Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, Volume 4 (of 5): In the years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773Bruce, James
History
Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, Volume 4 (of 5): In the years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773
Bruce, James
Egypt -- Description and travel; Ethiopia -- Description and travel; Ethiopia -- History; Natural history -- Ethiopia; Nile River
said the other three men. "I am then one of these Dervish, said I,
content with the bread that is given me, and bound for some years to
travel in hardships and danger, doing all the good I can to poor and
rich, serving every man, and hurting none." "Tybe! that is well," says
the king. "And how long have you been travelling about?" adds one of
the others. "Near twenty years," said I.--"You must be very young,
says the king, to have committed so many sins, and so early; they must
all have been with women?"--"Part of them, I suppose, were, replied I;
but I did not say that I was one of those who travelled on account of
their sins, but that there were some Dervishes that did so on account
of their vows, and some to learn wisdom." He now made a sign, and a
slave brought a cushion, which I would have refused, but he forced me
to sit down upon it.
I found afterwards who the three men were who had joined in our
conversation; the first was Ali Mogrebi, a native of Morocco, who was
Cadi, or chief judge at Sennaar, and was then fallen into disgrace
with the two brothers, Mahomet Abou Kalec, governor of Kordofan, and
Shekh Adelan, prime minister at Sennaar, then encamped at Aira at the
head of the horse and Nuba, levying the tax upon the Arabs as they
went down, out of the limits of the rains, into the sandy countries
below Atbara to protect their cattle from the fly. Another of these
three was Cadi of Kordofan, in the interest of Mahomet Abou Kalec,
and spy upon the king. The third was a saint in the neighbourhood,
conservator of a large extent of ground, where great crops of dora
not only grow, but when threshed out are likewise kept in large
excavations called Matamores; the place they call Shaddly. This man
was esteemed another Joseph among the Funge, who accumulated grain in
years of plenty, that he might distribute it at small prices among the
poor when scarcity came. He was held in very great reverence in the
neighbourhood of Sennaar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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