Chapter VIII: Introduction (7)

The insect which we have here before us is a proof how fallacious it is to judge by appearances. If we consider its small size, its weakness, want of variety or beauty, nothing in the creation is more contemptible and insignificant. Yet passing from these to his history, and to the account of his powers, we must confess the very great injustice we do him from want of consideration. We are obliged, with the greatest surprise, to acknowledge, that those huge animals, the elephant, the rhinoceros, the lion and the tiger, inhabiting the same woods, are still vastly his inferiors, and that the appearance of this small insect, nay, his very sound, though he is not seen, occasions more trepidation, movement, and disorder, both in the human and brute creation, than would whole herds of these monstrous animals collected together, though their number was in a tenfold proportion greater than it really is.

_El Adda._

_London. Published Dec.^r 1.^{st} 1789 by G. Robinson & Co._]

The necessity of keeping my narrative clear and intelligible as I proceeded, has made me anticipate the principal particularities relating to this insect. His operations are too materially interwoven with the history of this country, to be left apart as an episode. The reader will find the description[84] of its manners in that part of my history which treats of the Shepherds, and in several places throughout the narrative he will meet with accounts of the consequences of its wonderful influence. Providence, from the beginning it would seem, had fixed its habitation to one species of soil, being a black fat earth, extraordinary fruitful; and small and inconsiderable as it was, it seems from the first to have given a law to the settlement of the country. It prohibited absolutely those inhabitants of the fat earth, called Mazaga, domiciled in caves and mountains, from enjoying the help or labour of any beasts of carriage. It deprived them of their flesh and milk for food, and gave rise to another nation, whose manners were just the reverse of the first. These were the Shepherds, leading a wandering life, and preserving these immense herds of cattle by conducting them into the sands beyond the limits of the black earth, and bringing them back again when the danger from this insect was over.

We cannot read the history of the plagues which God brought upon Pharaoh by the hands of Moses, without stopping a moment to consider a singularity, a very principal one, which attended this plague of the fly. It was not till this time, and by means of this insect, that God said, he would separate his people from the Egyptians. And it would seem, that then a law was given to them, that fixed the limits of their habitation. It is well known, as I have repeatedly said, that the land of Goshen, or Geshen, the possession of the Israelites, was a land of pasture, which was not tilled or sown, because it was not overflowed by the Nile. But the land overflowed by the Nile was the black earth of the valley of Egypt, and it was here that God confined the flies; for he says, it shall be a sign of this separation of the people, which he had then made, that not one fly should be seen in the sand or pasture ground, the land of Goshen, and this kind of soil has ever since been the refuge of all cattle emigrating from the black earth to the lower part of Atbara. Isaiah, indeed, says, that the fly shall be in all the desert places, and consequently the sands; yet this was a particular dispensation of providence, to answer a special end, the desolation of Egypt, and was not a repeal of the general law, but a confirmation of it; it was an exception, for a particular purpose, and a limited time.

I have already said so much of this insect, that it would be tiring my reader’s patience to repeat any thing concerning him. I shall therefore content myself, by giving a very accurate design of him, only observing, that, for distinctness sake, I have magnified him something above twice the natural size. He has no sting, though he seems to me to be rather of the bee kind; but his motion is more rapid and sudden than that of the bee, and resembles that of the gad-fly in England. There is something particular in the sound, or buzzing of this insect. It is a jarring noise, together with a humming; which induces me to believe it proceeds, at least in part, from a vibration made with the three hairs at his snout.

The Chaldee version is content with calling this animal simply Zebub, which signifies the fly in general, as we express it in English. The Arabs call it Zimb in their translation, which has the same general signification. The Ethiopic translation calls it Tsaltsalya, which is the true name of this particular fly in Geez, and was the same in Hebrew.

The Greeks have called this species of fly Cynomya, which signifies the dog-fly, in imitation of which, those, I suppose, of the church of Alexandria, that, after the coming of Frumentius, were correcting the Greek copy, and making it conformable to the Septuagint, have called this fly Tsaltsalya Kelb, to answer the word Cynomya, which is dog-fly. But this at first sight is a corruption, apparently the language of strangers, and is not Ethiopic. It is the same as if we were to couple the two nominative substantives Canis and Musca, to translate Cynomya. Canis is indeed a dog, and Musca is a fly, but these two words together, as I have now wrote them, could never be brought to signify dog-fly. It is the same in the Ethiopic, where Tsaltsalya alone signifies dog-fly, without the addition of any other word whatever. What is the derivation of this is doubtful, because there are several words, both in the Ethiopic and Hebrew, that are exceedingly apposite and probable. Salal, in the Hebrew, signifies to buzz, or to hum, and, as it were, alludes to the noise with which this animal terrifies the cattle: and Tsaltsalya seems to come from this, by only doubling the radicals. t’Tsalalou, in Amharic, signifies to pierce with violence; from this is derived Tsalatie, the name of a javelin with a round point, made to enter the rings of a coat of mail, which, by its structure, is impervious to the round cutting points of the ordinary lance or javelin. In the book of Job[85] this seems to mean a trident, or fishing-spear, and is vaguely enough translated Habergeon in the English copy. I do not know that this insect, however remarkable for its activity and numbers, has ever before been described or delineated.

