BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCLX. FEBRUARY, 1854. VOL. LXXV.
CONTENTS.
ABYSSINIAN ABERRATIONS, 129
THE QUIET HEART.—PART III., 150
NATIONAL GALLERY, 167
A GLANCE AT TURKISH HISTORY, 184
MACAULAY’S SPEECHES, 193
FIFTY YEARS IN BOTH HEMISPHERES, 203
A SPORTING SETTLER IN CEYLON, 226
GRAY’S LETTERS, 242
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET,
AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON;
_To whom all communications (post paid) must be addressed._
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCLX. FEBRUARY, 1854. VOL. LXXV.
ABYSSINIAN ABERRATIONS.[1]
Locomotion, profitless and often aimless, is, in the opinion of
Continentals, a condition of an Englishman’s existence. Provided with a
dressing-case that would contain a Frenchman’s entire wardrobe, and with
a hat-box full of pills “to be taken at bedtime,” every son of Albion is
supposed to perform, at some period of his life, a distant journey, with
the sole apparent object of acquiring a right to say that he has been
“there and back again.” An Englishman, in the opinion of Europe, would
be a miserable being, had he not continually present to his mind the
recollection or the anticipation of a journey to the uttermost parts of
the earth—to the North Pole or the South Seas, to the feverish heart of
Africa or the scarcely less perilous wastes of Tartary. That opinion
will be strongly confirmed by the peregrinations of Mansfield Parkyns.
There can be no reasonable doubt that when the handsome volumes, full of
amusing letter-press and neat sketches, and externally decorated with a
chubby and Oriental St George spearing a golden dragon, with bossy
shields and carved scimitars, and lion’s mane and tail, which Mr Murray
has just published, shall have been as generally read as they deserve to
be, the tide of enterprising travel will set strongly in the direction
of Abyssinia. Everybody will take wing for the land of the Shohos and
Boghos; African outfits will be in perpetual demand; sanguine railway
projectors will discuss the feasibility of a “Grand Cairo and Addy Abo
Direct” line. Mr Parkyns tells us, in his preliminary pages, that he
shall estimate the success of his book, not by his friends’ flatteries
or his reviewers’ verdict, but by its sale. Sale!—why, it will sell by
thousands, in an abridged form, with a red cover, as the “Handbook for
Abyssinia.” Persons starting for those parts will ask for Parkyns’
Handbook, just as tenderer tourists, who content themselves with an
amble through Andalusia, inquire for Ford’s. That many such starts will
be made, we cannot doubt, after reading the book in which are so vividly
described the charms of the pleasant land of Tigrè, the delights of the
journey thither, and of the abode there. Never was anything so tempting.
The mere introduction makes us impatient to be off. Mr Parkyns is
resolved to lure his readers, in his very first chapter, not only to
read his book, but to roam in his footsteps. Werne’s _Campaign in Taka_
gave us some idea of the advantages enjoyed by those privileged mortals
to whom it is given to ramble between the Blue Nile and the Red Sea; but
the German’s narrative, which we thought striking and startling enough
when we read it, is thrown into the shade by the vivid and lively
delineations of the friend and comrade of Prince Shetou. The sanitary,
dietetic, and surgical instructions, with which, for the benefit of
future travellers in Abyssinia, he preludes his subject, would alone
suffice to inspire us with an ardent longing to pass a season in the
delightful regions where they are applicable. The preservation of
health, he justly observes, should be every traveller’s chief care,
since, without it, pleasure or profit from the journey is alike
impossible. Then he proceeds to point out the chief dangers to health in
Abyssinia, and the means of warding them off. The highlands, he tells
us, are highly salubrious, but unfortunately one cannot always abide
upon the hills; and down in the valleys malaria prevails, engendering
terrible inflammatory fevers, to which four patients out of five
succumb, the fifth having his constitution impaired for life, or at
least for many years. Parkyns points out a preservative. Light two large
fires and sleep between them. They must be so close together that you
are obliged to cover yourself with a piece of hide to avoid ignition of
your clothes. “Not very agreeable till you are used to it,” says the
cool Parkyns, “but a capital preventive of disease. Another plan, always
adopted by the natives, is not, I think, a bad one:—Roll your head
completely up in your cloth, which then acts as a respirator. You may
often see a nigger lying asleep with the whole of his body uncovered,
but his head and face completely concealed in many folds”;—a _sort of
woodcocking_ which may be pleasant, but can hardly be considered
picturesque. Tobacco is indispensable; in that country you must smoke
abundantly. On the White Nile no negro is ever without his pipe, which
sometimes holds a pound of tobacco. “The largest I now possess,” says
Parkyns, somewhat dolefully, “would not contain much more than a quarter
of that quantity.” The sun, generally considered formidable to
travellers in Africa, is disregarded by him to whom we now give ear. “I
never retired into the shade to avoid the noonday heat; and for four
years I never wore any covering to my head except the rather scanty
allowance of hair with which nature has supplied me, with the addition
occasionally of a little butter. During the whole of that time I never
had a headache”;—an immunity we are disposed to attribute less to the
sun’s forbearance than to some peculiar solidity in the cranium of
Parkyns. “In these climates,” he next informs us, “a man cannot eat
much, or, even if he could, he ought not.” This probably applies
exclusively to foreigners, for we are afterwards introduced to native
dinners, where the gormandising surpassed belief, and yet none of the
guests were a pin the worse. Indeed, in the course of the book, the
Abyssinians are invariably represented as enormous feeders, capable of
demolishing four or five pounds of meat, more or less, raw, as one day’s
ration, and without ill effects. As long as you are moderate in
quantity, the quality of what you eat is evidently unimportant in a
sanitary point of view. “A man who cares a straw about what he eats
should never attempt to travel in Africa. It is not sufficient to say,
‘I can eat anything that is clean and wholesome.’ You will often have to
eat things that are far from being either, especially the former. I have
eaten of almost every living thing that walketh, flyeth, or
creepeth—lion, leopard, wolf, cat, hawk, crocodile, snake, lizard,
locust, &c.; and I should be sorry to say what dirty messes I have at
times been obliged to put up with.” As general rules for the
preservation of health, we are instructed to avoid bad localities—the
valleys, especially after the rainy season, when the sun pumps up
malaria from stagnant pools and decayed vegetable matter—to be
abstemious in all respects, and to follow the native customs with
respect to food, injunctions which appear difficult to reconcile. Should
all precautions prove ineffectual, and fever or other ills assail us,
kind, considerate Parkyns, who himself, he tells us, has some knowledge
of the healing art, instructs us what to do. “Local bleedings, such as
the natives practise, are often highly advantageous; and firing with a
hot iron may also be adopted at their recommendation. For severe
inflammation of the bowels, when you cannot bear to be touched on the
part, _some boiling water poured on it_ will be a ready and effective
blister,—a wet rag being wrapped round in a ring to confine the water
within the intended limits. For bad snake-bites or scorpion stings, bind
above the part as tightly as possible, and _cut away with a knife_; then
apply the end of an iron ramrod, _heated to white heat_. This, of
course, I mean supposing you to be in the backwoods, out of the reach of
medicines. Aquafortis is, I have heard, better than the hot iron, _as it
eats farther in_.” Actual cautery, boiling-water blisters, and “cutting
away” really compose a very pretty basis for a surgical system.
Professor Parkyns gives but few prescriptions, supposing, he says, that
few of his readers would care to have more, or be likely to profit by
them. Judging from the above sample, we are inclined to coincide in his
supposition.
Mr Mansfield Parkyns is an amateur barbarian. Leaving England when a
very young man, he plunged, after some previous rambling in Europe and
Asia Minor, into the heart of Abyssinia, and adopted savage life with an
earnestness and gusto sufficiently proved by his book, and by the regret
with which he still, after three years’ return to what poor Ruxton
called “civilised fixings,” speaks of his abode in the wigwams of
Ethiopia, and of his hankerings—not after the flesh-pots of Egypt,
but—after the ghee-pots and uncooked beef he so long throve upon in the
dominions of the great Oubi, Viceroy of Tigrè. Fancy a civilised
Englishman, gently nurtured and educated, pitching his tent for three
years amongst filthy savages, adopting their dress and usages, rubbing
his head with butter, sleeping with the but of his rifle for a
pillow—the grease from his plaited locks being “beneficially employed in
toughening the wood”—having himself partially tattooed, eating raw beef,
substituting raw sheep’s liver soused in vinegar for oysters, discarding
hats and shoes, and going bareheaded and barefoot under the broiling sun
and over the roadless wastes of Abyssinia, burning and gashing his flesh
in order to produce peculiar scars and protuberances, deemed ornamental
by the people amongst whom he dwelt, and, upon his return home (to
England, we mean to say, for the home of his predilection is amongst the
savoury savages he so reluctantly left, and amongst whom he evidently
considers himself naturalised), coolly writing down and publishing his
confessions—in most amusing style, we freely admit, but not without a
slight dash of self-complacency, as if he would say, See what a fine
fellow I am to have thus converted myself into a greasy, shoeless,
raw-beef-eating savage for a term of years! We have nothing in the
world, however, to do with Mr Parkyns’ peculiar predilections. This is a
free country—as the Yankee observed when flogging his nigger—whose
natives have a perfect right to exhibit themselves in any character they
please, from an Objibbeway to an alabaster statue, so long as they do
not outrage decency, or otherwise transgress the law. For our part, we
should have been sincerely sorry if Mr Parkyns had not en-cannibaled
himself, and told us how he did it. We should have been deprived of two
of the most extraordinary, original, and amusing volumes through which
we ever passed our paper-knife. We accept the book, and are grateful for
it. With the author’s tastes, depraved though we cannot but consider
them, we purpose not to meddle. Men of his stamp should be prized, like
black diamonds, by reason of their rarity. We are much mistaken, or Mr
Parkyns will be the cynosure of all eyes during the approaching
spring—particularly if he condescends occasionally to exhibit his
tattooed arm, and to bolt a raw beef-steak. Gordon Cumming, on his
return from his South-African slaughterings, was the lion of the London
season; Mansfield Parkyns will receive much less than his due if he be
not made its hippopotamus.
Mr Parkyns started from Smyrna for a tour of the Nile, in company with
the poetical member for Pontefract, Mr Monckton Milnes, then pondering
his “Palm Leaves.” Of the Nile tour, so repeatedly made and so well
described by others, he abstains from speaking, in order the sooner to
get to Abyssinia. After an agreeable boat voyage of two months’
duration, he parted from his companion at Cairo. Mr Milnes must surely
have regretted quitting so lively and intrepid a fellow-traveller, and
Mr Parkyns, we cannot doubt, equally deplored their separation. The cool
of the evening would have been so pleasant in the desert. But
parliamentary duties summoned one of the travellers northwards; the
_Wander-trieb_, the vagabond instinct, impelled the other southwards,
and so they parted. A double-barrelled gun, a single rifle, a brace of
double pistols, and a bowie-knife, composed Mr Parkyns’ travelling
arsenal; he also took with him three pair of common pistols, a dozen
light cavalry sword-blades, some red cloth, white muslin, and Turkey
rugs, as presents for Abyssinian chiefs, and in March 1843 he sailed
from Suez for Jedda, on board a miserable Arab boat, loaded with empty
rice-bags and a hundred passengers. The throng was too great to be
agreeable, but Mr Parkyns, who has evidently a happy temper and a knack
at making himself popular amongst all manner of queer people, was soon
on most friendly terms with the Turks, Bedouins, Egyptians, Negroes, and
others who composed the living freight of the clumsy lateen-rigged
craft. The voyage from Suez to Jedda varies from nine days to three
months. Mr Parkyns was so fortunate as to accomplish it in little more
than three weeks. We pass over its incidents, which amused us when we
first read them, but which have lost their piquancy now that we recur to
them with the highly-spiced flavour of the Abyssinian adventures hot
upon our palate, and we go on at once to Massawa Island, on the
Abyssinian coast, whose climate may be estimated from the remark made by
an officer of the Indian navy to Mr Parkyns, to the effect that he
thought Pondicherry the hottest place in India, but that Pondicherry was
nothing to Aden, and Aden a mere trifle to Massawa. “Towards the latter
end of May I have known the thermometer rise to about 120° Fahrenheit in
the shade, and in July and August it ranges much higher.” Indoors, the
natives, men and women, wear nothing but striped cotton napkins round
their loins. Most Europeans suffer severely from the heat of the place.
