James Bruce

“ His colour is a grey mixt with a reddish brown, perfectly like the wild or warren rabbit. His belly is white, from the point of the lower jaw, to where his tail would begin, if that he had one. All over his body he has scattered hairs, strong and polished like his mustachoes, these are for the most part two inches and a quarter in length. His ears are round, not pointed. He makes no noise that ever I heard, but certainly chews the cud. To discover this, was the principal reason of my keeping him alive; those with whom he is acquainted he follows with great assiduity. ”

“ Thence it comes that we find it remarked in my return through the desert, that the whole country is strewed with bones of the dead; horrid 118 monuments of the victories of this savage animal, and of man more savage and cruel than he. From the ease with which he overcomes these half-starved and unarmed people, arises the calm, steady confidence in which he surpasses all the rest of his kind. ”

“ There are bees which build in the earth, whose honey is nearly black, as has been observed by the jesuit Jerome Lobo, I willingly place this truth to his credit, the only one, I think, I can find in his natural history, a small atonement for the multitude of falsehoods this vain and idle romancer has told on every occasion. Nor are the granivorous birds fewer in number or worse provided for; all the trees and shrubs in Abyssinia bear flowers, and consequently seeds, berries, or fruit, of some kind or other; food for all or some particular species of birds. ”

“ The modern and more accurate system of botany has fixed its distinctions of genus and species upon a variety of such fine parts naturally so fragil, that drying, spreading, and pressing with the most careful hands, must break away and destroy some of those parts. These deficient in one plant, exiting in another in all other respects exactly similar, are often, I fear, construed into varieties, or different species, and well if the misfortune goes no farther. They are precisely of the same bad consequence as an inaccurate drawing, where these parts are left out through inattention, or design. ”

“ The Arabs who conquered Egypt, and very soon after the rest of Africa, the tyranny and fanatical ignorance of the Khalifat of Omar being overpast, became all at once excellent observers. They addicted themselves with wonderful application to all sorts of science; they became very skilful physicians, astronomers, and mathematicians; they applied in a particular manner, and with great success, to natural history, and being much better acquainted with their country than we are, they were, in an especial manner, curious in the accounts of its productions. ”

“ The flower itself consists of one leaf of the funnel-fashioned kind, spreads, and, when in its full perfection, folds back at the lips, though it has in some flowers marks or depressions which might appear like segments, yet they are not such, but merely accidental, and the edge of most of the flowers perfectly even, without any mark of separation. ”

“ The vast quantity of field-rats and mice that appear after harvest, and swarm in the cracks, or fissures in the ground, are their next supply. But above all, the great slaughter made of cattle upon the march of the army, the beasts of burden which die under carriage and ill treatment, the number of men that perish by disease and by the sword, whose carcases are never buried by this barbarous and unclean people, compose such a quantity, and variety of carrion, that it brings together at one time a multitude of birds of prey, it would seem there was not such a number in the whole earth. ”

“ In Barbary I have seen the Moors in the day-time take this animal by the ears and pull him towards them, without his attempting any other resistance than that of his drawing back: and the hunters, when his cave is large enough to give them admittance, take a torch in their hand, and go straight to him; when, pretending to fascinate him by a senseless jargon of words which they repeat, they throw a blanket over him, and haul him out. He seems to be stupid or senseless in the day, or at the appearance of strong light, unless when pursued by the hunters. ”

“ Repeating the experiment one night, he ate up a young ass, a goat, and a fox, all before morning, so as to leave nothing but some small fragments of the ass’s bones.
In Barbary, then, he has no courage by day; he flies from man, and hides himself from him: But in Abyssinia or Atbara, accustomed to man’s flesh, he walks boldly in the day-time like a horse or mule, attacks man wherever he finds him, whether armed or unarmed, always attaching himself to the mule or ass in preference to the rider. ”

“ Others that are more pliable, greener, or fuller of sap, are bent back by his weight and velocity of his motion. And after he has passed, restoring themselves like a green branch to their natural position, they sweep the uncautious pursuer and his horse from the ground, and dash them in pieces against the surrounding trees. ”

“ I apprehend this to be the aspic which Cleopatra employed to procure her death. Alexandria, plentifully supplied by water, must then have had fruit of all kinds in its gardens. The baskets of figs must have come from thence, and the aspic, or Cerastes, that was hid in them, from the adjoining desert, where there are plenty to this day; for to the westward in Egypt, where the Nile overflows, there is no sort of serpent whatever that I ever saw; nor, as I have before said, is there any other of the mortal kind that I know in those parts of Africa adjoining to Egypt, excepting the Cerastes. ”

“ The soldier screens himself by a goat’s, leopard, or lion’s skin, thrown over his shoulder, of which it has no hold. As his head is bare, he always cuts his hair short before he goes to battle, lest his enemy should take advantage of it; but the women, wearing their hair long, and the great men, whether in the army or travelling in peace, being always cloathed, it never fails to incommode them, whatever species of raiment they wear. ”

“ Let us now apply these characters to the Ashkoko. He is above all other animals so much attached to the rock, that I never once saw him on the ground, or from among large stones in the mouth of caves, where is his constant residence; he is gregarious, and lives in families. He is in Judea, Palestine, and Arabia, and consequently must have been familiar to Solomon. For David describes him very pertinently, and joins him with other animals perfectly known to all men: “The hills are a refuge for the wild goats, and the rocks for the saphan, or ashkoko63.” ”