EL ADDA.

There is no genus of quadrupeds that I have known in the east so very numerous as that of the lizard, or of which there are so many varieties. The eastern, or desert parts of Syria, bordering upon Arabia Deserta, which still have moisture sufficient, abound with them beyond a possibility of counting them. I am positive that I can say, without exaggeration, that the number I saw one day in the great court of the Temple of the Sun at Baalbec amounted to many thousands; the ground, the walls and stones of the ruined buildings, were covered with them, and the various colours of which they consisted made a very extraordinary appearance, glittering under the sun, in which they lay sleeping, or basking. It was in vain, in a place so full of wonders as Baalbec, to think of spending time in designing lizards. I contented myself with collecting and preserving those I could catch entire, many of which have perished by the accidents of the journey, though some of very great beauty have escaped, and are in my collection in great preservation.

As I went eastward towards the desert, the number of this animal decreased, I suppose, from a scarcity of water; for example, at Palmyra, tho’ there were ruins of ancient buildings, and a great solitude, as at Baalbec, the lizards were few, all of the colour of the ground, without beauty or variety, and seemingly degenerated in point of size.

The Arabian naturalists and physicians were better acquainted with the different species of this animal than any philosophers have been since, and in all probability than any strangers will ever be; they lived among them, and had an opportunity of discovering their manners and every detail of their private œconomy. Happy if succeeding the Greeks in these studies, they had not too frequently left observation to deviate into fable; the field, too, which these various species inhabit is a very extensive one, and comprehends all Asia and Africa, that is, great portion of the old world, every part of which is, from various causes, more inaccessible at this day, than after the Arabian conquest. It is from the Arabian books then that we are to study with attention the descriptions given of the animals of the country. But very great difficulties occur in the course of these disquisitions. The books that contain them are still extant, and all the animals likewise exist as before; but, unfortunately, the Hebrew, the Syriac, and the Arabic, are languages very ambiguous and equivocal, and are in terms too loose and vague for modern accuracy and precise description, and especially so in that of colours; besides, that unbounded liberty of transposition of letters, and syllables of words, in which the writers of those languages have indulged themselves, from notions of elegance, seem to require, not only a very skilful and attentive, but also a judicious and sober-minded reader, that does not run away with whimsical, or first conceptions, but weighs the character of his author, the common idioms of language which he uses, and opportunities of information that he had concerning the subjects upon which he wrote, in preference to others that may have treated the same, but who differ from them in facts.

The small lizard here described is a native of Atbara beyond the rains, in that situation where we have said the island and city of Meroë formerly were. It seemed also to be well known by the different black inhabitants that came from the westward by the great caravan which crossed the desert north of the Niger, and is called the Caravan of Sudan, of which I have often spoken, as being the only barbarians who seem to pay the least attention to any articles of natural history. These bring to Cairo, and to Mecca, multitudes of green paroquets, monkeys, weasels, mice, lizards, and serpents, for the diversion and curiosity of the men of note in Arabia, or of the Beys and the women of the great at Cairo. This lizard is called El Adda, it burrows in the sand, and performs this operation so quickly, that it is out of sight in an instant, and appears rather to have found a hole, than to have made one, yet it comes out often in the heat of the day, and basks itself in the sun; and if not very much frightened, will take refuge behind stones, or in the withered, ragged roots of the absinthium, dried in the sun to nearly its own colour.

Almost the whole of this large tribe of lizards is, by the Arabians, described as poisonous. Experiment has detected the falsehood of this, in very many species; the same idea has led them to attribute to them medicinal virtues in the same proportion, and, I am apt to believe, with nearly as little reason; at least, though the books prescribing them are in everybody’s hands, the remedy is not now made use of in the places where those books were wrote; and this affords a strong proof that the medicine was never very efficacious.

The El Adda is one of the few which the Arabs in all times have believed to be free of poisonous qualities, and yet to have all the medicinal virtues that they have so abundantly lavished upon the more noxious species. It has been reputed to be a cure for that most terrible of all diseases, the Elephantiasis; yet this distemper is not, that I know, in the hotter parts of Africa, and certainly this lizard is not an inhabitant of the higher or colder parts of Abyssinia, which we may call exclusively the domicil of the elephantiasis. It is likewise thought to be efficacious in cleansing the skin of the body, or face, from cutaneous eruptions, of which the inhabitants of this part of Africa are much more afraid than they are of the plague; it is also used against films, and suffusions on the eyes. I never did try the effect of any of these, but give their history solely upon the authority of the Arabian authors.