Mr Parkyns, who is first cousin to a salamander, suffered not at all,
but ran about catching insects, or otherwise actively employing himself,
whilst his servants lay in the shade, the perspiration streaming off
them. He is clearly the very man for the tropics. After ten days at
Massawa, he started for the interior, previously getting rid of his
heavy baggage, to an extent we should really have thought rather
improvident, but which, if he had already made up his mind to content
himself with the comforts, and conform to the customs of the people he
was going amongst, was doubtless extremely wise. We have enumerated his
stock of arms, and his assortment of presents for the natives. The list
of his wardrobe, after he had given away his European toggery—partly at
Cairo, and partly to Angelo, a Massawa Jew, who made himself useful and
agreeable—is very soon made out. When he landed on the mainland,
opposite Massawa, it consisted of “three Turkish shirts, three pair of
drawers, one suit of Turkish clothes for best occasions, a pair of
sandals, and a red cap. From the day I left Suez (25th March 1843), till
about the same time in the year 1849, I never wore any article of
European dress, nor indeed ever slept in a bed of any sort—not even a
mattress; the utmost extent of luxury I enjoyed, even when all but dying
of a pestilential fever, that kept me five months on my beam-ends at
Khartoum, was a coverlet under a rug. The red cap I wore on leaving
Massawa was soon _borrowed_ of me, and the sandals, after a month, were
given up; and so, as I have before said in the Introduction, for more
than three years (that is, till I reached Khartoum), I wore no covering
to my head, except a little butter, when I could get it, nor to my feet,
except the horny sole which a few months’ rough usage placed under
them.” The sole in question had scarce put its print upon Ethiopian soil
when it was near meeting with an accident that would have necessitated
the use of the sharp knife and white-hot ramrod. On his way to the house
of Hussein Effendi, a government scribe, at the sea-coast village of
Moncullou, Mr Parkyns put his bare foot near an object that in the
twilight had the appearance of a bit of stick or stone. “I was startled
by feeling something cold glide over it, and, turning, saw a small snake
wriggling off as quickly as possible. From what little I could
distinguish of its form and colour, it seemed to answer the description
I had heard of the cerastes, or horned viper, which is about a foot and
a half long, rather thick for its length, and of a dirty, dusty colour,
mottled. The horns are nearly over the eyes, and about the eighth of an
inch in length. This is considered one of the most venomous of the snake
tribe, and they are very numerous in this neighbourhood. I tried to kill
it, but without success.” He soon came to think very little of such
small deer as this. Snakes are as common as rats in those torrid
latitudes, and about as little heeded. On his way to the hot springs of
Ailat, a day’s journey from Massawa, he killed another horned viper, as
it was coolly wriggling across his carpet, “spread in a natural bower
formed by the boughs of a species of mimosa, from whose yellow flowers,
which emit a delicious fragrance, the Egyptians distil a perfume they
call ‘fitneh.’” After this he makes no mention of adventures with snakes
on account of their frequency, until he gets to his chapter on the
natural history of Abyssinia, towards the close of the second volume, to
which we shall hereafter refer. We are at present anxious to get up the
country, to the court of King Oubi, whose capital, Adoua, was Mr
Parkyns’ headquarters during his residence in Tigrè. There he had what
he calls his town-house, of which he presents us with a plan and
sketches. He remained for some weeks at Ailat, the Cheltenham of
Abyssinia, whose healing springs attract visitors from great distances.
There he lodged in the house of a sort of village chief, called Fakak,
and passed his time shooting. It was rather an amusing residence,
caravans of Bedouins and Shohos frequently passing through on their way
to and from Massawa, and he had excellent sport. The evening before
starting for Kiaguor, three days’ journey on the road to Adoua,
“I went out to procure a supper for myself and numerous friends and
attendants; and, to tantalise my English sporting readers, I will tell
them what bag I brought home in little more than an hour. My first
shot brought down four guinea-fowl; my second, five ditto; third, a
female of the little Ben Israel gazelle; fourth, her male companion;
and, fifth, a brace of grouse; so that in five shots I had as good a
bag as in England one would get in an average day’s shooting, and
after expending half a pound of powder, and a proportionate quantity
of shot, caps, and wads. But I feel it my duty to explain that _I
never shoot flying_, considering that unsportsmanlike. A true
sportsman shows his skill by getting up to his game unperceived, when,
putting the muzzle of his gun as close to the tail-feathers as he
possibly can, he blazes away into the thick of the covey, always
choosing the direction in which he sees three or four heads picking in
a row! At any rate, this is the only way you can shoot in a country
where, if you entirely expend your powder and shot, you must starve,
or else make more, as I have been obliged to do many a time. I cannot
understand how people in Europe can enjoy shooting, where one is
dependent on a crowd of keepers, beaters, dogs, sandwiches, grog,
&c.... My sole companion on ordinary occasions is a little boy, who
carries my rifle, whilst I carry my gun, and we do all the work
ourselves. His sharp eyes, better accustomed to the glare than my own,
serve me in every point as well as a setter’s nose. The country (about
Ailat) is sandy and covered with large bushes. Most of the trees are
thorny, being chiefly of the mimosa tribe, and their thorns are of a
very formidable description, some of them being about two inches and a
half in length, and as thick at the base as a large nail; while
another variety, called in Abyssinian the ‘Kantàff-tafa,’ have thin
short-curved thorns placed on the shoots two and two together. These
catch you like the claws of a hawk, and if they enter your clothes you
had better cut off the sprig at once, and carry it with you till you
have leisure to liberate yourself, otherwise you will never succeed;
for as fast as you loosen one thorn another catches hold.”
Some interesting sporting anecdotes follow (they abound in Mr Parkyns’
book), told in off-hand characteristic style—encounters with wild pigs,
rather dangerous animals to deal with—and then we take the road to
Kiaguor. A night’s rest there, and we are off to Adoua. Hereabouts Mr
Parkyns gives a sketch of “Abyssinian Travelling.” We presume that he
himself, somewhat tanned by the climate, is the gentleman mounted on a
jackass, with bare head and legs, and a parasol for protection from the
sun. Suppress the donkey and supply a parrot, and he might very well
pass for the late Mr R. Crusoe.
Vague ideas of columns and obelisks, Moorish architecture and the like,
floated in Mr Parkyns’ fancy as he drew near to the capital city of the
kingdom of Tigrè, one of the most powerful of all Ethiopia. He found a
straggling village of huts, most of them built of rough stones, and
thatched with straw. The customhouse—they possess that civilised
nuisance even in Abyssinia—gave him trouble about his baggage, which it
found exorbitant in quantity, and suspected him of smuggling in goods on
account of merchants. He explained that he had a supply of arms, powder,
lead, &c., for two or three years’ consumption, besides presents for the
prince, but the Tigrè _douaniers_ insisted on examining all his
packages. He would not submit, and set off to make an appeal to
Oubi—nominally the viceroy, but in reality the sovereign of the
country—who was then at a permanent camp, at a place entitled Howzayn.
During this part of his travels, Mr Parkyns was in company with Messrs
Plowden and Bell; and on reaching Howzayn, which they did in a heavy
shower of rain, they went at once to the habitation of Càfty, the
steward of Oubi’s household, who had been Mr Bell’s _balderàbba_ on a
former visit. “It is customary for every person, whether native or
foreigner, after his first audience with the prince, to ask for a
‘balderàbba,’ and one of his officers is usually named. He becomes a
sort of agent, and expects you to acknowledge, by presents, any service
he may render you—such as assisting you out of difficulties in which you
may be involved, or procuring for you admission to his master when you
may desire it. Càfty was absent on an expedition. His brother, Negousy,
was acting for him, and he volunteered to procure us an audience of the
prince without delay.” Meanwhile the travellers were not very
comfortable. Some poor fellows were turned out of their huts into the
rain to make room for them; but the huts let in water so freely, that
the new occupants were scarcely better off than those who had been
ejected. Only one hut, about 7 feet in diameter, and 5½ feet high, had a
water-tight roof. Imperfect shelter was but one of their annoyances, and
a minor one. It is a custom of that country for the king to send food to
travellers as soon as he hears of their arrival, and our three
Englishmen, aware of this, had brought no provisions. This was
unfortunate, for Oubi neglected to observe the hospitable custom, and
they were half starved. Instead of obtaining for them an immediate
interview with the prince, Negousy, who was fishing for presents, put
them off from day to day. They were obliged to send a servant round the
camp, crying out, “Who has got bread for money?” and offering an
exorbitant price; but even thus they could not obtain a tithe of what
they needed. To add to their vexations, Mr Parkyns’ servant, Barnabas, a
negro whom he had engaged at Adoua, was claimed as a slave by a man in
authority, to whose uncle he had formerly belonged. At last, on the
fourth evening after their arrival, Oubi sent them a supper. “It
consisted of forty thin cakes, thirty being of coarser quality for the
servants, and ten of white ‘teff’ for our own consumption. These were
accompanied by two pots of a sort of sauce, composed of common oil,
dried pease, and red pepper, but, it being fast time, there was neither
meat nor butter. To wash all down there was an enormous horn of honey
beer.” On the morning of the sixth day Oubi sent for them, and, escorted
by Negousy, they hastened to the Royal Hovel. They had to wait some time
for admission, amidst the comments of a crowd of soldiers—comments then
unintelligible to Mr Parkyns, but which he afterwards ascertained to be
far less complimentary to the personal appearance of himself and
companions than he at the time imagined—their eyes being compared to
those of cats, their hair to that of monkeys, and their skin, to which
the sun had given a bright capsicum hue, being greatly coveted for red
morocco sword-sheaths.
Oubi was reclining on a stretcher, in a circular earthen-floored hut,
thirty feet in diameter. Although it was the middle of August there was
a fire in the apartment, and Mr Parkyns was almost blinded by the wood
smoke. When he was able to see, he beheld “a rather good-looking,
slight-made man, of about forty-five years of age, with bushy hair,
which was fast turning grey. His physiognomy did not at all prepossess
me in his favour. It struck me as indicative of much cunning, pride, and
falsity; and I judged him to be a man of some talent, but with more of
the fox than the lion in his nature. Our presents were brought in,
covered with cloths, and carried by our servants. They consisted of a
Turkey rug, two European light-cavalry swords, four pieces of muslin for
turbans, and two or three yards of red cloth for a cloak. He examined
each article as it was presented to him, making on almost every one some
complimentary remark. After having inspected them all, he said, ‘God
return it to you,’ and ordered his steward to give us a cow.” The cow
proved to be what a Far West trapper would call very “poor bull”—a mere
bag of bones, which would never have fetched two dollars in the market
(the value of a fat cow in Abyssinia varies from 8s. to 12s. 6d.); but,
such as it was, the taste of meat was welcome to the hungry travellers,
who devoured the beast the same day they received it, so that by
nightfall not an eatable morsel was left. Oubi made a better
acknowledgment of their gifts by settling their difficulty with the
chief of the customhouse, and not long after this Mr Parkyns parted from
Messrs Bell and Plowden, their routes no longer lying together. “I
prepared for a journey into Addy Abo, a province on the northern
frontier of Tigrè, then so little known as not to be placed on any map.
My principal object in going there was the chase, and if possible to
learn something of the neighbouring Barea or Shangalla—a race totally
unknown, except by the reputation they have gained in many
throat-cutting visits paid to the Abyssinians.” When recording his
parting from his two friends, both of whom he believes to be still in
Abyssinia, he intimates his intention of revisiting that country. “It is
not improbable,” he says, “that we three may meet again, and do what we
have often done before—eat a raw beef-steak, and enjoy it for the sake
of good company.”
