While in Abyssinia, Bruce observed a certain extraordinary custom. Had
he forgotten to mention this custom in the volumes of travel he later
published, he would have done well, for his description of the custom did
more to brand him as a marvel monger than all the rest of the fantastic
realities set down in his careful and accurate history of his Abyssinian
years.
This custom was eating of raw flesh from the living animal.
Bruce had attended the great banquets of raw bullock meat,—exactly such
banquets are served today in the halls of Abyssinia’s present ruler, Ras
Tafari—but he was unfamiliar with the eating of living flesh. Chancing
one day to be riding down a forest road, he encountered two peasants
driving a cow ahead of them. Presently, they became hungry, and Bruce saw
a strange thing. Throwing the cow down, and trussing her securely, Bruce
saw the natives feel the flesh along the backbone with their fingers,
select a place, cut a square flap with a sharp knife, lift up this flap
of hide, and cut themselves a square of living steak. This done, they
put back the flap of hide in place, and tied it down with vegetable
fibres. After their meal they drove the animal on ahead of them down the
road.
Bruce questioned the men, and asked questions about the matter at the
capital, but was told that he had seen nothing unusual.
On his return to Gondar from his expedition to the Nile, he found the
kingdom once more in feudal disorder; enemies of Ras Michael were
gathering their retainers, and the wild Galla tribes had been enlisted in
the fray. The roar of battle and the thunder of charging horsemen shake
the forest land, corpses of traitors and suspected folk hang on all the
trees, the Abyssinian city reeks of death, and at night Bruce is troubled
by hyenas dragging human carrion into the courtyard of his house. The
court goes to battle, and Bruce goes with it to the great African plain
by Gondar. Horsemen gathering by thousands and ten thousands stir the
dust of the field to a tawny cloud, and in the haze their breastplates
and lances catch the sun.
How completely Biblical is this fragment from Bruce’s account of the
battle! “The first person that appeared was Kesla Yasous, and the horse
with him, stretching out his hand (his face being all besmeared with
blood for he was wounded in his forehead) he cried as loud as he could,
‘Stand firm, the king is safe in the valley!’”
The struggle ends in the crushing defeat of Ras Michael, the wild Galla
tribes pour into Gondar, and the old Ruler goes to his palace to await
the end. Alone in the turmoil, but master of himself and unconfused,
Yagoube, the tall Scot, makes his way to the deserted palace of the once
all powerful lord of Abyssinia.
The lives of vagabonds are full of romantic scenes, but there are few
which so stir the imagination as the last meeting of the Laird of
Kinnaird and the able, despotic old man who held kings in the hollow of
his hand. The forest city was still; the great warriors with the mystical
names,—Heart of Christ, Servant of the Holy Ghost, Shield of Jesus, were
dead; the people waited to hear the war cries of the victorious factions
in the streets. Bruce entered the palace unchallenged by a sentry. The
throne room was “hung with mirrors brought at great expense from Venice
by way of Arabia and the Red Sea; they were mostly broken; their copper
gilt frames had been made by some Greek filigrane workers from Cairo.”
And in this empty room of the broken mirrors, magnificently clad in his
robes of scarlet and heavy golden thread, and throned in the seat of
power, sat old Ras Michael silently waiting the arrival of his murderers.
The next morning, Galla savages occupied the palace, and Bruce saw them
grimacing into the mirrors, breaking them, and grinding them to powder.
Ras Michael had been led away. None could tell Bruce of the fate of Ozoro
Esther.
One feels the approaching close of a drama. His old friends dead or
in exile, the court dispersed, and himself heavily in debt, Bruce
presently sought permission to leave Abyssinia. The new rulers were well
disposed to him, and he might have stayed on, and retained his honours,
but his world had been too violently re-made, and the European in him
had awakened. Poor young Balugani had died of dysentery; the long and
perilous journey home would have to be made alone.
The permission to depart was given unwillingly, and only after repeated
entreaty. Once more the Abyssinian forest gathers the laird and his
native escort into its greenery.
Suddenly Bruce sees another cavalcade approaching through the leafy
quiet, and from the dress of the riders knows them to be nobles of the
land. Are they partisans of the victors riding forth to visit the new
lands they have been given, or friends of the old kingdom riding to
silence and exile? The tall laird suddenly reins in his horse with a
start,—the cavalcade is the train of Ozoro Esther. This meeting in the
forest was the last sight tall Yagoube had of his Biblical queen.
Ozoro Esther! Bruce remembered the day when she rose from beside Ayto
Consu’s bed of sickness, and turned to him, superb in her dark and
stately beauty. “But now,” she had said, “if I am not as good a friend to
Yagoube who saved my children as I am a steady enemy to the Galla,—then
say Esther is not a Christian, and I forgive you.” The great lady of the
palace of the broken mirrors was on her way to Jerusalem to pray for Ras
Michael.
“The troops of Begemder have taken away my husband, Ras Michael, God
knows where,” said she.
A romantic episode enough, this meeting in the wood, yet it ends in a
lighter key. Tecla Miriam, a young noblewoman who had chosen to follow
the beautiful Ozoro, turned to Yagoube with a jest. The tall Scot seems
to have been a favourite with the ladies.
“But tell me truly, Yagoube,” said Tecla Miriam, “you that know
everything while peering and poring through those long glasses, did you
not learn by the stars that we were to meet you here?”
“Madam,” answered the laird, “if there was one star in the firmament that
had announced to me such agreeable news, I should have relapsed into the
old idolatry of this country, and worshipped that star for the rest of my
life.”
Instead of returning to Europe by the caravan route to the ports of the
Red Sea, Bruce was on his way down the west slope of the Abyssinian
plateau. At the foot of the wooded mountain slope lay the desert country
of Senaar, and at the edge of the desert lay the Nile. The way proved
long and dangerous. A simoon half smothered Bruce and his faithful
Abyssinian followers, a scoundrelly Arab sheikh abused them and would
have cut their throats and robbed them, and finally the camels began to
die.
In order to save his notes, his observations and his scientific
instruments, Bruce dismounted, and trudged the sand. “In this whole
desert,” he wrote, “there is neither worm, fly, nor anything that has
the breath of life.... My face was so swelled as scarcely to permit me
to see, my neck covered with blisters, my feet swelled and inflamed and
bleeding with many wounds.”
Now came a water shortage, and Bruce and his followers killed two camels
to drink the camel water stored in their bodies. “We drew four gallons
of camel water,” runs the account; “it was indeed vapid and of a bluish
cast, but had neither taste nor smell.” Their strength still continuing
to fail (Bruce had “three large wounds on the right foot, and two large
wounds on the left which continued open”) they determined to save their
lives by throwing away the quadrant, telescopes, and time-keeper and ride
the camels alternately.
On the 28th of November they consumed the last of their black bread
and dirty water, and at seven o’clock in the morning they saw the
distant roofs of Egyptian Assouan. At a quarter to ten, on the 29th of
November, 1772, James Bruce, Laird of Kinnaird, and late Lord of Geesh in
Abyssinia, “arrived in a grove of palm trees” by the Nile. Here friendly
souls helped him, and he even regained his abandoned goods.