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Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., in Nine Volumes by Samuel Johnson
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than forty provinces. At the time of Lobo's mission, it was not much
larger than Spain, consisting then but of five kingdoms, of which part
was entirely subject to the emperour, and part paid him a tribute, as an
acknowledgment. The provinces were inhabited by Moors, Pagans, Jews, and
Christians. The last was, in Lobo's time, the established and reigning
religion. The diversity of people and religion is the reason why the
kingdom was under different forms of government, with laws and customs
extremely various. Some of the people neither sowed their lands, nor
improved them by any kind of culture, living upon milk and flesh, and,
like the Arabs, encamping without any settled habitation. In some places
they practised no rites of worship, though they believed that, in the
regions above, there dwells a being that governs the world. This deity
they call, in their language, Oul. The christianity, professed by the
people in some parts, is so corrupted with superstitions, errours, and
heresies, and so mingled with ceremonies borrowed from the Jews, that
little, besides the name of christianity, is to be found among them. The
Abyssins cannot properly be said to have either cities or houses; they
live in tents or cottages made of straw or clay, very rarely building
with stone. Their villages, or towns, consist of these huts; yet even of
such villages they have but few, because the grandees, the viceroys, and
the emperour himself, are always in camp, that they may be prepared,
upon the most sudden alarm, to meet every emergence in a country, which
is engaged, every year, either in foreign wars or intestine commotions.
Aethiopia produces very near the same kinds of provision as Portugal,
though, by the extreme laziness of the inhabitants, in a much less
quantity. What the ancients imagined of the torrid zone being a part of
the world uninhabitable, is so far from being true, that the climate is
very temperate. The blacks have better features than in other countries,
and are not without wit and ingenuity. Their apprehension is quick, and
their judgment sound. There are, in this climate, two harvests in the
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