The models and plans of palaces that had been from time to time prepared
by Captain Graham, had imparted to the royal mind a new architectural
impulse; and after much deliberation with himself, he had finally come
to the resolution of expending the timber requisite towards the erection
of a chaste Gothic edifice. In the selection of the design. His
Majesty displayed unlooked-for taste; for although as a penman his
talents rank immeasurably in advance of the most accomplished of his
scriveners, his skill as an artist had proved very circumscribed. It
was nearly exhausted in the delineation of a nondescript bird, perched
upon a tree-top, and did wuth difficulty extend to the one-legged
fowler, gun in hand, who was conjectured to be planning its destruction.
At the royal desire, I had frequently executed likenesses of the court
favourites, and they were invariably acknowledged with much merriment;
but, although repeatedly urged, no persuasion could induce the despot to
sit for his own, from a firm belief in the old superstition, that
whosoever should possess it, could afterwards deal with him as he
listed.
"You are writing a book," he remarked to me on one occasion, with a
significant glance, as I was in the act of completing a full-length
portrait of himself, which I had contrived to make unobserved from his
blind side--"I know this to be the case, because I never inquire what
you are doing that they do not tell me you are using a pen, or else
painting pictures. This is a good thing, and it pleases me. You will
speak favourably of myself; but you shall not insert my portrait, as you
have done that of the Negoos of Zingero." Such was the title with which
His Christian Majesty was invariably pleased to dignify his heathen
brother, Moselekatse, whose acquaintance he had made through the
frontispiece to my "Wild Sports in Southern Africa."
The Abyssinians have from time immemorial expended an entire tree in the
reduction to suitable dimensions of every beam or plank employed in
their primitive habitations; and it is not therefore surprising that
Sahela Selassie should have been equally delighted and astonished at the
economy of time, labour, and material attending the use of the cross-cut
saw. From age to age, and generation to generation, the Ethiopian plods
on like his forefathers, without even a desire for improvement.
Ignorance and indolence confine him to a narrow circle of observation
from which he is afraid to move. Strong prejudices are arrayed against
the introduction of novelties, and eternal reference is made to
ancestral custom. But in a country where the absence of timber is so
remarkable and inconvenient, the advantages extended by this novel
implement of handicraft was altogether undeniable.
"You English are indeed a strange people," quoth the monarch, after the
first plank had been fashioned by the European escort. "I do not
understand your stories of the road in your country that is dug below
the waters of a river, nor of the carriages that gallop without horses;
but you are a strong people, and employ wonderful inventions."
Meanwhile the platform required for the new building advanced slowly to
completion. The crowd of idle applicants for justice who daily convened
before the tribunal of "the four chairs" were pressed into the service;
and whenever His Majesty returned from an excursion in the meadow, the
entire cortege might be seen carrying each a stone before his saddle in
imitation of the royal example. Early one morning Graham received a
message from the impatient despot to announce that the day being
auspicious, he was desirous of seeing one post at least erected without
delay. Greatly to his satisfaction the door-frames, which had
previously been prepared by the carpenters of my escort, were
simultaneously raised; and it being ascertained that the sub-conservator
of forests had neglected to make the requisite supplies of timber, the
delinquent was, with his wife and family, sentenced to vacate his
habitation forthwith, and to bivouac _sub divo_ during twenty days upon
the Angollala meadow--a punishment not unfrequently inflicted for venial
derelictions of duty, and attended during the more inclement seasons
with no ordinary inconvenience.
But the endless succession of holydays, during which no work can be
performed, interfered in a much greater degree with the completion of
the rising structure--it being superstitiously imagined that any portion
of a work erected on the festival of a saint, with the aid of edged
tools, will infallibly entail a curse from above. No little delay arose
also from the whims and caprices of His Majesty, who could never satisfy
himself that the doors and windows occupied the proper places. On this
subject his ideas wandered perpetually to the ruins of a certain palace
on the banks of the Nile, which he had visited whilst hunting the wild
buffalo--"It is overgrown with trees and bushes," was his lucid
description, "and it has two hundred windows, and four hundred pillars
of stone, and none can tell whence it came."
On lawful days, however, the soldiers continued to work as diligently as
the quantities of hydromel would permit, with which they were supplied
by the royal munificence; and at length the Gothic hall was complete.
It had been amusing in the interim to watch the persevering industry of
an unfortunate gun-man of the body-guard, who was constructing a hut
immediately below the palace. Whensoever the vigilant eye of the church
permitted, he would add to the frail wall of his circular dwelling a few
layers of loose stone which, with his own single labour, he had
collected in the meadow; but each morning's dawn revealed to his
sorrowing eyes some monstrous breach in the unstable fabric, which, like
Penelope's web, was never nearer to completion, and his patience being
fairly exhausted, he finally gave up the task in despair.
The novel style of architecture introduced by the Gyptzis, so
immeasurably superior in elegance, stability, and comfort, to anything
before witnessed in Shoa, and combining all these recommendations with
so limited an expenditure of material, afforded an undeniable contrast
to the adjacent tottering pile upon vaults on which Demetrius the
Albanian had expended three years of labour. Beyond the rude fabrics of
the neighbouring states, where the more common manufactures have
attained a somewhat higher cultivation, the palace of the king can boast
of no embellishment saving the tawdry trappings which decorate the
throne--gaudy tapestries of crimson velvet loaded with massive silver
ornaments, but ill in keeping with the clumsy mud walls to which they
are appended, and serving to render the latter still more incongruous by
so striking a contrast. But the new apartments were elegantly furnished
throughout, and with their couches, ottomans, carpets, chairs, tables,
and curtains, had assumed an aspect heretofore unknown in Abyssinia. "I
shall turn it into a chapel," quoth His Majesty, accosting Abba Raguel,
and patting the little dwarf familiarly upon the back--"What say you to
that plan, my father?"
As a last finishing touch, we suspended in the centre hall a series of
large coloured engravings, which the cathedral of Saint Michael might
well have envied, for they represented the chase of the tiger in all its
varied phases. The domestication of the elephant, and its employment in
war, or in the pageant, had ever proved a stumbling-block to the king,
who all his life had been content to reside in a house boasting neither
windows nor chimneys, and who reigned not in the days when "the Negus,
arrayed in the barbaric pomp of gold chains, collars, and bracelets, and
surrounded by his nobles and musicians, gave audience to the ambassador
of Justinian, seated in the open field upon a lofty chariot drawn by
four elephants superbly caparisoned." [Gibbon.] The grotesque
appearance of the "hugest of beasts" in his hunting harness, struck the
chord of a new idea. "I will have a number caught on the Robi," he
exclaimed, "that you may tame them, and that I too may ride upon an
elephant before I die." A favourite governor from a remote frontier
province was standing meanwhile with his forefinger in his mouth gazing
in mute amazement at the wonders before him. "This place is not suited
for the occupation of man," he at length exclaimed in a reverie of
surprise, as the monarch ceased:--"this is a palace designed only for
the residence of the Deity, and of Sahela Selassie."
Volume 3, Chapter XLII.