterwards called Meroë, from a dry climate at first, they had after fallen in with rains, and as those rains increased in proportion to their advancing southward, they chose to stop at the first mountains, where the country was fertile and pleasant, rather than proceed farther at the risk of involving themselves, perhaps in a land of floods, that might prove as fatal to their posterity as that of Noah had been to their ancestors.