Travels in the Mogul Empire (Bernier) 3.4.2

3.4.2

The African Monarch, anxious that his ambassador should appear in a style suitable to the occasion, contributed liberally toward the expenses of the embassy. He presented them with thirty-two young slaves, boys and girls, to be sold at Moka; and the money raised by this happy expedient was to supply the expenses of the mission. A noble largess indeed! for let it be recollected that young slaves sell at Moka, one with another, at five-and-twenty or thirty crowns per head. Besides these, the Ethiopian King sent to the Great Mogol twenty-five choice slaves, nine or ten of whom were of a tender age and in a state to be made eunuchs. This was, to be sure, an appropriate donation from a Christian to a Prince! but then the Christianity of the Ethiopians differs greatly from ours. The ambassadors also took charge of other presents for the Great Mogol; fifteen horses, esteemed equal to those of Arabia, and a small species of mule, whose skin I have seen: no tiger is so beautifully marked, and no alachá of the Indies, or striped silken stuff, is more finely and variously streaked; a couple of elephants' teeth, of a size so prodigious that it required, it seems, the utmost exertion of a strong man to lift either of them from the ground; and lastly, the horn of an ox, filled with civet, which was indeed enormously large, for I measured the mouth of it at Dehly, and found that it exceeded half a foot in diameter.