The road to Addy Abo took Mr Parkyns through Axum, the capital of that
part of Abyssinia until supplanted by Adoua. Axum contains a tolerably
well-built church, probably of Portuguese construction, and some
neatly-built huts, whilst broken columns and pedestals tell of the
civilisation of former ages. It possesses, moreover, a beautiful obelisk
and a very remarkable sycamore tree, “both of great height, the latter
remarkable for the extraordinary circumference of its trunk, and the
great spread of its branches, which cast their dark shade over a space
of ground sufficient for the camp of the largest caravan. The principal
obelisk is carved on the south side, as if to represent a door, windows,
cornices, &c.; whilst, under the protecting arms of the venerable tree,
stand five or six smaller ones, without ornament, most of which have
considerably deviated from the perpendicular. Altogether they form a
very interesting family party.” Judging from the present book,
antiquarian researches have not much interest for Mr Parkyns, whose
sympathies are with the living, his pleasures in the field and forest,
and who seems more of a sportsman than of a student. It would be unfair,
however, not to mention, that whilst enjoying himself in his own
peculiar ways (and some of his ways certainly were extremely peculiar),
he kept less selfish aims in view, and exerted himself to make
collections of objects of natural history, of costumes, arms, and other
curiosities, besides investigating the history and geography of the
country. His collections were on a very large scale: unfortunately some
went astray upon the road; others, left for years in warehouses, and ill
cared for by those to whom they were consigned, were plundered of their
most precious specimens. The latter was the case with his first great
shipment, of more than twelve hundred birds, sent to England by way of
Hamburg. Rats and moths destroyed the contents of another case, left by
mistake for four years at Aden; and another, containing arms,
silver-mounted ornaments, and zoological specimens, its owner supposes
to be either at Bombay, Calcutta, or in some warehouse of the Transit
Company in Egypt. These losses are the more to be deplored, that they
comprised that of many extremely rare specimens of birds and monkeys,
some of them from regions into which it is probable that no European
traveller ever before penetrated. To make sure of not losing his
collection made in Nubia and on the White Nile, Mr Parkyns himself went
out to fetch it, and never lost sight of it till he had it safe at home.
It consisted of six hundred birds, and of about a ton weight of negro
arms and implements. He was still more unfortunate in geographical than
in zoological matters, having lost the whole of the observations, maps,
&c. made during his long residence in Tigrè.
The Great Gondar road, along which Mr Parkyns travelled for some
distance after quitting Axum, bears about the same resemblance to a
civilised European highway that Oubi’s smoky cabin bears to the Louvre
or the Escurial. High-roads in Abyssinia are mere tracks worn by
passage. “The utmost labour bestowed on any road in that country is,
when some traveller, vexed with a thorn that may happen to scratch his
face, draws his sword and cuts off the spray. Even this is rarely done.
An Abyssinian’s maxim is, ‘I may not pass by this way for a year again;
why should I give myself trouble for other people’s convenience?’ The
road, however, here as in many parts of Tigrè, is abundantly watered by
several tolerably copious streams, which flow _all_ the year round.
These are most useful to the numerous merchants who pass constantly
between Gondar, Adoua, and the Red Sea, with large caravans of laden
animals, offering not only ready means for watering their cattle, but
often green food for them near the banks, when all the rest of the
country is parched up and dry, and a cool grassy bed for their own weary
limbs to repose upon.” Hereupon Mr Parkyns breaks out into rapturous
laudation of life in the wilderness, and advises his readers to shoulder
their rifles, abandon civilised diggings, and take a few months’
roughing and hardship in a hot climate. Only in such a life, he
maintains, is real happiness and enjoyment to be found. His arguments
are as original as his book. The principle that he goes upon is, that
one enjoys nothing thoroughly until one has suffered from privation of
it. Shade, a patch of grass, a stream of water, a cloud, are treasures
in Africa, whilst in England they are unheeded, because easily
obtainable. A draught of water in the desert, albeit dirty or
tar-flavoured, is more precious than the choicest Tokay in epicurean
_blasé_ Europe; a piece of scorched gazelle and an ill-baked loaf, made
by putting a red-hot stone into the middle of a lump of dough, form a
repast more luxurious, when hunger and exercise supply the sauce, than
ever was placed before royal _gourmet_ by the most renowned of France’s
cooks. There is not much fruit in Abyssinia—but, oh! for a good raw
onion for luncheon! Scenting some of those fragrant bulbs, greedy
Parkyns, during his residence in the “Happy Valley” of Rohabaita, once
ran two miles up a hill, in the heat of the day. How he enjoyed himself
in that pleasant province of Rohabaita, hard by the banks of the Mareb,
where he abode nine months, and to which he feels disposed to devote
many chapters! He had the good fortune, he says, during his long stay,
to become considered as one of the country, and to be offered the
government of that and another province by H.R.H. Dejatch Lemma, Oubi’s
eldest son, who held authority in the north-western districts of Tigrè,
but who had been unable to acquire much influence over the
Rohabaitese—rough border-men, particularly averse to tax-paying, and
who, when pressed for the impost, fled with their movables across the
frontier. For, in Abyssinia, inattention to the tax-gatherer’s claim is
terribly punished. In the first instance, the offender is subjected to a
sort of _dragonnade_; soldiers are sent to live upon him, waste his
substance, and treat him brutally; so that, if he cannot at once borrow
money to pay his debt, he is speedily ruined. Another means of extortion
is still more barbarous: the insolvent is cast into prison, and chained
by the arm. “The iron round his wrist is not clasped, but is merely a
strong hoop, opened by force to allow the hand to enter, and then
hammered tight between two stones. At first it is only made tight enough
to prevent any possibility of the prisoner’s escape. After some time,
however, if the sum required be not forthcoming, it is knocked a little
tighter, and so, by degrees, the hand dies, the nails drop out, and the
poor prisoner is at best maimed for life. Death sometimes ensues from
this treatment.” Rather savage work, Mr Parkyns is fain to admit, whilst
assuring us that this torture is not often practised, and that his
Tigrine friends, with all their faults, have many good qualities. Lofty
were the castles he built in Rohabaita (aërial ones, of course, castles
of more solid structure being rare in a land whose sovereign is lodged
as we have described) whilst waiting for Oubi’s permission, for which
Lemma was obliged to apply before installing the Englishman in his
government. Besides the payment of a tribute to Lemma, Mr Parkyns
undertook to keep in order the neighbouring tribe of the Bàza, whom he
more frequently speaks of as the Barea or slaves, that being the name
given to them in Abyssinia. He was very desirous to visit that brave and
hardy tribe of savages, and had made all his arrangements to do so, when
Oubi unfortunately determined on a _razzia_, in retaliation of numerous
recent murders and robberies perpetrated by them in his dominions. In
the last of their forays they had pillaged monasteries, and slain their
holy occupants, whose blood cried aloud for vengeance. His project of a
pacific ramble amongst the Barea being thus knocked on the head, Mr
Parkyns hoped that the campaign itself would give him opportunities of
obtaining an insight into their manners. He was disappointed. Little or
nothing was seen of the natives except at the sword’s point. They appear
to be bold and wary warriors, skilled in the stratagems of savage
warfare. Mr Parkyns, when at Rohabaita, received a visit and presents
from a friend of his, one Obsabius, a hospitable old cock, and man in
authority, whom, on his departure, he accompanied for some distance with
a small escort, Obsabius, when coming, having seen Barea sign upon the
road. He was convinced that the blacks were outlying, and that he had
escaped attack only by having joined a number of other travellers.
“Scarcely had we passed the brook of Mai-Chena when one of our men, a
hunter, declared that he saw the slaves. Being at that time
inexperienced in such matters, I could see nothing suspicious. He then
pointed out to me a dead tree standing on an eminence at a distance of
several hundred yards, and charred black by last year’s fire. To
explain this, I should remark that the rains cause to spring up a
thick jungle of grass, canes, and bushes, which cover the whole
surface of the country, growing to a height of several feet. When this
becomes dry, it is set fire to—in some places by the farmers, as the
readiest means of clearing the ground; in others by hunters, to enable
them to get at their game with greater facility; and often
accidentally.... However, all that I saw was a charred stump of a
tree, and a few blackened logs or stones lying at its foot. The hunter
declared that neither tree nor stones were there the last time he
passed, and that they were simply naked Barea, who had placed
themselves in that position to observe us, having no doubt seen us for
some time, and prepared themselves.... So confident was I of his
mistake, that, telling the rest to go on slowly, as if nothing had
been observed, I dropped into the long grass and stalked up towards
them. A shot from my rifle, at a long distance (I did not venture too
close), acted on the trees and stones as powerfully as the fiddle of
Orpheus, but with the contrary effect; for the tree disappeared, and
the stones and logs, instead of running after me, ran in the opposite
direction. I never was more astonished in my life; for so complete was
the deception, that even up to the time I fired, I could have declared
the objects before me were vegetable or mineral—anything, indeed, but
animal. The cunning rascals who represented stones were lying flat,
with their little round shields placed before them as screens.”
The presents brought by the obliging Obsabius were a supply of food—corn
and honey—for there was considerable hunger in the Happy Valley just
then, the chase being unproductive, and the natives having fled from the
apprehension of a tax-gathering visit from the troops of the
extortionate Oubi. Abstinence, however, is a good thing in that climate,
and Mr Parkyns never felt himself better than during this tolerably long
period of semi-starvation. He was never fatigued, and wounds of all
kinds healed with wonderful rapidity. He led a rough life in that
frontier country, and wounds were common enough. “Once, in running down
the stony and almost precipitous path leading to the Mareb, I struck my
bare foot against an edge of rock, which was as sharp as a razor, and a
bit of flesh, with the whole of the nail of my left foot little toe, was
cut off, leaving only the roots of the nail. This latter I suppose to
have been the case, for it has grown all right again. I could not stop
longer than to _polish off_ the bit which was hanging by a skin, for we
were in chase of a party of Barea, who had cut the throats of three of
Waddy Hil’s nephews the night before, but was obliged to go on running
for about twenty miles that afternoon, the greater part of the way up to
our ankles in burning sand. Whether this cured it, I know not, but I
scarcely suffered at all from it the next day, and forgot it the day
after.” Thorns in the feet—no trifling prickles, but three or four
inches long—were picked out by the half-dozen at a time; and such, says
Mr Parkyns, is the force of habit and the thickness of skin one
acquires, that such an operation is thought no more of than an English
sportsman would of kicking away a clod of clay clinging to his
shooting-shoes. But to return to the Barea. Oubi remained nearly two
months in their country, which he completely traversed—so completely,
indeed, as to have unintentionally (?) committed depredations on certain
tribes to the north, claimed as tributary by the Egyptians. Although
good fighting men, the Bàza have too little idea of united action, and
are too ignorant of modern improvements in the art of slaughter, to make
head against their Abyssinian enemies when these take the field in
force. Their idea of cavalry is very ludicrous. They imagine them to be
old or infirm men, carried by horses because they cannot keep up with
their comrades on foot! “So in their campaigns, whenever the Bàza are
met by cavalry, they amuse themselves at their expense by facetiously
plucking handfuls of grass and holding them towards the horses, and
calling them ‘Tish, Tish,’ &c. They appear never able to understand how
the firearms of their adversaries kill them. Occasionally it has been
noticed that when a man has fallen among them by a gun-shot wound, his
neighbours will assist him up, imagining him to have stumbled; should
life be extinct, they manifest their astonishment at finding him dead
from some unseen cause, and when, on examining his body, they discover
the small round hole made by the ball, they will stare at it, poke their
fingers into it, and absolutely laugh with surprise and wonder.”
Notwithstanding these artless ways, the Bàza are ugly customers in a
hand-to-hand tussle—one of them usually proving more than a match for
two Abyssinians, and Mr Parkyns relates several anecdotes illustrative
of their physical superiority. But we feel desirous to take a glance at
his town life, which has even greater novelty than his chapters of wild
adventure, and so we return with him to Adoua, whither he went to pass
the rainy season when he left Rohabaita. He waited several months for
Oubi’s consent to his installation as governor; but before it arrived he
received long-expected supplies from England, and abandoned his
ambitious and philanthropical schemes—unfortunately for the Rohabaitese,
to the improvement of whose physical and moral condition they tended,
and fortunately for the Barea, against whom he proposed to organise a
system of moss-trooping, to result in much profit in ivory and buffalo
hides.
