Flashman on the March

She didn’t, wheeling and calling to me to mount behind her, which was dam’ sporting and completely useless, since they’d have run us down in a couple of furlongs—they were coming on like the Heavy Brigade, yelling in triumph, half a dozen robed figures brandishing their lances, sure now of a capture and kill.

“Down, sultana!” cries I, drawing the pistol Napier had given me, and seeing what I was at she slipped from the saddle and down beside me as I took cover in a clump of rocks. I was hoping to God our pursuers had no firearms, but even if they had we’d no choice but to make a stand. It was a piece I’d never handled before, an American Joslyn .44 with five shots in the cylinder, any one guar anteed to stop a rhino in its tracks. My immediate aim was to stop a horse, for I’m no Hickok and knew that if I let them come near enough to shoot a rider, and missed him, they’d be all over us.

So I rested the long barrel on a rock, waited with my heart thumping, sighted on the foremost horse, took the pressure, and let fly at thirty yards. The beast went down like a stone, screaming, her rider flew head-first into a boulder and with any luck cracked his skull, and his mates hauled their wind with cries of alarm and sheered off out of range.

“Kill them!” Uliba was blazing with rage. “Shoot the swine! See there—the one with the lion scarf! That is Yando, Gobayzy’s toad! Kill the bastard, I say! Kill him!”

“Not at this range,” says I. “Keep a grip of that bridle, will you? We’re going to need that screw!”

They didn’t have firearms, fortunately, and seemed to be at a loss until their leader, Yando, sent forward a reluctant scout to see how their fallen companion had fared. The fellow came on in little runs from boulder to boulder, while I lay doggo, calming Uliba’s demands that I blow him to damnation. When he reached the fallen body I tried a snap-shot which missed but struck splinters from a rock beside him; he scuttled off in panic, and they made no further sortie, but started shouting at us, and Uliba got to her feet and called back. From the spirited exchanges which ensued, in Amharic, between her and Yando, a burly brute with a hectoring manner, I gathered he was making an informal proposal which she was declining in grossly insulting terms, for from cajoling he passed to threatening and concluded in a veritable passion, jumping up and down, stamping, and hurling his fine lion robe to the ground. I decided to try a long shot at him, and missed again but winged one of his companions, to Uliba’s delight.

That discouraged them, and presently they rode off, Yando shouting what sounded like a mixture of pleas and menaces.

“They will return,” says Uliba. “Yando dare not go back to Gobayzy with a tale of failure. We shall have them round my citadel before night, so the sooner we are within the walls the better.”

She rode her horse and I led my lame screw, and as we went I demanded and got an explanation of our recent stirring encounter. She gave it straight-faced matter-of-fact, as though it were an account of everyday social activities among the smart set—which I guess it was, Abyssinian style.

Her husband, she reminded me, was held prisoner by King Gobayzy of Lasta, who had lustful designs on her and had threat ened to have hubby dismembered at length unless she placed herself at his majesty’s disposal. This she had declined to do, so Gobayzy had ordered Yando, a local petty chief, to abduct her. But Yando too had designs on her, and these being troubled times, with Gobayzy at sporadic war with Theodore, had decided to take her for himself, possibly passing her on to Gobayzy later or fobbing him off with some fiction. Hence Yando’s ambush, foiled by resourceful Flashy. Whether her husband remained whole and intact or not, she forgot to mention.

I could see now what she had meant by referring to her “suitors", and how right she’d been to describe herself as an unsafe travel ling companion. Half Abyssinia seemed to be nuts on her, eager to abduct her, and happy to butcher her chance associates, such as myself—and this was the woman who was to guide me through hostile country and present me to her barmy half-sister whom she might well try to depose. By Gad, Speedy could pick ’em, couldn’t he just?

In addition to which, she was the sort who abandoned lovers to their fate, and didn’t seem to care if someone dissected the man she’d sworn to love, honour and obey… but then again, she had a lovely figure, and such legs as the faithful imagine on the houris of paradise.

And she was not without womanly sentiment. “God send that Sarafa died quickly in the fight,” says she. “If he was taken alive Yando will give him a thousand deaths because he was my lover.”

I said Yando might not be aware of that, and she looked at me in astonishment. “Why, Sarafa will taunt him with it!” cries she. “He will throw it in Yando’s face!” She didn’t add “Wouldn’t you?” possibly because she thought the question superfluous.

