Volume One—Chapter Forty.

Ascent of the Abyssinian Alps.

Having thus happily shaken the Adel dust from off the feet, and taken affectionate leave of the greasy Danákil, it is not a little pleasant to bid adieu also to their scorching plains of unblessed sterility. Every change in the soil and climate of Africa is in extremes, and barrenness and unbounded fertility border on each other with a suddenness whereof the denizens of temperate climes can form no conception. As if by the touch of the magician’s wand, the scene now passes in an instant from parched and arid wastes to the green and lovely highlands of Abyssinia, presenting one sheet of rich and thriving cultivation. Each fertile knoll is crowned with its peaceful hamlet—each rural vale traversed by its crystal brook, and teeming with herds and flocks. The cool mountain zephyr is redolent of eglantine and jasmine, and the soft green turf, spangled with clover, daisies, and buttercups, yields at every step the aromatic fragrance of the mint and thyme.

The baggage having at length been consigned to the shoulders of six hundred grumbling Moslem porters, assembled by the royal fiat from the adjacent villages, and who, now on the road, formed a line which extended upwards of a mile, the Embassy, on the morning of the 17th, commenced the ascent of the Abyssinian Alps. Hitherto every officious attendant functionary had exerted himself to the utmost to promote delay, confusion, and annoyance; and each now exhorted the respective members of the party to urge their jaded beasts to increased speed, and hasten onwards over a rugged path which, in the toil-worn condition of the majority, was not to be ascended without considerable difficulty. The king was waxing impatient to behold the delighting things that had been imported, an account of which, so far as the prying eyes of his servants had been able to discern, had been duly transmitted to the palace; and in order to celebrate the arrival of so great an accession of wealth. His Majesty’s flutes once more poured out their melody, and his warriors again chanted their wild notes among the hills, until far out of hearing of the astonished population of Fárri.

It was a cool and lovely morning, and a fresh invigorating breeze played over the mountain side, on which, though less than ten degrees removed from the equator, flourished the vegetation of northern climes. The rough and stony road wound on by a steep ascent over hill and dale—now skirting the extreme verge of a precipitous cliff—now dipping into the basin of some verdant hollow, whence, after traversing the pebbly course of a murmuring brook, it suddenly emerged into a succession of shady lanes, bounded by flowering hedge-rows.

The wild rose, the fern, the lantana, and the honeysuckle, smiled around a succession of highly cultivated terraces, into which the entire range was broken by banks supporting the soil; and on every eminence stood a cluster of conically-thatched houses, environed by green hedges, and partially embowered amid dark trees. As the troop passed on, the peasant abandoned his occupation in the field to gaze at the novel procession; whilst merry groups of hooded women, decked in scarlet and crimson, summoned by the renewal of martial strains, left their avocations in the hut to welcome the king’s guests with a shrill ziroleet, which rang from every hamlet. The leather petticoat of the wandering shepherdess was no longer to be seen. Birds warbled among the leafy groves, and throughout the rich landscape reigned an air of peace and plenty that could not fail to prove highly delightful after the recent weary pilgrimage across the hot desert.

At various turns of the road the prospect was rugged, wild, and beautiful. Aigibbi, the first Christian village of Efát, was soon revealed on the summit of a height, where, within an enclosure of thorns, rest the remains of a traveller, who not long before had closed his eyes on the threshold of the kingdom, a victim to the pestilential sky of the lowlands. Three principal ranges were next crossed in succession, severally intersected by rivulets which are all tributary to the Háwash, although the waters are for the most part absorbed before they reach that stream. Lastly, the view opened upon the wooded site of Ankóber, occupying a central position in a horse-shoe crescent of mountains, still high above, which enclose a magnificent amphitheatre of ten miles in diameter. This is clothed throughout with a splendidly varied and vigorous vegetation, and choked by minor abutments, converging towards its gorge on the confines of the Adel plains.