The delay of remittances from Europe rendering it probable that Mr
Parkyns would be detained for some time in Abyssinia, he resolved
completely to domesticate himself with the natives, as the best way of
studying their habits and mode of life. This he seems to us to have done
from the very commencement; for, as he justly observes, “there is
nothing like a civil tongue, and quiet unpretending manners, to get one
on in those countries;” so, upon principle, he always showed himself
ready to answer questions, and to do the amiable, and even to put up
with savage familiarities and intrusions, which he would gladly have
dispensed with: as, for instance, during his stay at Addaro, a village
of Addy Abo, formerly an important market, but now decayed and almost
deserted. It was there that he first saw the snake-killing secretary
bird, called Farras Seytan, or the Devil’s Horse, from the astonishing
swiftness with which it runs. He was the first white man who had ever
entered the place, with the exception of two French medical men, who had
passed through some years previously on their way to the Mareb, and one
of whom was carried off by fever, and the other by a crocodile, “picked
out by the voracious animal from the colour of his skin, whilst swimming
between two guides.” So a white skin was a great curiosity in Addaro;
and here we come to a plate representing Mr Parkyns reclining on a
settle, receiving perpetual visitors, whilst he jots down in his journal
the following memoranda:—“Blessed with a swarm of bees that have lodged
in the house. They have stung me several times; but I can bear that,
especially as they have also stung some of my importunate visitors, who,
by this means, are kept away. In fact, the only method I have to rid
myself of my friends is to stir up the bees—to rid myself of the bees, I
am obliged to stir up the fire, which is kept burning all day for the
cooking; but, by the time the bees are gone, the hut is intolerable.
Fancy a roaring fire, and lots of smoke, at noon in one of the hottest
places in Abyssinia.” His visitors were of a mixed description, and not
all of agreeable aspect; and, upon the whole, they bothered him no
little with their interminable questionings, attempts to extort
presents, and squabbles amongst themselves; but it would have been
impolitic to turn them out, except by the indirect agency of the bees;
and, moreover, he seems to possess one of those even, _insouciant_
tempers, hard to ruffle, which we take to be a prime requisite for a man
who sojourns amongst savages, and without which he certainly would not
have been able to say, at the end of his second volume, that, during
nine years’ travel, he never met with a companion, of whatsoever colour,
station, or religion, who gave him a moment’s cause to quarrel with him,
or from whom he parted otherwise than with regret. Far be it from us to
doubt the word of Mr Parkyns; but we would ask him if he really grieved
at relinquishing the society of an elderly warrior—his “friend,” he
calls him—who sat close to him at Addaro, looking over him as he wrote,
and begging to be set down in his book? “His name is Welda Georgis. He
is naturally very ugly; nor is his appearance at all improved by the
want of his nose, which he says he lost in battle. He cannot speak at
all without stopping the holes with his fingers; hence his voice,
especially when he speaks loud, is, as may be judged, not the most
harmonious; and just now he is raising it to a considerable pitch, being
excited to wrath by one of his companions insinuating that he was never
but in one battle, and that then he ran away before a blow had been
struck.” An imputation not to be borne; and, accordingly, in the plate
we see Welda Georgis and the other gentleman engaged in single combat
upon the floor. Presently Mr Parkyns is disturbed in his writing by a
bang, by a scream from a woman who is boiling a pot (a child in a bag on
her back), and by a “Wa!” from Welda Georgis, who, ignorant of the
dangers of a little knowledge, has been retailing to his friends
instructions he had received the day before in the art of cocking
double-barrelled pistols. He had cocked both barrels, but had pulled the
left trigger whilst holding the right hammer. A gourdful of capsicum
paste and a corn-jar were mortally wounded, but no other damage was
done. Welda laid down the weapon, which he evidently suspected of foul
play, looked gravely at it, and apostrophised it as “a naughty devil!”
Easy-going Mr Parkyns took all these trifles with an excellent grace, as
became a man of strong nerves, who had gone out to rough it, and who had
no desire to leave his bones in Abyssinia, or to have his physical
integrity in any way deteriorated. He smilingly put up with intruders,
and even with spies. He could not go out for a walk without being
followed. There is a notion abroad in those parts that Europeans _make_
money. This was confirmed, in the case of Mr Parkyns, by his happening
to have a great many new dollars. When he put one in circulation, the
receiver would exclaim, “Wa! this is only just made; see how it shines!”
So somebody always accompanied him, when he strolled out with his gun,
under pretence of showing him game, but in reality to watch his motions,
thinking to catch him in the very act of coining. It does not appear
that these scouts took much by their curiosity. “I often retire to the
neighbouring hills” (thus runs one of the brief verbatim quotations from
his journal, occasionally given by Mr Parkyns) “when about to take an
observation, or for some other reason wishing to be undisturbed, and
seek out some snug little nook or corner amongst the rocks. Scarcely,
however, have I time to make my preliminary arrangements, when, looking
up, I find two or three heads curiously peering into my retreat, fully
persuaded that they are about to behold the entire process of extracting
dollars from the earth, ready stamped with the august head of her
Imperial Majesty. Sometimes they were most laughably disappointed in
their expectations.” All this was at an early period of Mr Parkyns’
abode in the country; the natives had not got used to him, and he had
not yet become a complete Abyssinian; and, as we have already seen,
Addaro is an out-of-the-way place, where whites are rare. To see him to
advantage, we must accompany him to Adoua, notwithstanding that he tells
us he was less happy there, and exerted himself less to write down what
he observed, than “in the more genial solitude of the backwoods;” the
reason being, that “Adoua is a capital (!), though a small one; and in
all capitals, whether great or small, I feel out of my element, losing
at once my health, spirits, and energy and disposition for work.” The
force of imagination, the magic of a name, can hardly farther go. Let us
see what were the employments and pursuits of this wild man of the woods
in the village metropolis of Tigrè, in which the houses of the wealthy
are square and flat-roofed, whilst those of the poorer classes have a
conical thatch of straw. They seem to have consisted in noting native
peculiarities, in taking part in native banquets and merry-makings, and
in setting the fashion to Young Abyssinia. It is time, by the by, that
we should say a word of his intimate friend, Shetou, a fine fellow and
daring soldier, but no favourite with his father, Oubi, who took every
opportunity of snubbing him, and showed a marked preference for his puny
elder brother, Lemma. “Shetou has rather a slang way of dressing, which
greatly offends his father. Sometimes he comes in with one leg of his
trousers drawn up in the proper manner above his calf, and the other
dangling down about his ankle. On such an occasion, it would not be at
all extraordinary should Oubi, after looking at him fixedly, and in his
usual quiet smiling manner, begin, in the presence of all assembled,
‘Well done, son of a Mahommedan mother! Pretty way of wearing your
breeches, isn’t it? Some new fashion of your own, eh?’ And, turning to
the _agafari_ (doorkeepers), ‘Turn him out! turn him out!’ The poor lad
is put out in the most neck-and-crop manner, and, returning to his tent,
he broods over this treatment, and vows vengeance on his brother, Lemma,
who, from being the favourite, is partly the cause of it.” A prince of
the blood-royal must naturally feel incensed at being ignominiously
ejected from the court of his despotic dad, for no greater offence than
the fanciful sit of his breeks. But whose fault is it? No one’s, if not
that of Mr Parkyns, the Brummel of that foreign court, the promoter of
all manner of sartorial extravagances and innovations. “This” (a
particular cut of trouser) “was considered so very ultra-fashionable
that, except Dejatch Shetou, myself, and one or two others, few dared
attempt it. It was I and my friend Shetou who first introduced the habit
of allowing the sword to swing perpendicularly from the side, instead of
its sticking out horizontally, like a dog’s tail; as well as of wearing
the belt over the hips, instead of round the waist, and up to the
armpits, as it was worn when I first arrived. These, with the increased
length of trousers, reaching, as we wore them, nearly to the ankle, and
so tight below that it took an hour to draw them over the heel, gave a
very ‘fast’ look.” Mr Parkyns has immortalised his name in Tigrè, and
will be spoken of with admiration by future generations, to whom his
fame will be handed down by the dandies to whom he set so bright an
example. The incompatibility of cleanliness and elegance in Abyssinia
rather shocks our European prejudices. The great “go,” we are told,
amongst the dandies in those parts, is “to appear in the morning with a
huge pot of butter (about two ounces) placed on the top of the head,
which, as it gradually melts in the sun, runs over the hair, down the
neck, over the forehead, and often into the eyes, thereby causing much
smarting.” The grease is wiped from the brow and eyes with _the quarry_
or cloth, a garment compared by Mr Parkyns to the Roman toga, and which
it is the fashion to wear dirty, a clean one being considered “slow.”
But the town life of the young fashionables of rank in the chief cities
of Abyssinia, may best be summed up and exhibited in an extract from Mr
Parkyns’ thirty-eighth chapter, where he shows himself to us in all his
glory as the D’Orsay of Adoua.
“I was leading,” he says, “the life of an Abyssinian gentleman ‘about
town,’ my hair well tressed, my pantaloons always of the newest,
frequently of an original cut; in dull weather setting fashions,
disputing and deciding on the merits and demerits of shields and
spears; in fine weather swelling about the town with a quarter of a
pound of butter melting on my head, face, neck, and clothes, and with
a tail of half a dozen well-got-up and equally greasy soldiers at my
heels; doing the great man, with my garment well over my nose, at
every festival and funeral worth attending; ‘hanging out’ extensively
when I had a few shillings to spend; sponging on my neighbours when,
as was oftener the case, I had nothing;—in fact, living a most
agreeable life on a very limited income. I cannot deny that I look
back to those times with a certain feeling of regret. It was the only
period of my life in which I ever felt myself a really great man. I
‘cry very small’ in England, with a much greater expenditure. The men
will not look after me with admiration, nor the girls make songs about
me here.”
Poor Parkyns! fallen from your high estate, dwindled from an
African savage into an English gentleman! We wretched, civilised
Europeans are rather in the _nil admirari_ vein, but we will
answer for your being “looked after” with curiosity and
wonderment, by all who have read your book, if you will but adopt
some distinguishing mark by which you may be recognised when you
walk abroad. As to the songs, whose absence you deplore, we can
only say that if you are not taken for the subject of romantic
ditties by the poetesses of England, as you were by those of
Tigrè, it will certainly not be because the theme is unsuggestive.
Innumerable incidents in your Abyssinian career deserve to be
commemorated in flowing metre, and sung by Ethiopian serenaders to
banjo accompaniment, and to the ancient and pathetic melody of
“The King of the Cannibal Islands.” And this reminds us to
accompany you to one of the festivals you above allude to—a dinner
party at Adoua—first advising ladies to have their salts at hand,
and permitting squeamish readers to pass over a page if it so
please them. Here are a score of Abyssinian gentlemen squatted,
sword in hand, on cut grass round a low table. It is perhaps
unnecessary to mention that the tablecloth has been forgotten, and
that napkins are absent, their place being supplied by cakes of
bread, on which the guests wipe their fingers after dipping them
in the dish or smearing them with the blood of the raw meat. The
cooked dishes are first brought in and their contents distributed
by waiters, who cut the meat or tear it with their fingers into
pieces of a convenient size. They also take a piece of bread from
before each person, sop it in the sauce, and return it to him.