I have drawn it here of its natural size, which is 6-1/6 inches. Though its legs are very long, it does not make use of them to stand upright, but creeps with its belly almost close to the ground. It runs, however, with very great velocity. It is very long from its shoulder to its nose, being nearly two inches. Its body is round, having scarce any flatness in its belly. Its tail too is perfectly round, having no flatness in its lower part. It is exceedingly sharp-pointed, and very easily broke, yet I have seen several where the part broke off has been renewed so as scarcely to be discernible. It is the same length, 2-1/6 inches, between the point of the tail and the joint of the hinder leg, as was between the nose and the shoulder of the foreleg. Its forehead from the occiput is flat, its shape conical, not pointed, but rounded at the end in the shape of some shovels or spades. The head is darker than the body, the occiput darker still; its face is covered with fine black lines, which cross one another at right angles like a net. Its eyes are small, defended with a number of strong black hairs for eye-lashes. Its upper jaw is longer, and projects considerably over the under; both its jaws have a number of short, fine, but very feeble teeth, and when holding it in my hand, though it struggled violently to get loose, it never attempted to make use of its teeth; indeed it seems to turn its neck with great difficulty. Its ears are large, open, and nearly round. Its body is a light-yellow, bordering on a straw-colour, crossed with eight bands of black, almost equally distant, except the two next the tail. All these decrease both in breadth and length from the middle towards each extremity of the animal. The scales are largest along the back, they are very close, though the divisions are sufficiently apparent. Their surface is very polished, and seems as if varnished over. Its legs from the shoulder to the middle toe are nearly an inch and three quarters long; its feet are composed of five toes, the extremity of each is armed with a brown claw of no great strength, whose end is tipt with black.

I have heard some of the common people call this lizard Dhab: This we are to look upon as an instance of ignorance in the vulgar, rather than the opinion of a naturalist well informed; for the Dhab is a species perfectly well known to be different from this, and is frequently met with in the deserts which surround Cairo.

CERASTES, OR HORNED VIPER.

There is no article of natural history the ancients have dwelt on more than that of the viper, whether poets, physicians, or historians. All have enlarged upon the particular sizes, colours, and qualities, yet the knowledge of their manners is but little extended. Almost every author that has treated of them, if he hath advanced some truths which he has left slenderly established by proof or experiment, by way of compensation, hath added as many falsehoods so strongly asserted, that they have occasioned more doubt than the others have brought of light, certainty, and conviction.

_London Publish’d Dec^r. 1.^{st} 1789. by G. Robinson & Co._

_Heath. Sc._]

Lucan, in Cato’s march through the desert of the Cyrenaicum in Search of Juba, gives such a catalogue of these venomous animals, that we cannot wonder, as he insinuates, that great part of the Roman army was destroyed by them; yet I will not scruple to aver this is mere fable. I have travelled across the Cyrenaicum in all its directions, and never saw but one species of viper, which was the Cerastes, or Horned Viper, now before us. Neither did I ever see any of the snake kind that could be mistaken for the viper. I apprehend the snake cannot subsist without water, as the Cerastes, from the places in which he is found, seems assuredly to do. Indeed those that Lucan speaks of must have been all vipers, because the mention of every one of their names is followed by the death of a man.

There are no serpents of any kind in Upper Abyssinia that ever I saw, and no remarkable varieties even in Low, excepting the large snake called the Boa, which is often above twenty feet in length, and as thick as an ordinary man’s thigh. He is a beast of prey, feeds upon antelopes, and the deer kind, which having no canine teeth, consequently no poison, he swallows whole, after having broken all its bones in pieces, and drawn it into a length to be more easily mastered. His chief residence is by the grassy pools of rivers that are stagnant. Notwithstanding which, we hear of the Monk Gregory telling M. Ludolf, that serpents were so frequent in Abyssinia, that every man carried with him a stick bent in a particular manner, for the more commodiously killing these creatures, and this M. Ludolf recommends as a discovery. And Jerome Lobo, among the rest of his fables, has some on this subject likewise. A cold and rainy country can never be a habitation for vipers. We see, on the contrary, that their favourite choice are deserts and burning sand, without verdure, and without any moisture whatever.

The very learned, though too credulous, Prosper Alpinus, says, that many have assured him, that near the lakes contiguous to the sources of the Nile there is a number of basiliscs, about a palm in length, and the thickness of a middle finger; that they have two large scales, which they use as wings, and crests and combs upon their head, from which they are called Basilisci or Reguli, that is, crowned, crested, or kingly serpents; and he says that no person can approach these lakes without being destroyed by these crested snakes.

