way, the Ishmaelite Arabs had access through Arabia to
Jerusalem and Syria, and carried on a great trade thither by land. They professed very candidly they could not give a satisfactory answer to that, as the time was very distant, and war had destroyed all the memorials of these transactions. I asked if they really ever had any memorials of their own country, or history of any other. They answered, with some hesitation, they had no reason to say they ever had any; if they had, they were all destroyed in the war with Gragné. This is all that I could ever learn from this people, and it required great patience and prudence in making the interrogations, and separating truth from falsehood; for many of them, (as is invariably the case with
barbarians) if they once divine the reason of your inquiry, will say whatever they think will please you.
They deny the sceptre has ever departed from Judah, as they have a prince of that house reigning, and understand the prophecy of the gathering of the Gentiles at the coming of Shiloh, is to be fulfilled on the appearance of the Messiah, who is not yet come, when all the inhabitants of the world are to be Jews. But I must confess they did not give an explanation of this either clearly or readily, or seem to have ever considered it before. They were not at all heated by the subject, nor interested, as far as I could discern, in the difference between us, nor fond of talking upon their religion at all, though very ready at all quotations, when a person was present who spoke Amharic, with the barbarous accent that they do; and this makes me conceive that their ancestors were not in Palestine, or present in those disputes or transactions that attended the death of our Saviour, and have subsisted ever after. They pretend that the book of
