Sometime before I left Gondar I had been threatened with an attack of the dysentery. At my arrival at Hor-Cacamoot it grew worse, and had many unpromising symptoms, when I was cured by the advice and application of a common Shangalla, by means of a shrub called Wooginoos[21], growing very common in those parts, the manner of using which he taught me.
The country, from Tcherkin to Ras el Feel, or Hor-Cacamoot, is all a black earth, called Mazaga, which some authors have taken for the name of the province. However, the word Mazaga, in the language of the country, signifies fat, loose, black earth, or mold, such as all that stripe of land from 13° to 16° of latitude is composed of, at least till you reach to the deserts of Atbara, where the rains end. Ras el Feel is, I suppose, one of the hottest countries in the known world. On the 1st day of March, at three o'clock in the afternoon, Fahrenheit's thermometer, in the shade, was 114° which was at 61° at sun-rise, and 82° at sun-set. And yet this excessive heat did not make a proportional impression upon our feelings. The evenings, on the contrary, rather seemed cold, and we could hunt at mid-day. And this I constantly observed in this sultry country, that, what was hot by the glass, never appeared to carry with it any thing proportionate in our sensations.
Ras el Feel formerly paid 400 ounces of gold, which is 4000 crowns; Sancaho paid 100. But trade having decreased, since the expedition of Yasous II. to Sennaar, without