With all submission to this naturalist’s relation, I should imagine he could not have heard the description of these lakes from many travellers, if all those that approached them were killed by the basiliscs. I shall only answer for this, that having examined the Lake Gooderoo, those of Court Ohha, and Tzana, the only lakes near the sources of the Nile, I never yet saw one serpent there, whether crowned or uncrowned, nor did I ever hear of any, and therefore believe this account as fabulous as that of the Acontia and other animals he speaks of in this whole chapter[86]. The basilisc is a species of serpent, frequently made mention of in scripture, though never described, farther than that he cannot be charmed so as to do no hurt, nor trained so as to delight in music; which all travellers who have been in Egypt know is exceedingly possible, and frequently seen. “For, behold, I will send basiliscs among you, saith the scripture, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the Lord[87]”. And[88] “Thou shalt tread upon the lion and basilisc[89] &c.”

I shall mention one name more, under which the Cerastes goes, because it is equivocal, and has been misunderstood in scripture, that is Tseboa, which name is given it in the Hebrew, from its different colours and spots. And hence the Greeks[90] have called it by the name of Hyæna, because it is of the same reddish colour, marked with black spots as that quadruped is. And the same fable is applied to the serpent and quadruped, that they change their sex yearly.

Some philosophers, from particular system, have judged from a certain disposition of this animal’s scales, that it is what they term, Coluber, while others, from some arrangement of the scales of its tail, will have it to be what they call Boa. I enter not into the dispute, it is here as faithfully represented as the size will permit, only I shall observe that, unless Boa means something more than I know it does, the name is ill chosen when applied to any species of poisonous serpents, because it is already the proper name of the large snake, just mentioned, that is not viviparous, and has no poison. Pliny and Galen say, that the young vipers are so fierce as to become parricides, and destroy their mother upon their birth. But this is surely one of the ill-grounded fancies these authors have adopted. The Cerastes is mentioned by name in Lucan, and without warranting the separate existence of any of the rest, I can see several that are but the Cerastes under another term. The thebanus ophites, the ammodytes, the torrida dipsas, and the prester[91], all of them are but this viper described from the form of its parts, or its colours. Cato must have been marching in the night when he met this army of serpents. The Cerastes hides itself all day in holes in the sand, where it lives in contiguous and similar houses to those of the jerboa, and I have already said, that I never but once found any animal in this viper’s belly, but one jerboa in a gravid female cerastes.

I kept two of these last-mentioned creatures in a glass jar, such as is used for keeping sweetmeats, for two years, without having given them any food; they did not sleep, that I observed, in winter, but cast their skins the last days of April.

The Cerastes moves with great rapidity, and in all directions, forward, backward, and sideways. When he inclines to surprise any one who is too far from him, he creeps with his side towards the person, and his head averted, till judging his distance, he turns round, springs upon him, and fastens upon the part next to him; for it is not true what is said, that the Cerastes does not leap or spring. I saw one of them at Cairo, in the house of Julian and Rosa, crawl up the side of a box, in which there were many, and there lye still as if hiding himself, till one of the people who brought them to us came near him, and though in a very disadvantageous posture, sticking as it were perpendicular to the side of the box, he leaped near the distance of three feet, and fastened between the man’s forefinger and thumb, so as to bring the blood. The fellow shewed no signs of either pain or fear, and we kept him with us full four hours, without his applying any sort of remedy, or his seeming inclined to do so.

To make myself assured that the animal was in its perfect state, I made the man hold him by the neck so as to force him to open his mouth, and lacerate the thigh of a pelican, a bird I had tamed, as big as a swan. The bird died in about 13 minutes, though it was apparently affected in 50 seconds; and we cannot think this was a fair trial, because a very few minutes before, it had bit the man, and so discharged part of its virus, and it was made to scratch the pelican by force, without any irritation or action of its own.

The Cerastes inhabits the greatest part of the eastern continent, especially the desert sandy parts of it. It abounds in Syria, in the three Arabias, and in Africa. I never saw so many of them as in the Cyrenaicum, where the Jerboa is frequent in proportion. He is a great lover of heat; for tho’ the sun was burning hot all day, when we made a fire at night, by digging a hole, and burning wood to charcoal in it, for dressing our victuals, it was seldom we had fewer than half a dozen of these vipers, who burnt themselves to death approaching the embers.

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.

It should seem very natural for any one, who, from motives of distress, has resolved to put a period to his existence, especially women and weak persons unaccustomed to handle arms, to seek the gentlest method to free themselves from that load of life now become insupportable. This, however, has not always been the case with the ancients. Aria, Petus’s wife, stabbed herself with a dagger, to set her husband an example to die, with this memorable assurance, after giving herself the blow, “Petus, it is not painful.” Porcia, the wife of Brutus, died by the barbarous, and not obvious way of perishing, by swallowing fire; the violent agitation of spirits prevailing over the momentary difference in the suffering. It is not to be doubted but that a woman, high-spirited like Cleopatra, was also above the momentary differences in feeling; and had the way in which she died not been ordinary and usual, she certainly would not have applied herself to the invention of a new one. We are therefore to look upon her dying by the bite of the Cerastes, as only following the manner of death which she had seen commonly adopted by those who were intended to die without torment.