“The guests take their bread and sauce and mix them together into
a sort of paste, of which they make balls, long and rounded like
small black puddings (black enough, we doubt not); these they
consider it polite to poke into their neighbours’ mouths; so that,
if you happen to be a distinguished character, or a stranger to
whom they wish to pay attention, which was often my case, you are
in a very disagreeable position; for your two neighbours, one on
each side, cram into your mouth these large and peppery proofs of
their esteem so quickly, one after the other, that, long before
you can chew and swallow the one, you are obliged to make room for
the next.” Surely these can hardly be included amongst the “happy
moments” Mr Parkyns so pathetically regrets, when recording,
towards the close of his work, his tearful parting from his Adoua
friends—the first time, he says, since his arrival in the country,
that he felt the want of a pocket-handkerchief. Let us, however,
proceed with our repast, after a glance at the accompanying plate
of the “Dinner Party,” where a favoured guest, with distended
jaws, is undergoing the cramming process. This first course, of
cooked dishes, is usually mutton; whilst it is being gobbled up, a
cow is killed and flayed outside, and as soon as the first course
is removed, in comes the raw meat—the _broundo_, as it is
called—brought in by servants in quivering lumps.
“There is usually a piece of meat to every five or six persons, among
whom arises some show of ceremony as to which of them shall first help
himself; this being at length decided, the person chosen takes hold of
the meat with his left hand, and with his sword or knife cuts a strip
a foot or fifteen inches long from the part which appears the nicest
and tenderest. The others then help themselves in like manner. If I
should fail in describing properly the scene which now follows, I must
request the aid of the reader’s imagination. Let him picture to
himself thirty or forty Abyssinians, stripped to their waists,
squatting round the low tables, each with his sword or knife or
‘shotel’ in his hand, some eating, some helping themselves, some
waiting their turn, but all bearing in their features the expression
of that fierce gluttony which one attributes more to the lion or
leopard than to the race of Adam. The imagination may be much assisted
by the idea of the lumps of raw pink-and-blue flesh they are gloating
over.”
Some still more full-flavoured details follow, which we abstain from
extracting, thinking we can fill up the space remaining to us better
than by their transcription, and referring those curious in such matters
to chapter xxvii., “Manners and Customs,” where they will see how the
pepperballs already spoken of are got rid of by those into whose mouths
they are thrust, how boys lie under the table and act as scavengers, and
how Mr Parkyns expresses his belief that raw meat, eaten whilst yet
warm, would be preferred to cooked meat by any man who from childhood
had been accustomed to it. In the chapter headed “Religion, &c.,” which
“&c.” comprises a variety of strange things, we are told of “a small
entertainment” he gave to a select party of friends on the occasion of
the great festival of Mascal or the Cross, a season celebrated, like
Christmas in England, by hospitality and good cheer. He sent out his
cards for an early hour, knowing that his guests would have several
other feeds to attend in the course of the day. But when he had done
this, his conscience smote him, for he reflected that, with half a dozen
other breakfasts and dinners in view, his friends would but take the
sharp edge off their appetites in his wigwam, and husband their
masticatory and digestive powers for the subsequent banquets. “My rather
savage feelings of hospitality,” he says, “were piqued at the idea of
their leaving me without being well filled. But truly I was agreeably
disappointed; for a fine fat cow, two large sheep, and many gallons of
mead, with a proportionate quantity of bread, disappeared like smoke
before the twelve or fourteen guests, leaving only a few pickings for
the servants.” Mr Parkyns met several of these hungry gentlemen at other
dinners in the course of the same day, and was utterly confounded to
observe that most of them played as good a knife and fork (we mean sabre
and fingers) at every ensuing repast as they had done at his. The
capacity of an Abyssinian stomach is evidently incalculable.
The 19th and 37th chapters of Mr Parkyns’ work are amongst those that
please us best. In the earlier of the two he is on his way from Axum to
Addàro, across a vast open plain, embellished with a great variety of
flowers; amongst them a kind of scarlet aloe, met with in most parts of
Tigrè, and flowering at all seasons, and countless mimosas, pink,
yellow, and white, some of them so fragrant as to scent the whole
neighbourhood, adding their perfume to that of a profusion of jessamine.
“There is also a beautiful parasitical creeper, growing, like the
mistletoe, from the bark of other trees. It has a bright dark-green
fleshy leaf, with brilliant scarlet flowers.” But Mr Parkyns is not much
of a botanist; zoology, and especially ornithology, are his favourite
pursuits, and, a capital shot, he bagged as many specimens as he chose.
“Rifle-shooting,” he modestly says, “was about the only thing in the
world I could do well.” The _was_ is to be deplored. It is thus
accounted for. Near Addàro, a hunter, either accidentally or
mischievously, set fire to the jungle. Mr Parkyns was then staying in a
hamlet, situated on a small hill. It consisted but of three compounds,
one of which he and his servants occupied; another was inhabited by a
farmer named Aito Hablo, with his wife and family; and in the third
dwelt a cast-off wife and children of the same Aito. Divorces are not
difficult to obtain in that country. One morning, all hands were roused
by the crackling of flames close at hand. The hillock was surrounded by
fire, gradually creeping up the slope. The huts were roofed with sticks
and straw, and the ground was covered with long dry grass. There was no
time to lose. Tearing down green boughs from the trees, the men, whilst
the women and children lit counterfires upon the plan usually adopted in
such cases, “made rushes at the flames, whenever a lull of the wind
allowed them to approach them, and, by beating them with the boughs, in
some measure impeded their progress till the space was cleared and the
huts were out of danger. I and one of my servants happened to rush at
the fire at an unlucky moment; for a breeze rising drove the flames
towards us just as we got near them, and we were badly scorched.”
Besides other injuries, the optic nerve of Mr Parkyns’ right eye was
damaged, and this spoiled his rifle-shooting. “Formerly,” he says, “I
managed occasionally to shoot from my left shoulder—a habit which I
found useful in stalking, as in some positions you must necessarily
expose yourself before you can bring your right shoulder forward. Now
that I am obliged to trust to my left alone, I find it a very poor
substitute for the right.” Even after this unlucky accident, however, we
find Mr Parkyns very dexterously picking off bird and beast, to supply
his table or enrich his collection. He tells some capital sporting
anecdotes, and others, equally good, of his queer pets, and of his
experience amongst the monkeys. About half-way across the mimosa-scented
plain, he came to a well-wooded ravine, the trees in which swarmed with
the “tota” or “waag,” a beautiful little greenish-grey monkey, with
black face and white whiskers, which allows men to approach very near to
it. But the cleverest of this class of animals met with in Abyssinia is
the Cynocephalus, or Dog-faced Baboon, a formidable animal, of
extraordinary sagacity, to which it is really difficult to refuse the
possession of reasoning powers. Mr Parkyns sketches these creatures on a
foray. “Arrived at the corn-fields, the scouts took their position on
the eminences all around, whilst the remainder of the tribe collect
provisions with the utmost expedition, filling their cheek-pouches as
full as they can hold, and then tucking the heads of corn under their
armpits. Now, unless there be a partition of the collected spoil, how do
the scouts feed? for I have watched them several times, and never
observed them to quit for a moment their post of duty till it was time
for the tribe to return, or till some indication of danger induced them
to take to flight.” Outlying one night on the frontier, Mr Parkyns was
roused by most awful noises, and started up in alarm, thinking the Barea
were upon him. It was but the baboons. A leopard had got amongst them.
They habitually dwell in lofty clefts of the rock, whither few animals
can follow them; but the leopard is a good climber, and sometimes
attacks them. The Abyssinians say that he seldom ventures to attack a
full-grown ape—and, judging from the formidable canine teeth displayed
in the skull sketched by Mr Parkyns, the leopard is in the right. Driven
to stand at bay, these baboons are dangerous opponents, but they have
not sufficient courage to act on the offensive. “Were their
combativeness proportioned to their physical powers, coming as they do
in bodies of two or three hundred, it would be impossible for the
natives to go out of the village except in parties, and armed; and,
instead of little boys, regiments of armed men would be required to
guard the corn-fields. I have, however, frequently seen them turn on
dogs, and have heard of their attacking women whom they have
accidentally met alone in the roads or woods. On one occasion I was told
of a woman who was so grievously maltreated by them, that, although she
was succoured by the opportune arrival of some passers-by, she died a
few days after, from the fright and ill-treatment she had endured.” We
are reminded of Sealsfield’s striking Mexican sketch of the _zambos_. Mr
Parkyns had a female dog-face as a pet. She was young when he got her;
and, from the first, her affection for him was ludicrously annoying. As
she grew older she was less dependent, and cared less about being left
alone. The master of a German brig who went up the country for a cargo
of animals, gave Mr Parkyns a copy of “Peter Simple.” Besides the Bible
and the “Nautical Almanack,” this, he says, was the first English book
he had seen for two years, and he sat down greedily to devour it.
“‘Lemdy’ was as usual seated beside me, at times looking quietly at me,
occasionally catching a fly, or jumping on my shoulder, endeavouring to
pick out the blue marks tattooed there.” The group is suggestive for a
sculptor; a thousand pities no Abyssinian Canova was at hand to model
it. Mr Parkyns went to light his pipe, imprudently leaving the book and
the monkey together. On his return he found the latter seated in his
place, and gravely turning over the leaves of Marryat’s novel; but, not
understanding English, she turned them too quickly, and had torn out
half the volume. “During my momentary absences she would take up my pipe
and hold it to her mouth till I came back, when she would restore it
with the utmost politeness.” At Khartoum, some time after the
termination of his Abyssinian wanderings, Mr Parkyns became very
intimate with three large monkeys of this intelligent species, and with
their showman—“so much so, that I travelled with them for some days,
acting as his assistant, my duty being to keep the ring, which I did by
gracefully swinging round me two wooden balls covered with red cloth,
and fastened, one at each end, to a rope similarly ornamented—and
occasionally to assist the monkeys in collecting coppers. I passed a
very agreeable time with him, and he told me many anecdotes of monkeys,
as well as the usual tales of ghouls, fire-worshippers, &c., for which
all Egyptians, especially of his erratic habits, are celebrated.” If
this be not a joke—and there is no reason to take it for one, since Mr
Parkyns, who is a sort of African Gil Blas (only more scrupulous in
certain respects than his Spanish prototype), was evidently, at that
time of his life, eccentric and adventurous enough to adopt on the
instant any wild freak that entered his head—we hope to have a more
detailed account of his association with the showman when he favours us
with the narrative of his post-Abyssinian travels, not forgetting the
anecdotes of monkeys (he tells two or three very good ones), and the
traditions of ghouls and fire-worshippers. We are sure that he must
there have materials for at least one long chapter; and we feel
particular curiosity about the traditions, because the supernatural
seems to partake, in tropical Africa, of the strange, fantastical,
exaggerated character of the animal and vegetable productions of the
country. Extraordinary stories are there current of tribes of monsters,
semi-human, dwelling in the unexplored parts of the country—such as the
Beni-Kelb or Dog-men (mentioned by Werne), “whose males are dogs, and
females beautiful women; and the Beni-Temsah (sons of the crocodile),
who have human bodies, but heads like those of their ancestor’s family.
I have heard of the former of these nations in almost every country I
have visited in Africa, from Egypt to the White Nile, including Kordofan
and Abyssinia, and even in Arabia, whither their fame has been carried,
doubtless, by pilgrims. They are, by most, believed to exist near the
Fertit country (south of Darfour), where there are copper-mines, and the
people of which file their teeth to points, saw-fashion.... There is no
tribe in this part of Africa, indeed scarcely an individual, but
believes in the existence of a race of men with tails. For my own part,
I have heard so much of them that I can scarcely help fancying there
must be some foundation for such very general belief.” Great diversity
of opinion exists as to the whereabouts of these tail-bearers, some
placing them to the north, others to the south of Bàza, and others in
the centre of Africa—convenient, because unexplored. A black Fàky or
priest, a speculative genius, whose acquaintance Mr Parkyns made in
Abyssinia, gave him some information about his future route across
Africa, and warned him against certain cannibal tribes south of Darfour,
by whom white meat, being a rarity, is much esteemed, as having a fat
delicate look. “He told me that a brown man, a Mahommedan priest, who
went there from his country, in the hope of converting the people to
Islamism, was—though protected from actual danger by his sanctity—a very
tempting object among them, so much so, that whenever he went out the
little children came about him, poking him with their fingers in the
ribs, feeling his arms and legs, and muttering to one another, ‘Wa-wa,
wa-wa!’ (meat, meat), with their mouths watering, and their features
expressive of the greatest possible inclination to taste him.” We will
back Mr Parkyns against the field for the humorous dressing-up of
extravagant stories of this kind, and for an occasional dash of dry
comical exaggeration, too obvious to mislead. His choice of pet animals
was rather of the strangest. For some time he kept a “tokla” (_Canis
venaticus_), which was as nearly tame as its wild vicious nature
admitted.