Here the journey was for the present to terminate, and, thanks to Abyssinian jealousy and suspicion, many days were yet to elapse ere the remaining height should be climbed to the capital of Shoa, now distant two hours’ walk. Three thousand feet above the level of Fárri stands the market-town of Alio Amba, upon the crest of a scarped prong formed by the confluence of two mountain streams. A Mohammadan population, not exceeding one thousand souls, the inmates of two hundred and fifty straggling houses, is chiefly composed of Ada?el, Argóbba, and merchants from Aussa and Hurrur; and among this motley community it had been ordained that the Embassy should halt that night.

Ascending by a steep stony path to an open spot, on which the weekly market is held, the escort fired a desultory salute; and whilst crowds of both sexes flocked to behold the white strangers, forming a double line, they indulged in the performance of the war-dance. Relieved occasionally by some of the younger braves who had earned distinctions during the last campaign, a veteran capered before the ranks with a drawn sword grasped between his teeth; and for the edification of the bystanders the notes of a martial song were powerfully poured forth in chorus from three hundred Christian throats.

The cone occupied by Alio Amba is only one of the thousand precipitous eminences into which the entire mountain side is broken on its junction with the plain. Swollen and foaming, the intersecting torrents appeared from the pinnacle like small threads of silver, twining and gliding far below amid green bushes and verdant fields to the great outlet, whence they escape to be soon lost on the desert sand. Together with a boundless prospect over the inhospitable tract beneath, countless villages now met the eye upon the entire intervening mountain side, and wherever the slope admitted of the plough being held, there cultivation flourished. Wheat, barley, Indian com, beans, peas, cotton, and oil plant, throve luxuriantly around every hamlet—the regularly marked fields mounting in terraces to the height of three or four thousand feet, and becoming in their boundaries gradually more and more indistinct, until totally lost on the shadowy green side of Mamrat, “The Mother of Grace.”

This towering peak, still shrouded in clouds when all was sunshine below, is clothed with a dense forest of timber, and at an elevation of some thirteen thousand feet above the sea, affords secure shelter to the treasures of the monarch, which have been amassing since the re-establishment of the kingdom, one hundred and fifty years since. Loza forms the apex of the opposite side of the crescent, and perched on its wooded summit is a monastery forming the temporary abode of Halloo Mulakoot, heir-apparent to the throne of Shoa. But by far the most interesting feature in the stern landscape is a conical hill, conspicuous from its isolated position, and rising amid dark groves of pine-like juniper, from a lofty serrated ridge. Hereon stands the stronghold of Góncho, the residence of Wulásma Mohammad, constructed over the state dungeon keep, in which, loaded with galling fetters, the three younger brothers of a Christian king—victims to a barbarous statute—have found a living tomb since the present accession, a period of thirty years!

After much needless detention in the market-place, exposed to the impertinent comments and rude gaze of the thronging populace, Ayto Kálama Work, a tall raw-boned man with a loose scrambling gait and a dead yellow eye, introduced himself as governor of the town. He condescended in person to conduct the British guests of his royal master to a mansion which had once boasted of himself as a tenant, but was now in the occupation of a fat old Moslem dame and her three daughters, whose respective appellatives being duly translated, proved worthy the days of Prince Cherry and Fairstar. Eve, Sweet-limes, and Sunbeam, all clothed alike in scarlet habiliments, vacated the premises with the utmost alacrity, and many good-humoured smiles; but owing to the length and difficulty of the road, that portion of the baggage most in request did not arrive until midnight—when, through the officious interference of Ayto Wolda Hana, whose garrulity had increased rather than abated, a new inventory of effects in charge of each principal of a village was to be penned by the royal scribe, and thus neither bedding nor food could be obtained.

The edifice so ostentatiously allotted for the accommodation of the party by him of the unpromising exterior, was of an elliptical form, about thirty feet in length by eighteen in breadth, and surrounded on every side by those tall rank weeds that delight to luxuriate in filth. Two undressed stakes supported a tottering grass thatch. Windows there were none. A long narrow aperture did duty for a door, and the walls, which met the roof at a distance of ten feet from the ground, were of the very worst description of wattle and dab—the former an assemblage of rotten reeds, and the latter decayed by time in a sufficiency of places to admit the light indispensable to a full development of the dirt and misery within.

