Volume Three—Chapter Twenty Five.

The Royal Granary at Dummakoo.

The reception that we experienced at the hands of the virago who owned this comfortless hovel, had been neither hospitable nor flattering. In the temporary absence of her husband, the wrinkled beldame considered herself to be vested with charge of the hamlet, and for a full hour after our arrival, standing in the dark porch of her adjacent house, she had exerted her cracked voice in a tissue of shrill comments levelled against the impropriety of entering private demesnes unannounced. The first crowing of the cock invited a renewal of her far from melodious clamour, and it was not silenced without much difficulty, even by the jingle of silver crowns.

The road now descended to the Umptoo, a rapid stream, with a broad stony bed, which rises in the lofty mountain Asságud. Cotton, in its most perfect state of cultivation, clothed all the level terraces. The papyrus, here, as in Egypt, designated pheela, fringed the banks of the stream in close thick patches; the honey-sucker, arrayed in green and gold, flashed in the morning sun, as it darted among the flowering acacias; birds of rare plumage filled the tangled brushwood; and the fantastic forms of the circumjacent mountains enhanced the beauty of the wild scene. But every man’s hand was armed for strife. The peasant carried spear and shield, and wore the sword girded to his loins; and the site of his habitation had been carefully selected with a long look-out on all sides as a precaution against attack and invasion.

Leaving the bed of the river, which measured some eighty yards across, the path ascended a ridge running east and west, and deriving its appellation from the conspicuous peaks of Golultee and Demsee. To the eastward, through a wide gap in the mountains, could be seen a long reach of the Airára, now expanded into a noble river, by the junction of the Umptoo, and glittering under its numberless channels, which bear in the rains a vast volume of water to the Casam, to be poured eventually into the Háwash. From the summit of the pass in the direction of Ankóber, a strange view extended for a distance of thirty or forty miles—a broken abyss of hill tops seeming as though the waves of the troubled ocean had been suddenly petrified in their progress—Mamrat, the monster billow, shewing above all in the far horizon, as the last barrier arrested in fall career.

The belt of rugged hills of limestone slate, through which the course lay, is an almost uninhabited waste of neutral ground, forming the boundary betwixt the Christian and Moslem subjects of Shoa. A few goats alone found a sufficiency of food among the scanty leaves of the now withered acacias; and the human denizens of the soil were wild as their rocky mountains. Fleeing at the approach of the white men, they took up a secure position on the very summit of the loftiest peaks, and looked down with evident mistrust upon the cavalcade, which was sufficiently well armed, and formidable in point of number, to instil terror into the bosom of all conscious of the wrath of princes, and of tribute rashly withheld. The termination of this sultry range forms an abutment upon the country of the Ada?el, whence is derived all the sulphur employed in the manufacture of gunpowder in the royal arsenals; and specimens which were picked up by the way would lead to the inference that the vein continued even beyond the point at which we crossed.

Like that of the Umptoo, the bed of the Korie, another tributary of the Casam, to which the road next descended, is bordered with luxuriant cotton cultivation, and in many parts overgrown with tangled papyrus. Shut in by a deep valley, it threads the mountainous district of Dingai-terri, and many wild bananas were seen luxuriating on its moist banks. The dusty path led on through a jungle composed chiefly of a bastard description of the Balm of Gilead, which being crushed under the foot, scented the whole atmosphere. On our arrival near the Moslem cemetery, below Kittel Yellish, the civility of the governor of the district was evinced in the display, on skins beneath the trees, of every article considered necessary for Christian sustenance during this most holy season of Lent—bread, beer, and water proving truly acceptable to the Abyssinian followers, already much distressed by the intense heat of a nearly vertical sun, to which they were so little inured. A wild roguish-looking Moslem dervish, decked in a rosary of large brown berries, and carrying a staff of truly portentous dimensions, here introduced himself as an acquaintance made many months previously at Dathára, upon which grounds he considered himself entitled to share in the repast. Leading a roving and an idle life, and armed with scrip and water-flagon, he had for years subsisted upon the alms of the superstitious followers of the Prophet; and if judgment might be formed from his sleek exterior, they had not been niggard of their contributions.