Galen speaking of the Aspic in the great city of Alexandria, says, I have seen how speedily they (the aspics) occasioned death. Whenever any person is condemned to die whom they wish to end quickly and without torment, they put the viper to his breast, and suffering him there to creep a little, the man is presently killed. Pausanias speaks of particular serpents that were to be found in Arabia among the balsam trees, several of which I procured both alive and dead, when I brought the tree from Beder Hunein; but they were still the same species of serpent, only some from sex, and some from want of age, had not the horns, though in every other respect they could not be mistaken. Ibn Sina, called by Europeans Avicenna, has described this animal very exactly; he says it is frequent in Shem (that is the country about and south of Damascus) and also in Egypt; and he makes a very good observation on their manners; that they do not go or walk straight, but move by contracting themselves. But in the latter part of his description he seems not to have known the serpent he is speaking of, because he says its bite is cured in the same manner as that of the viper and Cerastes, by which it is implied, that the animal he was describing was not a Cerastes, and the Cerastes is not a viper, both which assertions are false.

The general size of the Cerastes, from the extremity of its snout to the end of its tail, is from 13 to 14 inches. Its head is triangular, very flat, but higher near where it joins the neck than towards the nose. The length of its head, from the point of the nose to the joining of the neck, is 10/12ths of an inch, and the breadth 9/12ths. Between its horns is 3/12ths. The opening of its mouth, or rictus oris 8/12ths. Its horns in length 3/12ths. Its large canine teeth something more than 2/12ths and 1/2. Its neck at the joining of the head 4/12ths. The body where thickest 10/12ths. Its tail at the joining of the body 2/12ths and 1/2. The tip of the tail 1/12th. The length of the tail one inch and 3/12ths. The aperture of the eye 2/12ths, but this varies apparently according to the impression of light.

The Cerastes has sixteen small immoveable teeth, and in the upper jaw two canine teeth, hollow, crooked inward, and of a remarkable fine polish, white in colour, inclining to blueish. Near one fourth of the bottom is strongly fixed in the upper jaw, and folds back like a clasp knife, the point inclining inwards, and the greatest part of the tooth is covered with a green soft membrane, not drawn tight, but as it were wrinkled over it. Immediately above this is a slit along the back of the tooth, which ends nearly in the middle of it, where the tooth curves inwardly. From this aperture I apprehend that it sheds its poison, not from the point, where with the best glasses I never could perceive an aperture, so that the tooth is not a tube, but hollow only half way; the point being for making the incision, and by its pressure occasioning the venom in the bag at the bottom of the fang to rise in the tooth, and spill itself through the slit into the wound.

By this flat position of the tooth along the jaw, and its being defended by the membrane, it eats in perfect safety; for the tooth cannot press the bag of poison at the root while it lies in this position, nor can it rise in the tube to spill itself, nor can the tooth make any wound so as to receive it, but the animal is supposed to eat but seldom, or only when it is with young.

The viper has but one row of teeth, none but the canine are noxious. The poison is very copious for so small a creature, it is fully as large as a drop of laudanum dropt from a vial by a careful hand. Viewed through a glass, it appears not perfectly transparent or pellucid. I should imagine it hath other reservoirs than the bag under the tooth, for I compelled it to scratch eighteen pigeons upon the thigh as quick as possible, and they all died nearly in the same interval of time; but I confess the danger attending the dissection of the head of this creature made me so cautious, that any observation I should make upon these parts would be less to be depended upon.

People have doubted whether or not this yellow liquor is the poison, and the reason has been, that animals who had tasted it did not die as when bitten, but this reason does not hold in modern physics. We know why the saliva of a mad dog has been given to animals and has not affected them; and a German physician was bold enough to distil the pus, or putrid matter, flowing from the ulcer of a person infected by the plague, and taste it afterwards without bad consequences; so that it is clear the poison has no activity, till through some sore or wound it is admitted into circulation. Again, the tooth itself, divested of that poison, has as little effect. The viper deprived of his canine teeth, an operation very easily performed, bites without any fatal consequence with the others; and many instances there have been of mad dogs having bit people cloathed in coarse woollen stuff, which had so far cleaned the teeth of the saliva in passing through it, as not to have left the smallest inflammation after the wound.

