Though the central channel is deep enough, the entrance
is made difficult to strangers by the shallows and sand banks on either
side; every six hours the river rises and falls with the flow and ebb of
the ocean, and where it pours out its waters into the sea, the flux and
reflux of waters reaches to a distance of sixty miles, as say the
Portuguese who have watched it. The Senegal is nearly four hundred miles
beyond Cape Blanco; a sandy shore stretches between the two; up to the
river the sailor sees from the shore only the wandering Azaneguys,
tawny, squat, and miserable savages; across the stream to the south are
the real Blacks, "well built noble-looking men," and after so long a
stretch of arid and stony desert, there is now a beautiful green land,
covered with fruit-bearing trees, the work of the river, which, men
say, comes from the Nile, being one of the four most glorious rivers of
earth that flow from the Garden of Eden and earthly paradise. For as the
eastern Nile waters Egypt, so this doth water AEthiopia.
Now the land of these negroes is at the entering in of AEthiopia, from
which to Cape Verde the land is all level, where the King of Senegal,
reigning over people that have no cities, but only scattered huts, lives
by the presents that his subjects bring him.
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