Once over the ridge we came in sight of the citadel, and it didn’t look any less sinister on second viewing, perched high on a rocky outcrop with a drop of hundreds of feet to the valley below. We reached it in half an hour, and I became aware that it was two towers joined together, six storeys high judging from the window spaces, the farther tower actually projecting out over the void beneath. It was a steep climb to the main door, and before we reached it the womenfolk of the tower were hurrying down to us, full of chatter and alarm, clamouring their questions at Uliba, but sparing a glance for the handsome stranger with the interesting whiskers. I’m not unused to female attention, as you know, but I don’t recall more brazen preening and ogling than I got from Uliba-Wark’s domestics. Plainly they were no strangers to the hayloft and the long grass.

One reason for their shameless glad-eyeing soon became apparent: Uliba-Wark’s stronghold proved to be almost entirely devoid of men, the few there were being either grey-bearded dotards or small boys. Presumably the young ones were away at the civil wars, as conscripts or mercenaries, but I never found out, on account of not speaking the lingo. It’s a damned bore, as you know, for you stand like a tailor’s dummy while the world prattles about you, and worse for me, I think, because I’m used to slinging the bat (* Speak the language (Army slang, from Hind.).) wherever I am.

They’re mighty strange places, these Abyssinian castles, not unlike our Border peels, with rooms piled on each other like so many boxes connected by stairs that are no better than ladders. Since from what Uliba had said we might have to withstand a siege, I was relieved to find that the main door was a massive affair which it would have taken artillery to breach, and the adobe walls were feet thick, with narrow windows well above ground level, offering a good field of fire. With my Joslyn and fifty rounds I could give a warm reception to anyone toiling up the path to our eyrie.

If I’d had any doubts about Uliba-Wark’s importance, they would have been dispelled by the respect amounting to reverence with which she was treated. They fairly grovelled to her, not only the slaves, who made up half the citadel’s residents, but the free women and the two elderly men who seemed to act as stewards or chamberlains. She delivered a brisk speech to the assembled staff in the great ground-floor hall which seemed to be used as a common room, but what she said was Amharic to me, except at the point where she indicated me, and the whole gang turned in my direction and bowed. When she’d dismissed them I was con ducted to an airy chamber on the third floor, bone clean and well if sparsely furnished with a good charpoy (* Native frame-and-cord bedstead.) leather chair, table, wash-stand, rug on the floor and leather curtain on the arrow-slit window—I’ve stayed in country inns at home that were less decent and comfortable.

To my disappointment I was attended by the village idiot super vised by a stout dragon with a moustache who must have been the only Plain Jane in the place, for the dollymops who’d been on hand at our arrival had been typical Ab, which is to say they’d ranged from comely to ravishing. I wondered if Uliba had decided I’d be safer with a fat crone; if so, it wasn’t a bad omen.

Not having had a wink of sleep since our bivouac at Ad Abaga the night before last, I slept the day through, and it was evening when I was summoned to a spacious apartment on the second floor and had my first taste of formal Ab dining. What is the norm, I can’t say, because on later occasions I’ve lounged on cushions on the floor, and sat up at a table like a Christian, but Chez Uliba we reclined on charpoys, Roman orgy fashion, with a low table apiece. But what lent the meal a delightful charm was that the girls waiting on us wore nothing but little aprons of leather laces—I think they had brass collars and a bracelet or two as well, but I can’t say I took much note. You don’t, when your maise (* Mead.) is being poured by a lovely little Hebe who rests her bare poont on your shoulder as she stoops to your cup; how I resisted the temptation to turn my head and go munch, I cannot imagine.

If you suppose, by the way, that I am unduly susceptible, you should read the recollections of J. A. St John, Esq., who travelled in Abyssinia in the 1840s and appears to have spent most of his time goggling at boobies, on which he was obviously an authority. He has drooling descriptions of slave-girls, and a most scholarly passage in which he compares Ethiopian juggs to Egyptian ones, and finds the former “more finely shaped and better placed"; the negro bosom he discounts as having a tendency to droop, which suggests to me that he never got the length of Zululand or Dahomey where the ladies give glorious meaning to the term double-breasted. That by the way. I admire the female form myself, but J. A. St John needed a course of cold baths if you ask me. [29]

To resume. The meal consisted of two kinds of beef, the cooked variety which was roasted black with peppers, and the raw stuff which they call brundo—it’s not bad at all when served with chutney, but I didn’t try it at the time. There was fruit for dessert, and the inevitable tej dispensed from long-necked flasks by the bouncing boobies brigade, and all the sweeter for that.

