Three proclamations are made before the king marches. The first is, “Buy your mules, get ready your provision, and pay your servants, for, after such a day, they that seek me here shall not find me.” The second is about a week after, or according as the exigency is pressing; this is, “Cut down the kantuffa in the four quarters of the world, for I do not know where I am going.” This kantuffa is a terrible thorn which very much molests the king and nobility in their march, by taking hold of their long hair, and the cotton cloth they are wrapped in. The third and last proclamation is, “I am encamped upon the Angrab, or Kahha; he that does not join me there, I will chastise him for seven years.” I was long in doubt what this term of seven years meant, till I recollected the jubilee-year of the Jews, with whom seven years was a prescription of offences, debts, and all trespasses. The rains generally cease the eighth of September; a sickly season follows till they begin again about the 20th of October; they then continue pretty constant, but moderate in quantity, till Hedar St Michael, the eighth of November. All epidemic diseases cease with the end of these rains, and it is then the armies begin to march. CHAP. XII. _State of Religion--Circumcision, Excision, &c._ There is no country in the world where there are so many churches as in Abyssinia. Though the country is very mountainous, and consequently the view much obstructed, it is very seldom you see less than five or six churches, and, if you are on a commanding ground, five times that number. Every great man that dies thinks he has atoned for all his wickedness if he leaves a fund to build a church, or has built one in his lifetime. The king builds many. Wherever a victory is gained, there a church is erected in the very field stinking with the putrid bodies of the slain. Formerly this was only the case when the enemy was Pagan or Infidel; now the same is observed when the victories are over Christians. The situation of a church is always chosen near running water, for the convenience of their purifications and ablutions, in which they observe strictly the Levitical law. They are always placed upon the top of some beautiful, round hill, which is surrounded entirely with rows of the oxy-cedrus, or Virginia cedar, which grows here in great beauty and perfection, and is called Arz[98]. There is nothing adds so much to the beauty of the country as these churches and the plantations about them. In the middle of this plantation of cedars is interspersed, at proper distances, a number of those beautiful trees called Cusso, which grow very high, and are all extremely picturesque.