I have also said, that, for the sake of commerce, these Shangalla have been extirpated in two places, which are like two gaps, or chasms, in which are built towns and villages, and through which caravans pass between Sennaar and Abyssinia. All the rest of this country is impervious and inaccessible, unless by an armed force. Many armies have perished here. It is a tract totally unknown, unless from the small detail that I have entered into concerning it in my travels.
And here I must set the critic right also, as to what he says of the produce of these parts. There is no grain called Dara, at least that I know of. If he meant millet, he should have called it Dora. It is not a mark of barrenness in the ground where this grows: part of the finest land in Egypt is sown with it. The banks of the Nile which produce Dora would also produce wheat; but the inhabitants of the desert like this better; it goes farther, and does not subject them to the violent labour of the plough, to which all inhabitants of extreme hot countries are averse.
The same I say of what he remarks with regard to cotton. The finest valleys in Syria, watered by the cool refreshing springs that fall from Mount Libanus, are planted with this shrub; and, in the fame grounds alternately, the tree which produces its sister in manufactures, silk, whose value is greatly inhanced by the addition. Cotton clothes all Ethiopia; cotton is the basis of its commerce with India, and of the commerce between England, France, and the Levant; and, were it nor for some such ignorant, superficial reasoners as Abbe Renaudot, cotton, after wool, should be the favourite manufacture of Britain. It will in time take
