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 stones of
the altars upon their heads, assuring their credulous followers that
the Emperor's troops would immediately at the sight of those stones
fall into disorder and turn their backs; but, as they were some of
the first that fell, their death had a great influence upon the
people to undeceive them, and make them return to the truth.
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