The two chamberlain chaps shared our nuncheon, as did two of the females, tawny languid ladies who weren’t domestics but more like companions to the mistress of the house, for they talked to her on equal terms, were well dressed and decked with costume jew ellery, and plainly thought no small beer of themselves. But then all Ab women do, with cause; the waitresses, whom I spent the time admiring because Uliba didn’t bother to translate the table talk for my benefit, showed no embarrassment at being looked at, the saucy little dears. Uliba, by the way, had discarded her tunic in favour of an exquisite saffron robe which looked like silk, worn toga-fashion with one bare shoulder and two huge hooped golden earrings under her braids.

Just as the meal was ending there was a commotion in the room below, with female voices raised in anger, and presently one of the maids brought up the ladder-stair a girl who was the peachiest thing I’d seen so far, even in that company. She was tawnier than most, but with a long lovely Egyptian face and huge eyes which at the moment were disfigured by weeping. In fact, she seemed torn between grief and rage, sobbing into her cupped hands one moment, shaking her fists and raging the next, to the scandal of the women attendants and the wrath of the elders, all of whom contributed to the row, so that it was bedlam until Uliba snapped them into silence.

She spoke sharply to the weeping girl, who answered sullenly at first, then furiously, stamping and giving Uliba what sounded like dog’s abuse, to which she responded with an icy anger which changed the beauty’s tune altogether, for she flung herself down by Uliba’s charpoy, wailing and smothering her feet with kisses. Uliba spoke to her quietly, and the wench rose, drying her eyes, but then suddenly rounded on me of all people, letting fly another stormy volley, at which Uliba lost her temper altogether, boxed her ears, and sent her squalling down the stair again. The ladies and elders withdrew, leaving the two of us alone while the pap-flashers cleared away the dishes.

I was all agog to know what had ailed the girl. Uliba was still snarling in Amharic as she disposed herself on her charpoy again, but then she began to laugh while her tej cup was refilled, and informed me that the hysteric had been Sarafa’s woman, now presumably a widow, and consequently madder than a cut snake.

“I told her he had stayed to front Yando’s fighters of his own free choice, and the insolent bitch swore that you should have stayed also, but she supposed that you had supplanted Sarafa in my bed, and so were precious to me!” She banged her cup down, angry and merry together. “Ha! And then, because it is not known whether Sarafa is dead or taken, she falls to pleading with me to bargain with Yando for his life. Bemout (* By my death!) Well she knows what price I’d have to pay, and when I refuse her she calls me a heartless whore that stole her man and left him to die because I had found a new lover! And this from a slave-girl, to me!”

I agreed that discipline below stairs had gone to the devil these days. “So she wasn’t Sarafa’s wife, then, just his bit o’ black velvet?”

“His concubine, once—as though that gave her the right to rail at me!” She soothed herself with a sip of tej. "I should have the little slut whipped! Or sold to the Egyptians!”

What struck me, of course, was that the grieving tart had assumed that I was Uliba’s latest mount. Natural enough, perhaps, but it prompted a disquieting thought. What with all the to-do of ambush and flight, I’d given no thought to the part I was meant to be playing, and hadn’t even had the chance to remove my whiskers or take the first steps in transforming myself into Khasim Tamwar.

“Does she know who I am—what I am? Do the rest of them, those two old files, or the women?”

“To them you are an Indian traveller. So I have told them, and why should they not believe it? They have never seen an Englishman before. It is when we go south, among the knowing folk, that your disguise must be complete.”

“And when will we go?”

“Perhaps the day after tomorrow, if there is no sign of Yando. That will give time to change the hair on your face while we rest and prepare for the journey.”

“Very good, sultana… Now, tell me, what precisely did you say to that noisy young woman when she accused me of being your lover?”

She regarded me with open amusement as she reclined on her charpoy, a very picture of sexual impudence in her silken robe with one shapely thigh and bare shoulder displayed, and if it hadn’t been for the maids chirruping among the dishes at the end of the room I’d have made a plunge at her. To no avail, judging by her reply.

“Why, I told her the truth—that you were no lover of mine. The brazen wretch swore that I lied, and when I said I had known you but a few hours, and on horseback, too, she cried, ‘Aye, but what of the future?’ I said that was in God’s hands, and she might sleep at my chamber door tonight if she wished, to be sure that no lover came creeping in to me.”

