Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 2.djvu/679

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THE SOURCE OF THE NILE.
663

Nanna Georgis, who chiefly was aimed at as the author of this revolt, escaped, with great difficulty, wounded, from the field; and the feud which had long subsisted between Waragna's family and the race of the Agows, received great addition that day, and came down to their posterity, as we shall soon see by what happened in Waragna's son's time at the bloody and fatal battle of Banja.

The next affair that called the attention of government, was a complaint brought by the monks of Magwena, a ridge of rocks of but small extent not far from Tcherkin, the estate of Kasmati Netcho. These mountains, for a great part of the year, almost calcined under a burning sun, have, in several months, violent and copious showers of rain, which, received in vast caves and hollows of the mountain, and out of the reach of evaporation, are means of creating and maintaining all sorts of verdure and all scenes of pleasure, in the hot season of the year, when the rains do not fall elsewhere; and as the rocks have a considerable elevation above the level of the plain, they are at no season infected with those feverish disorders that lay the low country waste.

Netcho was a man of pleasure, and he thought, since the monks, by retiring to rocks and deserts, meant thereby to subject themselves to hardship and mortification, that these delightful and flowery scenes, the groves of Magwena, were much more suited to the enjoyment of happiness with the young and beautiful Ozoro Esther, than for any set of men, who by their austerities were at constant war with the flesh. Upon these principles, which it would be very difficult for the monks themselves to refute, he took possession of the mountain Magwena, and of those bowers