I forbear to fatigue the reader by longer insisting upon this subject. A long dissertation would remain upon the incantation of serpents. There is no doubt of its reality. The scriptures are full of it. All that have been in Egypt have seen as many different instances as they chose. Some have doubted that it was a trick, and that the animals so handled had been first trained, and then disarmed of their power of hurting; and fond of the discovery, they have rested themselves upon it, without experiment, in the face of all antiquity. But I will not hesitate to aver, that I have seen at Cairo (and this may be seen daily without trouble or expence) a man who came from above the catacombs, where the pits of the mummy birds are kept, who has taken a Cerastes with his naked hand from a number of others lying at the bottom of the tub, has put it upon his bare head, covered it with the common red cap he wears, then taken it out, put it in his breast, and tied it about his neck like a necklace; after which it has been applied to a hen, and bit it, which has died in a few minutes; and, to complete the experiment, the man has taken it by the neck, and beginning at his tail, has ate it as one would do a carrot or a stock of celery, without any seeming repugnance.

We know from history, that where any country has been remarkably infested with serpents, there the people have been screened by this secret. The Psylli and Marmarides of old undoubtedly were defended in this manner,

_Ad Quorum cantus mites Jacuére Cerastæ._

SIL. ITAL. lib. iii.

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. The Arabs have not this secret naturally, but from their infancy they acquire an exemption from the mortal consequences attending the bite of these animals, by chawing a certain root, and washing themselves (it is not anointing) with an infusion of certain plants in water.

One day when I was with the brother of Shekh Adelan, prime minister of Sennaar, a slave of his brought a Cerastes which he had just then taken out of a hole, and was using it with every sort of familiarity. I told him my suspicion that the teeth had been drawn, but he assured me they were not, as did his master Kittou, who took it from him, wound it round his arm, and at my desire ordered the servant to carry it home with me. I took a chicken by the neck, and made it flutter before him; his seeming indifference left him, and he bit it with great signs of anger, the chicken died almost immediately; I say his seeming indifference, for I constantly observed, that however lively the viper was before, upon being seized by any of these barbarians he seemed as if taken with sickness and feebleness, frequently shut his eyes, and never turned his mouth towards the arm of the person that held him. I asked Kittou how they came to be exempted from this mischief? he said, they were born so, and so said the grave and respectable men among them. Many of the lighter and lower sort talked of enchantments by words and by writing, but they all knew how to prepare any person by medicine, which were decoctions of herbs and roots.

I have seen many thus armed for a season do pretty much the same feats as those that possessed the exemption naturally, the drugs were given me, and I several times armed myself, as I thought, resolved to try the experiment, but my heart always failed me when I came to the trial; because among these wretched people it was a pretence they might very probably have sheltered themselves under, that I was a Christian, that therefore it had no effect upon me. I have still remaining by me a small quantity of this root, but never had an opportunity of trying the experiment.

The reader will attend to the horn which is placed over the eye in the manner I have given the figure of it, it is fluted, and has four divisions. He will likewise observe the tooth as viewed through a glass. He may suppose the black represents a painter’s pallet, for the easier discerning the white tooth, which could not otherwise appear distinctly upon the white paper.

_London Publish’d Jan^y. 19.^{th} 1790 by G. Robinson & Co._]

BINNY.

Although the fish we find in the east are generally more distinguished for their beauty and variety of colours, or for their uncouth forms, rather than for the goodness of the fish itself, this before us appears to be an exception; though it is not without singularities, yet its form and colour are very simple, and, for the elegance of its taste, may vie with any fish caught in any river which runs either into the Mediterranean or Ocean. Whether it is the Latus, or the Oxyrinchus of antiquity, both fishes of the Nile, so famous that divine honours were paid them, by large cities, nomes, or districts situated upon that river, is what I am not naturalist enough to discover. Such as it is, in all its parts, I have placed it before the reader faithfully.

By the disproportion in the length of its jaws, I should imagine this to be a fish of prey, though a circumstance concerning the bait with which it is taken seems to contradict this. The fish from which this drawing was made weighed 32 pounds English, but is often caught of 70 pounds and upwards, as I have been told by the fishermen, for I never saw one larger than the one I am now describing. The largest of this kind are caught about Rosetto and the mouth of the river, but they are very numerous, higher up as far as Syene and the first cataract. This was caught at Achmim, the ancient Panopolis, and the manner in which this is performed is very uncommon and ingenious, and by the few trials that I saw is also very successful.

They take a quantity of oil, clay, flour, and honey, with straw, and some other thing that makes it stick together, they knead or tread it with their feet till it is perfectly mixed. They then take two handfuls of dates, and break them into small pieces about the bigness of the point of the finger, and stick them in different parts of this mixture, which begins now to have such consistency as to adhere perfectly together, and appears in form like a Cheshire cheese. In the heart of this cake they put seven or eight hooks, with dates upon them, and a string of strong whip-cord to each. The fisherman then takes this large mass of paste, and putting it upon a goat’s skin blown with wind, rides behind it out into the middle of the stream; there he drops it in the deepest part of the river, then cautiously holding the ends of each of the strings slack, so as not to pull the dates and the hooks out of the heart of the composition, he gets again ashore upon his skin a little below where he had sunk the solid mass.