“That was dam’ considerate of you! But I tell you what, sultana, I’ve a notion worth two o’ that—why don’t she sleep at my chamber door, eh? Now, that would really convince her!”

She considered me for a long moment, the strong disdainful face impassive, and then a little imp began to play at the corner of the carved mouth and she swung her legs off the charpoy in one graceful movement and stood looking down at me.

“I told her the future was in God’s hands,” says she coolly. “It is also in mine.” And with that she stooped, brushed her lips on mine, and walked swiftly away, leaving me to the shrill giggles of the maids and the reflection that she was a teasing, provoking, wanton baggage adept at stoking what old Arnold called the flames of lust… and giving me a gentle hint that the fire brigade would be along shortly.

And it was, as I’d expected. I know women, you see, and long experience had taught me that when they start playing Delilah it’s a sure sign that they’re coming to the boil themselves. So it came as no surprise, after I’d said my prayers (you may guess their content) and was drowsing in happy anticipation on the charpoy in my peaceful chamber, listening to the distant creaks and murmurs of the sleeping castle, and the occasional cry of some night beast out yonder, that a soft footfall should approach my room, and a gentle draught stir the air as the door opened and softly closed again.

But I’m a wary bird, and my hand was on the Joslyn beneath my pillow, only to let go as a tall figure advanced silently into the shaft of moonlight from the high narrow window—a figure in a robe of saffron silk which slid to the floor without a sound, revealing a splendid golden body swaying slowly towards me, slim hands clasped over her breasts and then falling away to caress her hips as she passed from the moonbeam into the shadow, kneeling on the charpoy and leaning down over me, her expert fingers and those wonderful lips questing across my body.

Ordinarily I’d have said “Good evening", or “Come in, my dear, it’s your birthday", but she had insisted, you remember, that in moments of crisis she and she alone should take the lead, so what could a dutiful soldier do but lie to attention as she made a meal of me, teasing and fondling until I was fit to burst, at which point for tunately she began to conduct herself like some randy Roman empress in a rogering competition, bestriding me furiously with ecstatic cries, those unseen lips finding mine at last as she plunged and writhed in a perfect frenzy, grunting and gasping with an abandon which I shouldn’t have thought her style at all, but you never can tell how they’ll behave in the happy throes, and when she concluded her performance by throwing up her arms and screaming, I confess I entered into the spirit of the thing uninvited, going “brrr!” between her boobies as she collapsed whimpering on my ruined carcase.

“Uliba-Wark,” says I, when I’d got my breath back, “from the moment we met I knew our love was fated, and I’m here to tell you you’re the best ride I’ve had since I left home.” For I like to give credit where it’s due, you know.

I spoke in Arabic, and she replied in a distracted way in what sounded like Amharic, heaving herself up to full stretch above me, and for the first time her head was in the moonlight—the beau tiful Egyptian head and shining black eyes of Sarafa’s woman. She, too, was breathing with difficulty, smiling at me in a most ingrati ating way and murmuring a question which I could only suppose was a plea for a high mark from the examiner.

Well, she’d earned it, eighty per cent at least, even if my imme diate instinct had been to cry “Sold! Impostor!” But that would have been downright discourteous, after the little darling had exerted herself so splendidly, and I was too blissfully sated to tax myself with wondering why Uliba-Wark had put her up to it, or why, so soon after her hysterics of grief for Sarafa, his bint had been ready, nay eager, to pleasure herself groggy with your correspondent—on whom, I may say, she worked her wicked will twice more before daybreak, the naughty little glutton. Seeking consolation?

Obeying mistress’s orders? Beglamoured by Flashy’s whiskers? Who could tell?

A moment ago I said that I knew women… and I should have added that what I know is that there’s no explaining ’em, or under standing ’em, or telling what they’ll do next. If you’re lucky enough to be bedded unexpected with a beauty like Sarafa’s wench, you must just follow the wisdom imparted to me by an Oriental lady of my acquaintance, after she’d filled me with hasheesh and ridden me ruined: “Lick up the honey, stranger, and ask no questions.”