“In appearance Tokla was more curious than beautiful. He had a little
lean body, which no feeding could fatten, covered with a darkish
brindly-spotted coat not unlike a hyena’s, and supported by legs as
unlike those of any other animal as possible, being in colour white,
with dark leopard spots, the hind-legs remarkably long, and so doubled
under him that when walking, or rather prowling about, it was doubtful
if he touched the ground oftenest with his feet or _elbows_.... To
account for his perpetual thinness, it only requires to state his mode
of feeding. He would take a huge piece of meat or offal, and put it
into his stomach at once, seemingly entire, for he never appeared
aware that his wonderfully muscular jaws and double row of teeth were
at all available for mastication. Having thus bolted his dinner, his
belly became distended till it nearly touched the ground; then he
would go and lie down for twenty-four hours or more, according to the
quantity he had eaten; after which he would return to be fed, as empty
and starved-looking as ever.”
A useful, profitable, and agreeable inmate must the said Tokla have
been. Mr Parkyns’ regard for him seems to have arisen from a sort of
sympathetic feeling for the unflinching pluck and endurance displayed on
various occasions by the ill-conditioned little brute. A friend of his,
knowing his partiality to pet animals, made him a present of a young
jackal, which he had knocked over with a stick, when it was labouring
under the effects of a surfeit of locusts. Jackal was hospitably
received, and a bed of cotton wool made up for him.
“Rising early one morning, I found that he and Tokla had entered into
an alliance most offensive to the fowls, one of whom they had caught,
and were dragging about the yard—the one holding by a foot, the other
by a wing. The moment I appeared, Cobero (the jackal) let go the fowl
and limped back to his corner. Tokla, more determined, I had to beat
off, which I did with great difficulty, and not until the poor fowl
was so lacerated that I was constrained to kill it. Excited by its
death-struggles, he again laid hold; so I held up the fowl with him
dangling to its wing until I was tired, and then swung him round and
round, over and over, in hopes of his jaws tiring; but in this I was
disappointed, for he held on till the wing breaking off threw him
heavily on his back to a distance of several yards. Even in his fall
he was great, for he neither uttered a sound of pain nor loosened his
hold, but, getting up, stalked away quite proudly with the wing in his
mouth. I was so much pleased with him that I gave him the body and
all. In this, perhaps, I acted wrong, for we afterwards found that if
we didn’t kill all the poultry he would, and so I gave up ever keeping
any more. Poor little Tokla! I grew very fond of him, for, though
rough and ugly, he had such pretty winning ways—he seemed always
hungry, and would often bite people’s legs, occasionally my own, not
at all from vice, but sheer appetite.”
Upon the whole, life in Abyssinia bears much resemblance to life in a
menagerie, so familiar and intrusive are the wild beasts of the field.
Hyenas prowl about the villages, and enter houses in quest of a supper.
They are far from dainty in their diet, and will eat leathern bags and
wearing apparel. “It once occurred to me,” says Mr Parkyns, “as it has
often to people I have known, to be awakened by one of them endeavouring
to steal my leathern bed from under me.” They are too cowardly to attack
anything capable of defence, but occasionally they take a bite out of a
sleeper and run away—first scratching him with their paw (so the
Abyssinians assert) to be sure that he sleeps soundly, and then
snatching their mouthful. As for lions, they frequently prowled around
Mr Parkyns’ bivouacs, but were not aggressive, and it was not even
necessary to light fires to keep them off. The buffalo-hunters of
Rohabaita used, upon the contrary, to light their camp-fires in holes,
and conceal their glare with branches of trees, that the blaze might
neither scare the buffalo nor bring down the Barea.
“I never killed a lion during all my stay in Africa,” says Mr Parkyns,
with meritorious candour—seeing that he might, without fear of
contradiction, have set down to his own rifle any number of the kings
of the forest. “I perhaps should have done so, had I known what a fuss
is made about it at home; but in Abyssinia it is not an easy thing to
accomplish.... At night I have often watched for them, but generally
without success; and when they did come, it was next to impossible to
shoot them. Besides, it is an awkward thing for a man, armed only with
a single rifle of light calibre, to take a flying shot at a lion in
the dark, especially when he has no one to back him on whose courage
or shooting he can rely. You hear a lion roar in the distance;
presently a little nearer; then you start up at hearing a short bark
close by; and if there be a fire or moonlight, perhaps you may see a
light-coloured object gliding quickly past from one bush to another.
Before you are sure whether or no you saw anything, it is gone. You
sit watching for a moment, rifle in hand, expecting him to appear
again, when (how he got there you know not) his roar is heard at a
considerable distance off in an opposite direction; and thus you go on
for an hour or two, when, getting sleepy, you politely request him to
take himself off to a certain warm place, and, returning your rifle
between your legs, roll over and go to sleep.”
Long habit and strong reliance on the mansuetude of the Abyssinian lions
must, we should think, be indispensable to slumber under such
circumstances. We can hardly fancy a man’s being lulled to rest by a
lion’s roar, and sinking into one of the deep and heavy sleeps common in
that country, with the consciousness that when he awakes he may possibly
behold a hyena gallopping off with his cheek in its mouth,[2] or find a
few scorpions walking over his body, leisurely stinging him. “Scorpions
are abundant everywhere in the hot districts; no house but is full of
them. I have been stung several times by them, but without any serious
consequences, though I have heard of many instances which have ended
fatally.” Mr Parkyns, we presume, at once applied the keen blade and
actual cautery recommended in his Introduction. What with incidental
scars of this kind, his tattoo decorations, and the scars he voluntarily
made upon his arm by an Abyssinian process similar to the moxa of
European surgery, and which is done by those people partly as ornamental
and partly to show their fortitude under pain, his epidermis must have
rather a remarkable appearance when exposed by the scantiness of costume
in which he informs us that he sometimes travelled—_en cueros_, namely,
when on solitary roads, and with a piece of rag or hide round the loins
when in populous districts. We certainly never met with or heard of any
traveller who embraced savagery with such earnestness and hearty
goodwill as Mr Parkyns; and we sincerely congratulate him upon his
escape with trifling detriment from the perils and exposure he not only
encountered but enthusiastically sought.
Tigrè is rich in reptiles. Of the extent of this undesirable wealth, a
few lines, culled here and there from the chapter on Natural History,
will give a vivid idea. “The crocodile is plentiful in every brook or
hole where there is water enough to conceal him.” A poor German, who
attached himself for a time to Mr Parkyns, and tended him carefully when
he was laid up with a terrible attack of ophthalmia, imprudently walked
into a river to cool himself, and suddenly disappeared, either sucked in
by a whirlpool or carried off by a crocodile—the latter, Mr Parkyns
thought, most probably the case; notwithstanding which, we come, a few
pages afterwards, to a plate of the bold traveller crossing the same
rapid and dangerous stream, aided by half a dozen swimming blacks, and
apparently heedless of the fact that crocodiles, like the cannibals
south of Darfour, show a decided preference for white meat. “There are
many snakes, centipedes, and large venomous spiders, of the tarantula
kind, in the hot low districts. There is a great variety in the smaller
sort of snakes: the cerastes or horned viper, asp, a species of cobra,
the puff adder, and many others of all sizes and colours, from a pale
pink to the brightest emerald green, are met with in Abyssinia and the
adjacent countries. I was told of a horned serpent that was killed some
years ago, which appears to have been a monstrosity, either in reality
or in the imagination of my informants. They describe it as about seven
feet long, nearly two feet in circumference, with scarcely any
diminution towards the tail, and wearing a pair of horns three inches in
length. It is commonly reported that dragons, or rather flying lizards
of very venomous nature, are to be met with in Walkait.” A pleasant
country for pic-nics in the woods. Going one day to shoot at a mark in a
long narrow gully close to Rohabaita, where the village wells were, Mr
Parkyns had just paced off the distance, and was building a rough target
of stones, when his servant started back, and pulled him with him,
calling out, “Temen, temen!” (snake). There was a rustling in the jungle
that rose abruptly on either side of the watercourse, which was only a
few feet wide. Not knowing what _temen_ meant, but supposing it was some
wild animal, Mr Parkyns called loudly to his second attendant to bring
the gun. “All this passed in a moment’s time; and although only one
hundred and fifty yards off, long before the gun arrived I had seen two
magnificent boa-constrictors, one about ten yards from the other,
quietly leave their places, without attempting to molest us, and ascend
the hill, till they were lost in jungle, whither I never cared to pursue
them. The first thing I saw after the rustle was a head, which appeared
for a moment above the canes, then a body, nearly as thick as my thigh,
and then they disappeared, the movement of the canes alone marking the
direction they had taken.” What Mr Parkyns says he himself saw we duly
credit, whilst fully sharing his intimated incredulity with respect to
the winged dragons, and the apocryphal horned monster. Before believing
in them, we should like to see them—not, by any means, roaming at large
in the state of vigour promoted by their own burning climate, but
properly stuffed, or carefully wrapped in flannel and securely caged, in
the gardens of the Zoological Society.
Although it may with perfect truth be said that no chapter of Mr
Parkyns’ book is devoid of strong interest of one kind or other, all are
not equally attractive; and we have preferred dwelling at some length
upon the section of natural history to extracting any of the horrible
stories of Abyssinian cruelty which he relates under the head of
“Anecdotes of Character.” He himself seems to doubt whether they might
not have been as well omitted, but perhaps he was right in deciding to
give them, in order to supply data for a fair estimate of the national
character of that singular people, which he might otherwise have been
suspected of placing in too favourable a light. Persons to whom
narratives of murder, torture, barbarous mutilation, and savage cruelty
are odious and intolerable, have only to treat the pages 187 to 222 of
the second volume as the monkey treated those of “Peter Simple”—turn
without reading them, although we warn them that by so doing they will
miss some very characteristic and curious matter. Portions of the
chapter devoted to “Physical Constitution, Diseases, &c.,” may be trying
to delicate stomachs, but for such Mr Parkyns has not written—as may be
judged from one or two extracts already given. Amongst the traits of
character, &c., we find some remarkable anecdotes of Arab swordsmanship.
An Abyssinian having treacherously murdered one of the Arab allies of
the Tigrè chiefs (merely for the sake of gratifying the exorbitant
vanity inherent in all those people, by displaying the barbarous
trophies taken from his victim), the murdered man’s friends claimed the
assassin’s blood.
“The crime being proved against him, Oubi gave him over to their
tender mercies. His punishment was most summary. Before they had left
the presence of the prince, one of the relations of the deceased,
drawing his heavy two-edged broadsword, cut the culprit through with
one blow; and, turning to Oubi, said, in Arabic: ‘May God lengthen
your life, oh my master!’—just as he would have done had he received a
present from his hands; and then, picking up a wisp of grass from the
floor, walked away, wiping his blade with as much _sangfroid_ as if
nothing had occurred. Oubi is said to have expressed much admiration
at the manly off-hand way in which this was done, as well as at the
wonderful display of swordsmanship. I know, from very good authority,
that the facts of the Arab being murdered, and the subsequent
execution of the criminal, are true, though I was not present when it
occurred. I do not dispute the fact; I do not wish any of my readers,
who think such a feat impossible, to believe it in the present
instance. I have known for certain of the same feat being performed by
Turks with their crooked sabres, but never by an Arab with his
straight sword.”