When arrived on the shore, he carefully separates the ends of the strings, and ties them, without straining, each to a palm branch made fast on shore, to the end of every one of which hangs a small bell. He then goes and feeds his cattle, digs ditches, or lies down and sleeps as his business calls him. The oil resists the water for some time, at last the cake begins to dissolve, pieces fall off, the broken dates dipped in the honey flow down the stream, and the large fish below catch ravenously at them as they pass. The fish follow these pieces up the stream, gathering them as they go along till they get to the cake at last, when altogether, as many as are assembled, fall voraciously to seek the dates buried in the composition; each fish that finds a date swallows it, together with an iron hook, and feeling himself fast, makes off as speedily as possible; the consequence is, endeavouring to escape from the line by which he is fastened, he pulls the palm branch, and rings the bell fastened to it.

The fisherman runs immediately to the bell, and finding thereby the particular line, hauls his prisoner in, but does not kill him; the hook being large, it generally catches him by the upper jaw, which is considerably longer than the under. He then pulls him out of the water, and puts a strong iron ring through his jaw, ties a few yards of cord to it, and fastens him to the shore, so he does with the rest. Very rarely one hook is found empty. Those that want fish at Girgé, a large town opposite, or at Achmim itself, come thither as to a fish-market, and every man takes the quantity he wants, buying them alive. Fish when dead do not keep here, which makes that precaution necessary. We bought two, which fully dined our whole boat’s crew; the fisherman had then ten or twelve fastened to the shore, all of which he pulled out and shewed us.

I apprehend that formerly this method of fishing was oftener practised, and better known than it is now, for I have seen, in several fishing towns, a tree, in which there was a fish with a ring through its nose, and beside it a bell. I likewise imagine that this is the fish which Mr Norden says the Kennouss caught at Syene, and which he calls a Carp; but as I have already observed, streams are not the haunt of leather-mouthed, or sucking fish, as is the carp, but rather of such as are powerfully furnished with fins, as this is, to struggle with, and traverse the current in all its directions. I believe the carp to be a fish of northern climates; I have never even seen them in these, they are certainly not in Ethiopia whence the Nile comes; their name, Cyprinus, seem to indicate they belong to Greece. They are found in the island of Cyprus, but whether exclusively from the rest of the islands is what I cannot determine.

This fish has two fins upon its back; the first has a sharp short thorn before it, and is composed of seven longer ones, sharp pointed, but much weaker in shape, resembling the latine sail of a boat. The one behind it is composed of eleven small pliable bones, but not armed with any defence. The belly has two fins, made of pliable, unarmed bones likewise, and on its side near the gills it has two others of the same kind. The tail is forked into two sharp thin narrow divisions, that below are considerably shorter than above. Below its throat is a parcel of long bones hanging down like a beard, which grow longer as they approach the tail, the last being the largest of all.

_London Publish’d Dec.^r 1.^{st} 1789 by G. Robinson & Co._

_Heath. Sc._]

The whole body of this fish is covered with silver scales much resembling silver spangles, they lie close together. There is no variety of colour upon the whole fish excepting a shade of red upon the end of the nose, which is fat and fleshy. His eye is large and black, with a broad iris of white stained with yellow. It has a number of small teeth very sharp and closely set, nature has probably given him this quantity of fins to save him from the crocodile, whom by his size he seems destined to feed.

CARETTA, OR SEA-TORTOISE.

Among the natural productions of the Red Sea, which either have been or are at present articles of commerce, I shall just speak a little of that species of the Testudo or Tortoise, called the Caretta or Hawk’s-bill. It is greatly inferior in size to the West Indian or American sea-tortoise. The extreme length of the shell of this was 3 feet 7 inches, and which was esteemed a large one. Simple as it is, I do not know one good figure of it. This which I have submitted to the reader may be depended upon for its exactness, otherwise the animal is well known, and has often been described.

Its back is covered like the rest of other turtles, with a bony substance, and this again is covered by lamina, or scales of a thin transparent texture, variegated with dark brown streaks, disposed in each scale as radii proceeding from a centre. The outer rows of the great scales are irregular pentagons. The row that runs down the middle between these are regular hexagons, and round the whole circumference the large scales are inclosed by a kind of quadrangular frame firmly united; the broadest and largest of these scales being nearest the tail. The lowest of all, as it were in the centre of the lowest part of the figure, is notched, the centre of this division answering to a line drawn through the middle of the oval, and the head or occiput.

This fish lays a multitude of eggs. Some have said that these are laid among stones, contrary to the practice of the large sea-turtle, which lays them upon sand. All I can say to this is, that I have seen them but seldom, and always upon sand, but never among stones. The fish itself is a very dry and coarse food, very different from that delicate species which comes from the West Indies, if the difference does not lie a great deal in the cookery. At the time that I ate of this animal, I was going to view the junction of the Indian Ocean without the Straits of Babelmandeb, and the wind setting in contrary, we were in great fear of not being able to return, as the reader will have seen in our voyage. Particularly, I did not observe any of the green fat, so well known to our epicures, nor indeed any fat at all. When roasted, it tasted to me much like old veal new killed. It is only an inhabitant of the mouth of the Gulf. They seldom come up the length of Mocha; when they do, they are few in number, are probably sick, and not able to bear the agitation of the waves from the south-westers.