So I didn’t, rising late and greeting Uliba-Wark and her household with cheerful composure and not a word or sign to suggest that I’d spent half the night trollop-wrestling. That Sarafa’s lass had been less discreet was plain from the reluc tance of Uliba’s ladies and elder statesmen to meet not only my eye but my presence, and the shameless giggling and whispering of the Bosom Brigade when they served me breakfast. I confess I’d hoped that Uliba herself might have her curiosity piqued by my nonchalance, but if it was, she didn’t show it. Her first words to me were that Yando and his gang hadn’t put in an appearance, so we should be able to set off south next day.

“But he may be about still, on the watch, so we shall ride out before dawn. There will only be the two of us, remember, without Sarafa and his man to scout, so we must go warily and quickly. Come, I’ll show you the way we must follow in the dark.”

The vantage point was the top of the far tower overhanging the valley, which we reached up various ladder-stairs, and a pretty picture she made climbing nimbly in her little leather tunic, with Flashy panting wearily in her wake. I was breathless by the time we reached the roof, despite a brief rest while I studied a peculiar contraption in the top chamber: a massive hook dangling in the middle of the room from a rope which ran over a great wheel in the ceiling to a windlass near the wall. Most sinister it looked, but when I asked Uliba about it she said simply, “That is the dungeon,” and directed my attention to the astonishing panorama before us.

South in the misty distance towered the huge silver peaks of the Ab highlands, beyond a vast rocky plateau criss-crossed by forested strips and ravines. Immediately below us, at a depth so dizzy that I automatically kept a hold on the parapet, lay the valley floor, a boulder-strewn river-bottom along which a thin thread of silver indi cated the stream which flowed out of a jungly cleft ten miles away.

“That is our road, along the river to the woods,” says Uliba. “Once under cover of the trees we shall besafe from pursuit. If we should be parted in the dark, we shall rendezvous by the white rocks yonder, where the river emerges. If I don’t arrive in twelve hours…” she pointed to the mountains “… Lake Tana lies beyond the ranges. You remember the names of the river and village? And the compass bearing? You are sure? Good… Well, since I see that you are more intent on staring foolishly at me than in studying the road on which your life depends, I suggest that we go down, and you can use the rest of the day changing yourself from a moon struck farangi soldier into an Indian traveller with his wits about him. Come.”

She said it with a smile, ever so pleasantly, and she looked so delectable in that shiny leather corset of which I had been men tally stripping her, that I thought, oh, what the devil, the blazes with pretences, let’s have the cards on the table.

“Hold on,” says I, and took her gently by the arm as she moved past me. She turned in mild surprise, and I’ll swear she expected lustful assault then and there, so I stared into those proud fearless eyes for a long moment, and then said: “You have the damnedest way of punishing insolent slave-girls, haven’t you?”

A split second’s bewilderment, and then delight that I’d been first to mention it. “Punishment? You think that was why I sent Malee to you?” She started to laugh. “I do not believe it! You have far too brave an opinion of yourself to think you could be a penance to any woman! Punishment, indeed!”

“Well, thank’ee ma’am, but you did speak of whipping or selling her, you know.”

“Oh, fool’s talk! What, whip or sell Malee, who was my playmate? Who prepared my bridal bed? Who would give her life for me, even as Sarafa did? I owe her too much kindness and friend ship for that!”

“So much kindness that you stole her lover?”

“What has that to do with anything? I took him because he pleased me—and since my own husband dallied with Malee when he’d tired of me, why should I not enjoy Sarafa?”

A fair question, which had me stumped. It was being borne in on me that the moral climate of Abyssinia was not quite that of our own polite society—not that Uliba’s Belgravian sisters are averse to a cut off the joint from time to time, but they know enough to keep quiet about it. But I was still well in the dark.

“You say she’s your old playmate, bosom pal, God knows what—yet she harangues you like a fishwife in public, calls you a heart less whore, and you box her ears—”

“We have been calling each other that and worse since we were ten years old and rivals for the same schoolboy!” cries she, laughing. “Not that I could ever rival Malee! Is she not lovely? You seem to have found her so, from what she tells me,” she added, with a sniff in her voice. “The little slut could hardly keep her eyes open.”

“Well, now you know what you missed,” says I. “Sending me a proxy-doxy in your own dress to fool me in the dark! Is that some kind of Abyssinian insult?”