Grey, water-worn precipices, with deep semicircular basins at their base, now flanked the road, a formation of limestone occasionally out-cropping beneath a thick stratum of basalt. After crossing the bed of the Meynso, we gained a more level tract, over which a gallop of five miles led to Dummakoo, one of the royal granaries, where, by His Majesty’s commands, our head-quarters were to be established. This village, constructed on a knoll three thousand feet below the level of Ankóber, is situated in a fine, open, undulating country, well populated, and intersected by numerous milk-bush hedges. Richly-cultivated, and fanned by a cool breeze, it afforded a most agreeable contrast to the barren sultry hills through which the greater part of our course had lain. The lofty range of Mentshar and Bulga, rising to an extinguisher-like cone called Megásus, was the principal feature in the landscape; and at the foot of these mountains, which abound in coal, sinks the valley of the Casam, which was to form the scene of coming operations.

One of the king’s numerous magazines for grain and farm produce extends its long barn-like front in the centre of the hamlet, every house of which is screened by a tall green hedge; and that the safety of the royal stores has been alone consulted in the selection of the site, is sufficiently proved by the fact of the inhabitants being compelled to drive their cattle many miles on either side for their daily draught of water, whilst the long-tressed Mohammadan damsels are fain to trudge with a heavy jar at their back to a remote pool, carefully fenced and barricadoed.

All agricultural operations connected with the royal farm at Berhut, are annually performed by the surrounding population en masse. Several heavy showers which had recently fallen having fully prepared the ground for the reception of the seed, a vast concourse of rustics had collected from the entire district—the inhabitants of each hamlet bringing their own oxen and implements of husbandry; so that in the course of a very few hours many hundred acres, already ploughed, were sown and harrowed by their united efforts, the praises of the despot being loudly sung throughout the continuance of the tributary labour, which is similarly exacted in all parts of the kingdom.

On the crop arriving at maturity, a sheaf is cut and presented in token of joy to the governor of the district. The reaping and threshing again call for the assembly of the agricultural population; and the harvest-home having been celebrated with suitable festivity, the accessions to the royal granaries are duly registered by scribes delegated on the part of the crown.

Upon a rising ground about a mile from Dummakoo, is held the monthly market of the district. Tradition asserts that one of the inhabitants of a neighbouring hamlet saw in a dream that the Imám Abdool Kádur, appearing upon this hill, picked up a stone, and in a loud voice proclaimed that the spot belonged henceforth to himself; and no sooner had the pious disciple of the Prophet declared his vision, than the site was adopted by the unanimous voice of the assembled multitude for the celebration of the bazaar, which, in the lapse of a few generations, has become one of considerable importance.

Almost immediately upon our arrival I received a visit from Habti Mariam, (i.e. “The property of the Virgin”) the vice-governor, whose residence is at Wurdoo, the principal village of the Berhut district. He explained that his non-appearance to escort the party from Ankóber had arisen from severe ophthalmia, contracted during a recent visit to the hot low country. Some very potent amulets had been now attached to various parts of his body in order to remove the disorder; and the good man was moreover provided with a large raw onion, with which he rubbed his eyes alternately during the interview.

It has already been mentioned that the influence of Wulásma Mohammad extends along the whole of the Moslem districts of the eastern frontier; and it had now been advantageously exerted in the despatch of a body of his immediate retainers, commanded first to announce to the Ada?el on the border our intention of visiting their country, and afterwards to escort us thither. In order to counteract any offensive demonstration to which this unusual excursion might give rise, Habti Mariam had issued orders to assemble his levy, in accordance with strict injunctions received from his royal master to secure the safety of his “European children,” upon penalty of loss of liberty and government. The greatest difficulty was, however, experienced in persuading his followers to undertake the much-dreaded journey to the lower regions, as well from their unanimous detestation of the intense heat, as their innate dread of the lawless population; and he was finally compelled to put them to the blush by a declaration of his resolve to perform the king’s behest at all risks in his own person; when a handful of the boldest setting the example, the lists were speedily filled to the number of two hundred and fifty, which force had been considered by the Negoos as sufficient for the excursion.