Mr Parkyns subjoins a note relating to the campaign in Taka in which
Werne shared.[3] Some of the prisoners then made were, as recorded by
Werne, treated with great barbarity. We do not remember his mentioning
the exact circumstances now recorded; but he separated from the Egyptian
army before its return to Khartoum, in order to join the expedition up
the White Nile. Certain chiefs, Mr Parkyns tells us, being marched off
to be made examples of on the marketplace of Khartoum, paused on the
road and refused to proceed. “Suliman Cushif, who commanded the escort,
having orders that all such should be put to death on the spot, is said
to have practised his swordsmanship on them by cutting them through at
the waist as they stood. My friend, Moussa Bey, in the same expedition,
unintentionally cut a horse’s head clean off.... Seeing one of his men
turn his horse’s head and make for the jungle, he determined to check so
dangerous an example by summary means, and so gave chase to the
fugitive. Being better mounted, he soon came up with him; but the Arab,
not liking his appearance as he stood up in his stirrups with his nasty
little crooked olive-brown blade, ready for a back-stroke, threw his
horse suddenly back on his haunches, and dropped off; the horse’s head
went up just in time to receive the blow aimed at his master”—and
dropped off too, it would appear. Mr Parkyns knows, he says, plenty more
such anecdotes—and indeed such anecdotes are plentiful enough in other
countries than Africa—but nothing is more difficult than to sift the
inventions from the verities. Haydon the artist, who seems to have been
partial to such tales, and ready enough to credit them, relates some
astounding exploits collected from his model life-guardsmen—amongst
others a story of a cut received by a French dragoon at Waterloo, which
went through helmet and head, so that the severed portion dropped on the
shoulder like a slice of apple. We have not the volume at hand to refer
to, but this is the substance of the incident, told nearly in the same
words. Such cuts as that—like the flying dragons of Abyssinia—we must
see before believing in them. At the same time, a swordsman’s power
depends so much more upon the mode in which his cuts are delivered than
upon mere brute strength—upon skill than upon violence—that it becomes
difficult to assign exact limits to the possible effect of a good blade
in adroit and practised hands. The cutting through, at the waist, of a
slender Oriental, will hardly appear an impossibility to those who have
seen the now commonplace feat of severing a leg of mutton at a blow.
Moussa Bey’s “nasty little crooked olive-brown blade” must
unquestionably have been dexterously wielded to decapitate, at a single
blow, his fugitive follower’s charger, allowing even that the latter was
the slenderest and most ewe-necked of its race. Oubi’s admiration of the
sweeping blow of his Arab auxiliary was not surprising, since his own
subjects have difficulty in inflicting a serious wound with their clumsy
sickle-shaped falchions, of great length of blade, and with hilts of
such awkward and inconvenient construction as to paralyse the play of
the swordsman’s arm. These hilts are cut out of solid pieces of
rhinoceros horn, at great waste of material, and a handsome one costs as
much as £2 sterling. The sword is worn on the right side, that the
Abyssinian warrior may not, when he has thrown his lance, have to
disturb the position of his shield, and so uncover himself, whilst
drawing his weapon across his body. Such, at least, is the explanation
Mr Parkyns gives. But the whole military equipment of the Abyssinians is
far from formidable. They are tolerably expert in throwing the javelin,
but with firearms they are extremely clumsy; and, notwithstanding their
large buffalo-hide shields, a European, who has any knowledge of the
sword, is more than a match for the best of them.
“It was my original intention” (we revert to Mr Parkyns’ Introduction)
“to write solely on the habits of the people, without bringing myself
into notice in any part of the story; but from this I was dissuaded by
being told that, without a little personal narrative, the book would be
unreadable. I have, therefore, divided the subject into two
parts—Travel, and Manners and Customs.” Your dissuasive friends, Mr
Parkyns, were in the right, and you showed your good sense by taking
their advice—in _form_ as regards the first volume, in _fact_ as regards
also the greater part of the second. Personal narrative is evidently
your forte; a humorous, rollicking, letter-writing style, the one you
have most at your command. The “exuberant animal spirits, not dependent
on temporary excitement, but the offspring of abstemious habits,
combined with plenty of air and exercise—the feeling which inspires a
calf to cock his tail, shake his head, kick and gallop about—which
swells a pigmy into a Hercules, and causes a young hippopotamus to think
of adopting the ballet as his profession,”—which you declare to be the
reason of your addiction to savage life, and which you so enjoyed in
Abyssinia, had evidently not abandoned you when dressing up your journal
for the press within the civilised precincts of the Nottinghamshire
County-hall, whence you date your dedication to Lord Palmerston. Your
style, of which you unnecessarily deprecate criticism, is spirited,
racy, and abundantly good for the subject. When the mass of your book is
so highly interesting, it may seem unkind to mention that a few of your
jokes are a little the worse for wear, and remind us too strongly of the
departed Miller to add much to the originality of your otherwise
extremely original and capital volumes; and if we touch on that point,
it is merely in the hope that you will take the hint in a kindly spirit,
and profit by it when preparing for the press the “ponderous heap of
papers” you inform us you accumulated during four and a half years’
travel in Nubia, Kordofan, and Egypt. Prepare them by all means, at your
leisure, and with care, and let us have them in type at the earliest
convenience of yourself and publisher. After your present work, we shall
expect much from them, and do not fear being disappointed. As to
attacking your statements, in the way of impugning your veracity, such
temerity would never enter our minds. We will not say that we have not
at times been startled, almost staggered, as we read with foot on
fender, and much enjoyment, the narrative of your strange experience;
but, as you justly observe, stay-at-home critics sometimes get hold of
the wrong end of the stick, and sneer at truth whilst swallowing
exaggerations. We beg, then, to assure you that, until we ourselves have
passed a season in Abyssinia, with butter on our hair, and nothing on
our feet—until we have dined upon raw beefsteaks, with fingers for
forks, and a curved sabre for a carving-knife—we shall never venture to
question the strict correctness and fidelity of any portion of your
singular narrative—an assurance you may safely accept as a guarantee of
impunity at our hands, even though you should draw a far longer bow than
we believe you to have done in the case of the country of which you have
so pleasantly written. Of one thing we are convinced, and that is, that
few who take up _Life in Abyssinia_ will lay it down without reading it
through, and without exclaiming, when they come to the end, “What an
amusing book this is, and what an agreeable savage is Mansfield
Parkyns!”
THE QUIET HEART.
PART III.—CHAPTER XI.
“My patience! but ye’ll no tell me, Miss Menie, that yon auld antick is
the doctor’s aunt?”
“She was no older than my father, though she was his aunt, Jenny,” said
Menie Laurie, with humility. Menie was something ashamed, and had not
yet recovered herself of the first salute.
“Nae aulder than the doctor!—I wouldna say; your mamma hersel is no sae
young as she has been; but the like of yon!”
“Look, Jenny, what a pleasant place,” said the evasive Menie; “though
where the heath is—but I suppose as they call this Heathbank we must be
near it. Look, Jenny, down yonder, at the steeple in the smoke, and how
clear the air is here, and this room so pleasant and lightsome. Are you
not pleased, Jenny?”
“Yon’s my lady’s maid,” said Jenny, with a little snort of disdain.
“They ca’ her Maria, nae less—set her up! like a lady’s sel in ane of
your grand novelles; and as muckle dress on an ilkaday as I’ve seen mony
a young lady gang to the kirk wi’, Miss Menie—no to say your ain very
sel’s been plainer mony a day. Am I no pleased? Is’t like to please folk
to come this far to an outlandish country, and win to a house at last
with a head owre’t like yon?”
“Whisht, Jenny!” Menie Laurie has opened her window softly, with a
consciousness of being still a stranger, and in a stranger’s house. The
pretty white muslin curtains half hide her from Jenny, and Jenny stands
before the glass and little toilet-table, taking up sundry pretty things
that ornament it, with mingled admiration and disdain, surmising what
this, and this, is for, and wondering indignantly whether the lady of
the house can think that Menie stands in need of the perfumes and
cosmetics to which she herself resorts. But the room is a very pretty
room, with its lightly-draped bed, and bright carpet, and clear
lattice-window. Looking round, Jenny may still fuff, but has no reason
to complain.
And Menie, leaning out, feels the soft summer air cool down the flush
upon her cheeks, and lets her thoughts stray away over the great city
yonder, where the sunshine weaves itself among the smoke, and makes a
strange yellow tissue, fine and light to veil the Titan withal. The heat
is leaving her soft cheek, her hair plays on it lightly, the wind
fingering its loosened curls like a child, and Menie’s eyes have
wandered far away with her thoughts and with her heart.
Conscious of the sunshine here, lying steadily on the quiet lawn, the
meagre yew-tree, the distinct garden-path—conscious of the soft bank of
turf, where these calm cattle repose luxuriously—of the broad yellow
sandy road which skirts it—of the little gleam of water yonder in a
distant hollow—but, buoyed upon joyous wings, hovering like a bird over
an indistinct vision of yonder pier, and deck, and crowded street—a
little circle enclosing one lofty figure, out of which rises this head,
with its natural state and grace, out of which shine those glowing
ardent eyes—and Menie, charmed and silent, looks on and watches, seeing
him come and go through all the ignoble crowd—the crowd which has ceased
to be ignoble when it encloses him.
And voices of children ringing through the sunshine, and a sweet, soft,
universal tinkle, as of some fairy music in the air, flow into Menie
Laurie’s meditation, but never fret its golden thread; for every joy of
sight and sound finds some kindred in this musing; and the voices grow
into a sweet all-hail, and the hum of distant life lingers on her ear
like the silver tone of fame—Fame that is coming—coming nearer every
day, throwing the glow of its purple royal, the sheen of its diamond
crown upon his head and on his path—and the girl’s heart, overflooded
with a light more glorious than the sunshine, forgets itself, its own
identity and fate, in dreaming of the nobler fate to which its own is
bound.
“A young friend of yours?—you may depend upon my warmest welcome for
him, my dear Mrs Laurie,” says a voice just emerging into the air below,
which sends Menie back in great haste, and with violent unconscious
blushes, from the window. “Mr Randall Home?—quite a remarkable name, I
am sure. Something in an office? Indeed! But then, really, an office
means so many very different things—may be of any class, in fact—and a
literary man? I am delighted. He must be a very intimate friend to have
seen you already.”
Menie waits breathless for the answer, but in truth Mrs Laurie is very
little more inclined to betray her secret than she is herself.
“We have known him for many years—a neighbour’s son,” said Mrs Laurie,
with hesitation; “yet indeed it is foolish to put off what I must tell
you when you see them together. Randall and my Menie are—I suppose I
must say, though both so young—engaged, and of course it is natural he
should be anxious. I have no doubt you will be pleased with him; but I
was hurried and nervous a little this morning, or I should have
postponed his first visit a day or two, till we ourselves were less
perfect strangers to you, Miss Annie.”
“I beg——” said Miss Annie Laurie, lifting with courteous deprecation her
thin and half-bared arm. “I felt quite sure, when I got your letter,
that we could not be strangers half an hour, and this is really quite a
delightful addition;—true love—young love!—ah my dear Mrs Laurie, where
can there be a greater pleasure than to watch two unsophisticated hearts
expanding themselves? I am quite charmed—a man of talent, too—and your
pretty little daughter, so young and so fresh, and so beautifully
simple. I am sure you could not have conferred a greater privilege upon
me—I shall feel quite a delight in their young love. Dear little
creature—she must be so happy; and I am sure a good mother like you must
be as much devoted to him as your darling Menie.”
Mrs Laurie, who was not used to speak of darling Menie, nor to think it
at all essential that she should be devoted to Randall Home, was
considerably confused by this appeal, and could only answer in a very
quiet tone, which quite acted as a shadow to Miss Annie’s glow of
enthusiasm, that Randall was a very good young man, and that she had
never objected to him.
“The course of true love never did run smooth,” said the greatly
interested Miss Annie. “My dear Mrs Laurie, I am afraid you must have
had some other, perhaps more ambitious views, or you could not
possibly—with your experience, too—speak with so little interest of your
dear child’s happiness.”
Here Menie ventured to glance out. The lady of the house swayed lightly
back and forward, with one foot on the ground and another on the close
turf of the little lawn, switching the yew-tree playfully with a wand of
hawthorn; and the wind blew Miss Annie’s long ringlets against her
withered cheek, and fluttered the lace upon her arm, with a strange
contempt for her airy graces, and for the levity so decayed and out of
date which Menie felt herself blush to see. Opposite, upon the grass,
stood Mrs Laurie, the sun beating down upon her snowy matron-cap, her
healthful cheek, her sober household dignity. But the sun revealed to
Menie something more than the natural good looks of that familiar face.
