‘Oh, I dunno,’ says our informant, another sprightly juvenile, modishly clad in jellaba, brass-buttoned jacket, and pirate head-scarf. ‘Slavers mayn’t show for a week yet, and Confound-it ain’t far across from Zoola. Tell your engineer you’ll stop his grog if he don’t get a move on, why don’t you?’
A dam’ silly suggestion, since the surest way to make a British workman take his time is to threaten him, especially if you call him a Port Mahon baboon into the bargain, and it was all of another ten days, a week later than Speed had reckoned, before we were steaming down Annesley Bay, the gulf on which Zoola lies. And d’you know, only now, with my first glimpse of the Abyssinian shore, did it come home to me that apart from the sketch I’d been given by Speed, and a few scraps I’d picked up from Ballantyne and the boys at Jedda, I knew nothing about the country or people or why we were going to war with them, really. I’d left Trieste in the deuce of a hurry, quite elated at escaping the consequences of my evil conduct and the novelty of the commission I’d been given, and here I was, with the job almost done, and wondering for the first time what the dickens it was all about.
And since you, honest reader, know no more than I did myself as we threaded our way through the vast fleet assembled in Annesley Bay and were engulfed in Zoola’s two most charming attractions, borne by the land breeze – a fine powdery dust that hung over us in a cloud, and the most appalling stench – it seems a proper time to tell you of things which I had yet to learn, about Abyssinia and the casus belli that had brought Napier and his army all the way from India to this mysterious coast.
To begin with, you must understand that the Abyssinians are like no other Africans, being some kind of Semitic folk who came from Arabia in the far-off time, handsome, cruel, and bloodthirsty, but civilised beyond any in the continent bar the Egyptians, with whom they shared a fierce mutual hatred, partly because the Gyppoes were forever carrying off their beautiful women and boys as slaves, partly because the Abs (as I call ’em for convenience) are devout and violently militant Christians, and can’t abide Muslims – or Roman Catholics. Very orthodox, they are, having been Christian long before we were, and of fairly primitive doctrine – I’ve seen church paintings (admission one dollar) of a Byzantinish-looking St George slaying the dragon while Pharaoh’s daughter and her handmaidens look on in admiration, and a depiction of the Last Supper with places laid for fourteen.
And their Christianity don’t run to morality, not far at least. They lie and deceive with a will, drink to excess, slaughter each other for amusement, and the women couple like stoats. The corollary to their adage that ‘a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband’ is that there are dam’ few crowned heads in Abyssinia, and hear, hear! say I, for ’twould be a cruel shame to have all that splendid married pulchritude going to waste.
They don’t look at all negroid; indeed, the Ab females fit my notion of Cleopatra with their straight noses, chiselled lips, almond eyes, saucy shapes, and in many cases skins no darker than an Italian’s. They know how to preen, too, the Shoho women of the north in shell-embroidered black cloaks over tight leather tunics from bosom to thigh, jolly fetching, and the Galla girls of the south, reckoned the handsomest of all, their perfect faces framed by elaborate oiled braids plaited from crown to shoulder. Some go naked to the waist, with little aprons made of thongs, and by gad they can stand the exposure. But if they’re fair, they’re fierce; one I knew was such a peach that the slavers who’d taken her expected a record price, but were disappointed when she discouraged the buyers by juggling a throwing-knife during the bidding, and they had to give her away.
In the men, the Egyptian look is enhanced by their white cotton robes, and their laziness, for they’re the idlest folk alive except when fighting, which they are much of the time, for everyone’s a warrior and goes armed. They don’t seem to know what fear is; the younger nobles have a curious custom of waiting at river fords to challenge travellers to single combat – and how they came by that Arthurian custom must be an interesting story.
Their houses aren’t much better than large huts, thatched and simply furnished, although they have occasional castle-like buildings on hill-tops; their towns are large walled villages with what seem to be permanent fairs and markets, and even their cities (if you can call ’em that) are no more than a collection of houses on top of a massive precipitous height called an amba. Magdala, the goal of Napier’s expedition, was like that; you don’t need battlements when you have sheer rock walls below you.14
So there you have the Abs, a pretty rum lot, first brought to our notice in the 1770s by a Scotch eccentric whom nobody believed – mind you, he was pretty rum himself, fooling about with the Barbary corsairs, seeking the source of the Nile, and finally breaking his neck while helping a lady downstairs, which shows that even the most seasoned mad adventurers can’t be too careful.15
Very few Europeans had ventured into Abyssinia before him, for it was a traveller’s nightmare, rugged and desolate beyond description, racked by perpetual civil wars in which the tribal leaders fought for the supreme lordship. One of these, Ras Ali, had made himself king of most of the country by 1840, but made the mistake of giving his daughter, Tewabetch the Beautiful, in marriage to an ambitious young mercenary, Lijkassa, the son of a woman who sold tape-worm medicine, which the Abs take in quantity as a result of their partiality to raw beef, ’nuff said. But he was a first-class soldier, clever, brave, and unscrupulous, and in no time he’d usurped the throne.
While still a lad, he’d become convinced that he was the Messiah named in an old prophecy and would become the greatest king on earth, master of all Ethiopia and Egypt; he would scourge the infidels out of Palestine, purge Jerusalem of its defilers (the Muslims), and would be called Theodore. So he changed his name accordingly, and proclaimed himself Emperor and King of Kings. He was young, handsome, muscular, literate (unlike most Abs), and full of reforming notions, like abolishing slavery and generally improving the lot of the commonalty. If he had a tendency to berserk rages, butchering his enemies, holding mass executions, flogging people to death or cutting off their limbs and leaving ’em for the wild beasts, well, savage despots can’t afford to behave like Tiny Tim.
His queen was a moderating influence, and so were two Englishmen, Plowden, our consul, and Bell, a soldier of fortune who became Theodore’s chamberlain. Unfortunately all three died almost simultaneously, the two Britons cut up by rebels and Tewabetch of natural causes. Theodore massacred the rebels in reprisal, but with the three best influences in his life gone, he began to behave like a real absolute monarch at last, taking to drink and concubines and committing even more atrocities than before. He married again, but since his bride was the daughter of a rival claimant to the throne whom Theodore had humiliated and imprisoned, the marriage was not a success.
We sent out a new consul, Captain Cameron, who presented Theodore with two pistols from Queen Victoria. This so delighted him that he wrote a letter proposing that he send an envoy to London, and remarking that he’d wiped out Plowden’s murderers ‘to win the friendship of her majesty’.
You’d have thought he couldn’t say fairer than that, but would you believe that those monumental half-wits at the F.O. didn’t give his letter to the Queen, or even acknowledge it? Why? Oh, other things, like Bertie the Bounder’s wedding to Alexandra of Denmark,16 were occupying their lordships’ attention, and who was this distant African upstart, anyway? Or quite possibly some chinless oaf simply mistook it for his wine bill and tossed it into a pigeonhole. God knows how our foreign affairs haven’t been one long catalogue of disaster … stay, though, they have, haven’t they?
What followed was inevitable, with a short-tempered, arrogant barbarian monarch who thought he was God’s anointed. After a year of being ignored he arrested Cameron, who’d visited Egypt, Theodore’s mortal enemy, to investigate cotton supplies which we were liable to need with the American Civil War disrupting our business. Then a missionary called Stern (who was trying to convert Abyssinian Jews to Christianity, if you’ll believe it) published offensive remarks about Theodore. Result: Cameron chained, flogged, and stretched on the rack; Stern brutally beaten and two of his servants lashed to death with hippo-hide whips; other Europeans arrested and bound