count Vidigueira, who was appointed, by the king of
Portugal, viceroy of the Indies. They arrived at Goa; and, in January
1624, father Lobo set out on the mission to Abyssinia. Two of the
Jesuits, sent on the same commission, were murdered in their attempt to
penetrate into that empire. Lobo had better success; he surmounted all
difficulties, and made his way into the heart of the country. Then
follows a description of Abyssinia, formerly the largest empire of which
we have an account in history. It extended from the Red sea to the
kingdom of Congo, and from Egypt to the Indian sea, containing no less
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 u