“ The vipers have their abode in the sandy desert of Libya, where even dew does not fall, where the sand is continually in motion, parched with hot winds, and glowing with the scorching rays of the sun. There the Ibis could not live ; the country is not inhabited by man, and consequently vipers there would be no nuisance. Nay, we know these vipers of Libya are an article of commerce in Egypt. The Theriac is composed of them at Venice and at Rome, and they are dispersed for the uses of medicine throughout the different parts of the world. ”

“ To leave ancient history, I can myself vouch, that all the black people in the kingdom of Sennaar, whether Funge or Nuba, are perfectly armed against the bite of either scorpion or viper. They take the Cerastes in their hands at all times, put them in their bosoms, and throw them to one another as children do apples or balls, without having irritated them, by this usage so much as to bite. ”

“ I cannot for my own part conceive, in a country where so many thousand hives of bees are, that there was any use for giving to a bird a peculiar instinct or faculty of discovering honey, when, at the same time, nature had denied him the power of availing himself of any advantage from the discovery, for man seems in this case to be made for the service of the Moroc, which is very different from the common ordinary course of things; man certainly needs him not, for on every tree and on every hillock he may see plenty of combs at his own deliberate disposal. ”

“ If Egypt had been a new, late, and extraordinary creation, the gift of the Nile in these latter times, as some modern philosophers have pretended, the least thing we could have expected would have been to find some new and extraordinary plants accompany it, very different in figure and parts from those of ancient times, made by the old unphilosophical way, the fiat of the Creator of the universe. ”

“ Most of the miserable survivors die before they can reach the next water; they have no subsistence by the way; they wander among the acacia-trees, and gather gum. There, every day losing their strength, and destitute of all hope, they fall spontaneously, as it were, into the jaws of the merciless hyæna, who finding so very little difference or difficulty between slaying the living and devouring the dead, follows the miserable remains of this unfortunate multitude, till he has extirpated the last individual of them. ”

“ It is well known to every one the least versant in this part of Natural History, what a prodigious revolution has happened in the use of drugs, dyes, and gums, since the time of Galen, by the introduction of those Herculean medicines drawn from minerals. The discovery of the new world, besides, has given us vegetable medicines nearly as active and decisive as those of minerals themselves. ”

“ This frequent victory over man, and his daily feeding upon him without resistance, is that from which he surely draws his courage. Whether to this food it is that he owes his superior size, I will not pronounce. For my own part, I consider him as a variety of the same rather than another species. At the same time I must say, his form gave me distinctly the idea of a dog, without one feature or likeness of the hog, as was the case with the Syrian hyæna living on Mount Libanus, which is that of M. de Buffon, as plainly appears by his drawing. ”

“ It seems now to be a point agreed upon by travellers and naturalists, that the famous animal, having one horn only upon his forehead, is the fanciful creation of poets and painters; to them I should willingly leave it, but a Swedish naturalist, Dr Sparman, who has lately published two volumes in quarto, in which he has distinguished himself by his low illiberal abuse of learned foreigners, as much as by the fulsome flattery he has bestowed on his own countrymen, has shewed an inclination to revive this antiquated fable. ”

“ That there is a rhinoceros in Asia with one horn is what we positively know, but that there is none of the other species in that part of the continent does not appear to me as yet so certain. Again, there is no sort of doubt, that though the rhinoceros with two horns is an inhabitant of Africa, yet is it as certain that the species with one horn is often found in that country likewise, especially in the eastern part, where is the myrrh and cinnamon country, towards Cape Gardefan, which runs into the Indian ocean beyond the Straits of Babelmandeb. ”

“ The Ashkoko are gregarious, and frequently several dozens of them sit upon the great stones at the mouth of caves, and warm themselves in the sun, or even come out and enjoy the freshness of the summer evening. They do not stand upright upon their feet, but seem to steal along as in fear, their belly being nearly close to the ground, advancing a few steps at a time, and then pausing. ”

“ I believe there are very few remarkable animals, either in Africa or Arabia, that are not still to be found described in some Arabian author, and it is doing the public little service, when, from vanity, we substitute crude imaginations of our own in place of the observations of men, who were natives of the country, in perpetual use of seeing, as living with the animals which they described. ”

“ The whole of the forefoot is very thick, fleshy, and soft, and of a deep black colour, altogether void of hair, though the back, or upper part of it, is thick-covered like the rest of its body, down to where the toes divide, there the hair ends, so that these long round toes very much resemble the fingers of a man. ”

“ It has been repeatedly observed in the course of my narrative, that an inconceivable 160 number of birds and beasts of prey, especially the former, follow an Abyssinian army pace by pace, from the first day of its march till its return, increasing always in prodigious proportion the more it advances into the country. An army there leaves nothing living behind, not the vestige of habitation, but the fire and the sword reduces everything to a wilderness and solitude. ”

“ I have said the rhinoceros does not eat hay or grass, but lives entirely upon trees; he does not spare the most thorny ones, but rather seems to be fond of them; and it is not a small branch that can escape his hunger, for he has the strongest jaws of any creature I know, and best adapted to grinding or bruising any thing that makes resistance. He has twenty-eight teeth in all, six of which are grinders, and I have seen short indigested pieces of wood full three inches diameter voided in his excrements, and the same of the elephant. ”

“ The goats, the only cattle these miserable people have, are very fond of it, and for it abandon all other food while it is within their reach. On the leaves of some plants I have seen a very small glutinous juice, like to what we see 48 upon the leaves of the lime or the plane, but in much less quantity; this is of the taste of sugar.
From the root of the branch arises a number of stalks, sometimes two, but never, as far as I have seen, more than three. The flower and seed are defended by a wonderful perfection and quantity of small parts. The head when in its maturity is of a purplish brown. ”