“First a punishment, now an insult!” cries she gleefully. “No, effendi, merely a whim, a little trick, a jest to remind the great farangi soldier that the wild barbarian woman will do what she will do in her own good time… not his.” The carved lips were pouting impudently, and suddenly laughing before I could deal with ’em. “But if it will soothe your manly pride, know that I sent Malee to you at her own request… no, truly, when she had cried out her tantrum, and implored my forgiveness, as she always does, she begged me. Why? Because she believes that you are my new fancy, and whatever I have, why, Malee must have, too. And she’s a lech erous strumpet, as you’ve no doubt discovered, with the appetite of a rutting baboon. So I indulge her.” She arched her brows, playful-like. “Am I not a kind mistress to my bondwomen?”

“Perhaps too kind, sultana. Oh, I ain’t complaining… but I’ll tell you something about slaves: however devoted and loving and like bloody spaniels they seem, they never forgive their owners for owning ’em.” They don’t, either, though what prompted me to say it just then, I don’t know, unless I was just mentally marking time while debating whether to kiss her before I wrenched off that scanty tunic, or after. But I debated too long, and she was off with a laughing dismissal of my caution, and down the ladder-stair before I could get to work.

I spent the day imagining Khasim Tamwar, which is the key to disguise. You must “catch the man” if you’re to impersonate him faithfully, as I’d learned to do in the past with Crown Prince Carl Gustaf (dignified royal duffer) and Makarram Khan (truculent Pathan ruffian) and my military self (bluff mutton-headed hero), to name but a few. I decided Khasim would be a bit of a languid exquisite, and carefully shaved my splendid moustache to a mere line along the upper lip, got rid of my whiskers, and spent time oiling and curling myself a lovelock with a hot iron—frontier style rather than Hyderabadi, but no one in Abyssinia would know the difference. I’d grow a little imperial, too, and remember to point my toes as I walked, which ain’t difficult for a cavalryman.

Finally I boned a length of silk off my room dragon to impro vise a tight turban, and having spruced up my boots, pyjamys and sash, stood forth for Uliba’s inspection. “Oho!” says she, mighty droll, “is it the Indian horse-trader or the Prince of the Seventh Sea-Coast? My ladies must see this wonder—and Malee, too!”

“Half a tick,” says I. “They know me as Khasim Tamwar, but what tale are you telling ’em to explain our going south together?”

“What is to explain if I make a pleasure journey to the Sea of Tana with a handsome stranger? Let their imaginations work!” Which they did, judging by their slantendicular looks and the smirks of the booby-sporters, but Malee wasn’t to be seen. Fagged out, no doubt.

In the evening Uliba took me to a little room off the stables where we packed our bags for the trip—spare clobber of shamas and boots and waterproof cloaks, blankets and utensils, biltong and bread and teff-cakes, (* Millet.) flasks of maise and tej, cheese and dried fruit and locust-balls, God help me. We split my two hundred dollars between us, at my suggestion since she’d have to do the buying of necessities along the way, and in addition to my Joslyn and car tridge-belt I had a dagger and sword from the citadel’s armoury—not one of their sickle-blades but a straight cross-hilted weapon with Deus vult engraved on the blade—a Crusader sword, bigod, and why not, for if it was seven hundred years out of date it was still in Christian land.

It took us until supper-time to complete our packages, and to see that all was well in the stables, where she had picked out two fine Arab mares and a led-animal. Afterwards we retired early, since we were to be up by three and away by four, bidding each other a decorous good night in which I kept my hands to myself with difficulty, for while Malee had taken some of the edge off my carnal appetite, Uliba’s leather-clad bounties were a quivering temptation. Still, I knew it wouldn’t be long before the mistress decided she’d like a share of the jollification of which the maid had apparently spoken so highly, and on that consoling thought I fell asleep.

When I woke it took a moment to identify the noise that had disturbed me. Judging by the moonlight it must be past midnight; there was nothing out of the way in the sounds of the sleeping castle—and then I heard it, a faint whisper beyond my door, low and urgent. For an instant I wondered if it could be Uliba, but the language was recognisably Amharic, and I caught one of the few words I knew—"tenisu", which means “get up". It was a woman’s voice; could it be Malee after another nightcap, but if so why hadn’t she just breezed in as before? There it came again; with a soft chuckle, I called to enter, without result, so I hopped out and opened the door, and sure enough, Malee it was, eyes wild in the light of the lamp she carried, and as she stepped back swiftly from the threshold I turned and hurled myself towards my charpoy, grabbing for the Joslyn under the pillow.