The Egyptians dealt largely with Rome in this elegant article of commerce. Pliny tells us, the cutting them for fineering or inlaying, was first practised by Carvilios Pollio, from which we would presume that the Romans were ignorant of the Arabian and Egyptian art of separating the lamina by fire, placed in the inside of the shell when the meat is taken out; for these scales, though they appear perfectly distinct and separate, do yet adhere, and oftener break than split where the mark of separation may be seen distinct. Martial[92] says, that beds were inlaid with it. Juvenal[93], and Apuleius, in his tenth Book mentions that the Indian bed was all over shining with tortoise-shell in the outside, and swelling with stuffing of down within. The immense use made of it in Rome may be guessed by what we learn from Velleius Paterculus[94], who says, that when Alexandria was taken by Julius Cæsar, the magazines, or ware-houses, were so full of this article, that he proposed to have made it the principal ornament of his triumph, as he did ivory afterwards when triumphing for having happily finished the African war.

This, too, in more modern times, was a great article in the trade to China, and I have always been exceedingly surprised, since near the whole of the Arabian Gulf is comprehended in the charter of the East India Company, that they do not make an experiment of fishing both pearls and tortoises; the former of which, so long abandoned, must now be in great plenty and excellence, and a few fishers put on board each ship trading to Jidda, might surely find very lucrative employment with a long-boat or pinnace, at the time the vessels were selling their cargo in the port, and while busied in this gainful occupation, the coasts of the Red Sea might be fully explored.

_London Published Dec^r. 1^{st}. 1789, by G. Robinson & C^o._]

OF PEARLS.

The ships which navigated the Red Sea brought gold and silver from Ophir and Tarshish; they brought myrrh, frankincense, and ivory, from Saba, and various kinds of spices from the continent of Asia, across the Indian ocean. If we judge by the little notice taken of them in very ancient times, the treasures which lay nearer home, in their own seas, and upon their own shores, were very little sought after, or spoken of, in the days when the navigation of the Arabian gulf was at its height. We are not, however, to believe that the pearl fishery, even in those days, was totally neglected; but foreign trade was grown to such a magnitude, and its value so immense, that we are not to be surprised, that articles that were only a matter of ornament and luxury, or of domestic use, and did not enter into the medium of commerce, were little spoken of, however closely followed and well understood.

We gather from scripture, the only history of these early times to be depended upon, that precious stones were imported from the southern coast of Africa. This trade, however great it might be, is mentioned but slightly, and as it were accidentally, being absorbed in the very great articles of commerce then spoken of. In the same manner we read of the beauty and excellence of pearls cursorily introduced, often by allusions and comparisons throughout the sacred books, but always in a manner which sufficiently shews the great intrinsic estimation in which they were held.

Pearls are found in all the four quarters of the world, but in no degree of excellence, excepting in the east of Africa and in Asia. They are in every part of the Red Sea, they are in the Indian Ocean, in that low part of the coast of Arabia Felix called the Baherein, which joins to the Gulf of Persia. There are banks where they are found about Gombron to the eastward of that Gulf, or in the flat coast there; and in the seas which wash the island of Ceylon, many have been found of the greatest beauty and price; and for number, they are nowhere so plentiful as in the Baherein, between the coast of Arabia Felix and the island of Ormus, whence they are transported to Aleppo, then sent to Leghorn, and circulated through Europe, and this above all others is the market for seed pearls.

The oyster is currently reported to be the species of fish where this precious guest is lodged, and many a weary search and inquiry I have made after these oysters in the Red Sea, despairing always to see a pearl, till we had first found an oyster. The fact, however, turned out to be, that there are no such fish as oysters in the Arabian Gulf, and though our success in finding pearls was small, yet we got from the natives of the coast a sufficient number as well as information, to put it beyond doubt to what fish this beautiful and extraordinary production belonged.

Pearls are produced only in shells that are bivalves, that is, which have an upper and lower shell closing by a hinge in a manner little differing from the oyster. It is commonly said by the fishermen, that all bivalves in the Red Sea have pearls of some kind in them. This is a very rude and large view of the matter, for though it is true that some excrescences, or secretions, of the nature of pearls, may be found in the bisser, and the large bivalves with which this sea abounds, yet it is well known to all conversant in these matters, that many of the pearl shell itself (I shall not call it an oyster, for it is not one) are found without any pearl or likeness of pearl in them; being, I suppose, not yet arrived to that age when the extravasation of that juice which forms the pearl happens.