ut and cultivated only to
please. I doubt whether even the imagination of a painter has yet
conceived a landscape as beautiful as I have seen. The forests have
nothing uncouth or savage, and seem only planted for shade and coolness.
Among a prodigious number of trees which fill them, there is one kind
which I have seen in no other place, and to which we have none that bears
any resemblance. This tree, which the natives call ensete, is
wonderfully useful; its leaves, which are so large as to cover a man,
make hangings for rooms, and serve the inhabitants instead of linen for
their tables and carpets. They grind the branches and the thick parts of
the leaves, and when they are mingled with milk, find them a delicious
food. The trunk and the roots are even more nourishing than the leaves
or branches, and the meaner people, when they go a journey, make no
provision of any other victuals. The word ensete signifies the tree
against hunger, or the poor's tree, though the most wealthy often eat of
it. If it be cut down within half a foot of the ground and several
incisions made in the stump, each will put out a new sprout, which, if
transplanted, will take root and grow to a tree. The Abyssins report
that this tree when it is cut down groans like a man, and, on this
account, call cutting down an ensete killing it. On the top grows a
bunch of five or six figs, of a taste not very agreeable, which they set
in the ground to produce more trees.

I stayed two months in the province of Ligonus, and during that time
procured a church to be built of hewn stone, roofed and wainscoted with
cedar, which is the most considerable in the whole country. My continual
employment was the duties of the mission, which I was always practising
in some part of the province, not indeed with any extraordinary success
at first, for I found the people inflexibly obstinate in their opinions,
even to so great a degree, that when I first published the Emperor's
edict requiring all his subjects to renounce their errors, and unite
themselves to the Roman Church, there were some monks who, to the number
of sixty, chose rather to die by throwing themselves headlong from a
precipice than obey their sovereign's commands: and in a battle fought
between these people that adhered to the religion of their ancestors, and
the troops of Sultan Segued, six hundred religious, placing themselves at
the head of their men, marched towards the Catholic army with the