In the principal of two apartments, a circular excavation in the floor surrounded by a parapet of clay, served as a stove. Heavy slabs of stone embedded in high mud pedestals, and used for grinding grain, engrossed one corner, and in another were piled heaps of old bullock hides in various stages of decomposition. Very buggy-looking bedsteads, equipped with a web of narrow thongs in lieu of cotton tape, assumed that air of discomfort which a broken or ill-adapted leg is so prone to impart. The narrow necks of divers earthen urn-shaped vessels containing mead, beer, and water, were stuffed with bunches of green leaves. Larger mud receptacles were filled with wheat, barley, and beans; and huge lumps of raw beef, with sundry bullocks’ heads, which were promiscuously strewed about, garnished the floor, the beds, and the walls, in every direction.

The inner chamber boasted the presence of mules and female slaves, who, if judgment might be formed from the evil odours exhaled, were revelling in the garbage of the shambles. Constructed on the slope of a hill, the floor of the edifice throughout was of the natural earth, and dipping at least one foot below the level of the threshold, had never known the presence of the housemaid’s besom. Equalling the filthiest Irish hovel in dirt and discomfort, the cheerless abode could boast of no sleek little pig, and of no pond covered with fat ducks, both being alike held in abhorrence by the Jew-Christians of Shoa; and even the old hat was wanting wherewith to cram the gaps through which whistled the keen cutting blast of Alpine climes.

Fatigue soon closed the weary eyes; but the change in the atmosphere, consequent upon the great elevation attained, presently interfered with repose upon the damp bare floor. Rain then set in with extreme violence. The water came tumbling through the manifold apertures in the crazy walls and shattered roof, and having speedily flooded the sloping court, poured over the threshold to deluge the floor with standing pools. Although the smoke of sodden wood, unable to escape, proved an inconvenience scarcely to be borne, there was no dispensing with a fire; and troops of fleas and sanguinary bugs, coursing over the body, by their painful and poisonous attacks, might almost have caused a sigh for the execrated plains of the Ada?el, which, with all their discomforts of watch and ward, were at least free from the curse of vermin.

But the lingering day dawned at last, and with the tedious hours of a cold and sleepless night the rain had also disappeared. As the rising sun shone against the lofty and now cloudless peaks, preparations were made for continuing the journey to Ankóber, in accordance with the royal invitation; but Ayto Wolda Hana, whose presence ever betokened evil, after wading through the compliments of the morning, proceeded with unbending gravity to unfold the dismal tidings that the monarch had altered his resolves. His Majesty would tarry yet some days longer at Debra Berhán, and in consequence graciously extended the option of visiting the court there or resting at Alio Amba, pending his indefinite arrival at the capital.

The difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of transporting the mass of baggage to so great a distance, in such weather, and with very inadequate means at command, rendered imperative the adoption of the latter alternative. Aytos Wolda Hana and Kátama, with the whole of the escort, meanwhile took their departure, to report orally the important discoveries they had been able to make relative to the nature of the presents designed for the throne, together with the particulars of the quarrel betwixt Izhák and Mohammad Ali, and the respective pretension of the rivals to the honour of having conducted the British visitors into Abyssinia.

One of those mysterious boxes, the lading of which, unviolated by the scrutinising scribes, remained hermetically sealed to the inquisitive gaze of officious spies, had, before leaving Fárri, been broken open with the design of obtaining access to an indispensable portion of the contents. To this unfortunate necessity may possibly be ascribed the sudden and unlooked-for alteration in the royal intentions. In lieu of ingots of gold were revealed to the astounded sight the leathern buckets, linch-stocks, and tough ash staves pertaining to the galloper-guns. Words of derision burst from the mouth of every disappointed spectator. “These,” exclaimed fifty vain-glorious lips at once, “be but a poor people. What is their nation when compared with the Amhára; for behold in this trash, specimens of the offerings brought from their boasted land to the footstool of the mightiest of monarchs!”