Mrs Laurie’s cheek was flushed a little. Mrs Laurie’s fine clear dark
eye wandered uneasily over the garden, and Mrs Laurie’s foot patted the
grass with a considerable impatience. Half angry, disconcerted, abashed,
annoyed, Menie’s mother could but half-conceal an involuntary smile of
amusement, too.
“Yes, my child’s happiness is very dear to me,” said Mrs Laurie, with
half a shade of offence in her tone. “But Menie is very young—I am in no
haste to part with her.”
“Ah, my dear, youth is the time,” said Miss Annie, pathetically—“the
first freshness, you know, and that dear, sweet, early susceptibility,
of which one might say so many charming things. For my part, I am quite
delighted to think that she has given her heart so early, so many
experiences are lost otherwise. I remember—ah, I remember!—but really,
Mrs Laurie, you surprise me. I see I must give my confidence to Menie.
Poor little darling—I am afraid you have not encouraged her to confide
all her little romantic distresses to you.”
“I have always respected Menie’s good sense,” said Mrs Laurie hastily.
Then she made a somewhat abrupt pause, and then glanced up with her look
of disconcertment and confusion, half covered with a smile. “I am
Menie’s mother, and an old wife now, Miss Annie. I am afraid I have lost
a great deal of that early susceptibility you spoke of—and I scarcely
think my daughter would care to find it in me—but we are very good
friends for all that.”
And Mrs Laurie’s eye, glistening with mother pride, and quite a
different order of sentiment from Miss Annie’s, glanced up involuntarily
to Menie’s window. Menie had but time to answer with a shy child’s look
of love out of her downcast eyes—for Menie shrank back timidly from the
more enthusiastic sympathy with which her grand-aunt waited to overpower
her—and disappeared into the quiet of her room to sit down in a shady
corner a little, and wind her maze of thoughts into some good order. The
sun was drawing towards the west—it was time to descend to the shady
drawing-room of Heathbank, where Randall by-and-by should be received
for the first time as Miss Annie Laurie’s guest.
CHAPTER XII.
It is very pleasant here, in the shady drawing-room of Heathbank. Out of
doors, these grassy slopes, which Menie Laurie cannot believe to be the
heath, are all glowing with sunshine; but within here, the light falls
cool and green, the breeze plays through the open window, and golden
streaks of sunbeams come in faintly at one end, through the bars of the
Venetian blind, upon the pleasant shade, touching it into character and
consciousness. It is a long room with a window at either end, a round
table in the middle, an open piano in a recess, and pretty bits of
feminine-looking furniture straying about in confusion not too studied.
The walls are full of gilt frames, too, and look bright, though one need
not be unnecessarily critical about the scraps of canvass and
broad-margined water-colour drawings which repose quietly within these
gilded squares. They are Miss Annie Laurie’s pictures, and Miss Annie
Laurie feels herself a connoisseur, and is something proud of them,
while it cannot be denied that the frames do excellent service upon the
shady drawing-room wall.
Mrs Laurie has found refuge in the corner of a sofa, and, with a very
fine picture-book in her hand, escapes from the conversation of Miss
Annie, which has been so very much in the style of the picture-book that
Menie’s mother still keeps her flush of abashed annoyance upon her
cheek, and Menie herself lingers shyly at the door, half afraid to
enter. There is something very formidable to Menie in the enthusiasm and
sympathy of her aunt.
“My pretty darling!” said Miss Annie—and Miss Annie lifted her dainty
perfumed fingers to tap Menie’s cheeks with playful grace. Menie shrank
back into a corner, blushing and disconcerted, and drooped her head
after a shy girlish fashion, quite unable to make any response. “Don’t
be afraid, my love,” said the mistress of the house, with a little
laugh. “Don’t fear any jesting from me—no, no—I hope I understand better
these sensitive youthful feelings—and we shall say nothing on the
subject, my dear Menie—not a word—only you must trust me as a friend,
you know, and we must wait tea till he comes—ah, till _he_ comes,
Menie.”
Poor Menie for the moment could have wished _him_ a thousand miles away;
but she only sat down, very suddenly and quietly, on a low seat by the
wall, while Miss Annie tripped away to arrange some ornamental matters
on the tea-table, where her little china cups already sparkled, and her
silver tea-pot shone. Menie took courage to look at her kinswoman’s face
as this duty was being performed. Withered and fantastic in its decayed
graces, there was yet a something of kindness in the smile. The face had
been pretty once in its youthful days—a sad misfortune to it now, for if
it were not for this long-departed, dearly remembered beauty, there
might have been a natural sunshine in Miss Annie Laurie’s face.
As it was, the wintry light in it played about gaily, and Miss Annie
made very undeniable exertions to please her visitors. She told Menie of
her own pursuits, as a girl might have done in expectation of a sharer
in them; and to Mrs Laurie she gave a sketch of her “society,” the few
friends who, Menie thought, made up a very respectable list in point of
numbers. Mrs Laurie from her sofa, and Menie on her seat by the wall,
looking slightly prim and very quiet in her shy confusion, made brief
answers as they could. Their entertainer did not much want their
assistance; and by-and-by Menie woke with a great flush to hear the
little gate swing open, to discern a lofty figure passing the window,
and the sound of a quick step on the gravel path. Randall was at the
door.
And Randall, looking very stately, very gracious and deferential, came
through the shower of “delighteds” and “most happys” with which Miss
Annie saluted him, with a bow of proud grace and much dignity of manner,
to Mrs Laurie’s extreme surprise, and Menie’s shy exultation. Another
hour passed over very well. The strangers grew familiar with Miss Annie;
then by-and-by they strayed out, all of them, into the sweet evening
air, so full of charmed distant voices, the hum and breath of far-off
life; and Menie found herself, before she was aware, alone under a sky
slowly softening into twilight, in a pretty stretch of sloping turf,
where some young birch-trees stood about gracefully, like so many
children resting in a game, with Randall Home by her side.
And they had found time for various pieces of talk, quite individual and
peculiar to themselves, before Menie lifted her face, with its flush of
full unshadowed pleasure, and, glancing up to the other countenance
above her, asked, “When is the next book coming, Randall?”
“What next book, May Marion?”
This was his caressing name for her, as May alone was his father’s.
“_The_ next book—our next book,” said Menie. “I do not know much, nor
maybe care much, about anybody else’s. Randall—our own—when is it
coming?”
“What if it should never come at all?”
Randall drew her fingers through his hand with playful tenderness, half
as he might have done with a child.
“Yes—but I know it is to come at all, so that is not my question,” said
Menie. “I want to know _when_—not if. Tell me—for you need not be coy,
or think of keeping such a secret from me.”
“Did you never hear that it is dangerous to hurry one work upon
another?” was the answer somewhat evasively given. “I am to be prudent
this time—there is peril in it.”
“Peril to what?” Menie Laurie looked up with simple eyes into a face
where there began to rise some faint mists. Looking into them, she did
not comprehend at all these floating vapours, nor the curve of
fastidious discontent which they brought to Randall’s lip and brow.
“My simple Menie, you do not know how everything gets shaped into a
trade,” said Randall, with a certain condescension. “Peril to
reputation, risk of losing what one has gained—that is what we all
tremble for in London.”
“Randall!” Menie looked up again with a flush of innocent scorn. He
might speak it, indeed, but she knew he could mean nothing like this.
There was a slight pause—it might be of embarrassment—on Randall’s part;
certainly he made no effort to break the silence.
“But a great gift was not given for that,” said Menie rapidly, in her
unwitting enthusiasm. “People do not have unusual endowments given them
to be curbed by such things as that; and you never meant it, Randall; it
could not move _you_.”
But Randall only drew his hand fondly over the fingers he held, and
smiled—smiled with pleasure and pride, natural and becoming. He had not
been sophisticated out of regard for the warm appreciation and praise of
those most dear to him. He might distrust it—might think the colder
world a better judge, and the verdict of strangers a safer rule, but in
his heart he loved the other still.
But Menie’s thoughts were disturbed, and moved into a sudden ferment.
Her hand trembled a little on Randall’s arm; her eyes forsook his face,
and cast long glances instead over the bright air before them; and when
she spoke, her voice was as low as her words were quick and hurried.
“It does not become me to teach you, but, Randall, Randall, you used to
think otherwise. Do you mind what you used to say about throwing away
the scabbard, putting on the harness—Randall, do you mind?”
“I mind many a delightful hour up on the hillside yonder,” said Randall
affectionately, “when my May Marion began to enter into all my dreams
and hopes; and I mind about the scabbard and the harness no less,” he
continued, laughing, “and how I meditated flashing my sword in the eyes
of all the world, like a schoolboy with his first endowment of
gunpowder; but one learns to know that the world cares so wonderfully
little about one’s sword, Menie; and moreover—you must find out for me
the reason why—this same world seems to creep round one’s-self
strangely, and by-and-by one begins to feel it more decorous to hide the
glitter of the trenchant steel. What a coxcomb you make me,” said
Randall, abruptly breaking off with a short laugh; “one would fancy this
same weapon of mine was the sword of Wallace wight.”
Menie made no answer, and the discontent on Randall’s face wavered into
various shades of scorn,—a strange scorn, such as Menie Laurie had never
seen before on any face—scorn half of himself, wholly of the world.
“When I knew I had succeeded,” said Randall at length, with still a tone
of condescension in his confidence, “I was a little elated, I confess,
Menie, foolish as it seems, and thought of nothing but setting to work
again, and producing something worthy to live. Well, that is just the
first impulse; by-and-by I came to see what a poor affair this applause
was after all, and to think I had better keep what I had, without
running the risk of losing my advantage by a less successful stroke.
After all, this tide of popularity depends on nothing less than real
‘merit,’ as the critics call it; so I apprehend we will have no new
book, Menie; we will be content with what we have gained.”
“If applause is such a poor affair, why be afraid of the chance of
losing it?” said Menie; but she added hastily, “I want to know about
Johnnie Lithgow, Randall; is it possible that he has come to be a great
writer too?”
“If I only knew what you meant by a great writer _too_,” said Randall,
with a smile. “Johnnie Lithgow is quite a popular man, Menie—one of the
oracles of the press.”
“Is it a derogation, then, to be a popular man?” said the puzzled Menie;
“or is he afraid to risk his fame, like you?”
The lofty head elevated itself slightly. “No. Johnnie Lithgow is not a
man for fame,” said Randall, with some pride. “Johnnie does his literary
work like any other day’s work; and, indeed, why should he not?”
Menie looked up with a blank look, surprised, and not comprehending.
Even the stronger emotions of life, the passions and the anguishes, had
never yet taken hold of Menie; still less had the subtle refining, the
artificial stoicism of mere mind and intellect, living and feeding on
itself; and Menie’s eye followed his slight unconscious gestures with
wistful wonderment as Randall went on.
“After all, what does it signify—what does anything of this kind
signify? One time or another appreciation comes; and if appreciation
never should come, what then? So much as is good will remain. I do not
care a straw for applause myself. I rate it at its own value; and that
is nothing.”
It began to grow somewhat dark, and Menie drew her shawl closer. “I
think it is time to go home,” she said softly; and as she spoke, a
vision of the kindly home she had left—of the brave protecting hills,
the broad fair country, the sky and atmosphere, all too humble for this
self-abstraction, which answered in clouds and tears, in glorious
laughter and sunshine, to every daily change—rose up before her; some
tears, uncalled for and against her will, stole into Menie’s eyes. With
a little awe, in her innocence, she took Randall’s arm again. He must be
right, she supposed; and something very grand and superior was in
Randall’s indifference—yet somehow the night air crept into Menie’s
heart, as she had never felt it do before. Many an hour this soft night
air had blown about her uncovered head, and tossed her hair in curls
about her cheeks—to-night she felt it cold, she knew not why—to-night
she was almost glad to hurry home.