Another split second and I’d have had it, but the men who’d been waiting with her were too quick. Even as my hand touched the butt, one of them landed on my back, wiry hands seizing my neck, while the other grabbed my wrist and snatched up the pistol with a yell of triumph. He covered me, his mate rolled off me, and as I came off the charpoy there was a shouted order from the doorway, and here was a hulking brute with a breastplate over his shama whom I recognised in horror as Yando, and Malee beside him squealing with excitement.

I know when I’m cornered, and I put up my hands. Yando let out a bellow of laughter, and the chap with my Joslyn shoved it into my ribs, shouting words which needed no translation as he urged me towards the door and down the ladder-stairs to the hall on the lower floor. His pal went first, menacing me with a spear as I came down while the pistoleer followed; Yando and Malee came last, she chattering like a parakeet and he roaring to his minions, no doubt to keep a tight grip on me.

The place was in uproar, women having hysterics, bare tits bouncing in alarm, elders dithering, and Uliba, teeth bared in fury, a stalwart Ab spearman at her side, two more with sickle-swords menacing the wailing crowd.

What had happened, if not why, was clear: my instinct about mistrusting slaves had been sound, and Malee had admitted Yando and his gang. This was confirmed by the demeanour of all parties. I couldn’t understand a word, but there was no mistaking the gleeful triumph of Malee’s tirade at Uliba, or Uliba’s snarling rage as she made for Malee, who took refuge behind Yando. The Ab guarding Uliba wrestled her back, Yando addressed her at the top of his voice in gloating amusement, she blazed back at him, the women’s hys terics increased with bosoms heaving to admiration, and I decided to put in my ha’porth with my best parade-ground roar.

"Chubbaraol” They stopped yelling. “Uliba-Wark, tell them who I am!”

It was common sense: whatever Yando might have done to an anonymous stranger within Uliba’s gates, he’d not dare misuse an envoy from the British army now invading his country. And if the revelation jeopardised my ridiculous mission to the Galla queen, so much the better.

“Tell him!” I repeated, in Arabic, and from the look he turned on Uliba I knew he didn’t understand a word. “He won’t dare

She looked at me without a word and then let fly a volley at Yando—and God alone knows what she said, but it drove him into a violent fury: he absolutely grabbed her by the shoulders, bawling into her face. They raged at each other until he thrust her away and turned to my captors, an outflung hand pointing at me, his pug face contorted with bestial anger, and before I knew it I was being thrust aloft again, the pistol wallah jabbing me with my own barrel, and the spearman offering assistance.

I went, but not quietly, you may be sure, damning their eyes for villains and swearing vows of revenge, in English, Arabic, and Hindi, to no avail whatever. They forced me up into the room which Uliba had described as “the dungeon", and here came Yando and another of his thugs bringing up the rear. He snapped an order, grinning malevolently, and I was flung down and bound wrist and ankle by two of the brutes while the third began to drag something from the shadows in a corner of the room.

Light was beginning to filter through the high windows, glinting on the hook dangling by a stout rope from its pulley, and terror gripped me as Yando, shouting with laughter, took hold of it, and I saw that what the third man was dragging forward was a frame shaped like an iron maiden, but made of metal strips, not unlike the irons in which they used to enclose hanged felons. It was hinged at one side, and as Yando threw it open my captors hoisted me up and thrust me into it. Yando snapped it closed, bolting it with a large pin attached to an immensely long fine steel chain which he held coiled in his hand. They lifted me parallel to the floor, hanging me on the hook by a loop on the back of the frame, so that I swung face down.

That was when I began to scream in earnest, struggling helpless in that ghastly cage, staring through its slender bars at the floor boards three feet below. Then Yando tugged on the coiled chain, withdrawing the pin so that the frame fell suddenly open, and I came crashing to the floor and lay half stunned.

D’ye know, in that moment I was a miserable Rugby fag again, being tossed in a blanket by the evil swine Bully Dawson, whose delight it was to heave us aloft and then pull the blanket aside so that we came down smash. I’d squealed for mercy then, but my pleas were nothing to the howls I put up now as they lifted me, thrusting me back into the dangling contraption, snapping it shut about me. Yando replaced the pin which held it closed, and they set me swinging again.

I still couldn’t see what they intended, except that it must be something hellish, but now Yando was leering at me through the bars, jabbering in Amharic as I wailed to be let alone, please, oh please, I’d done nothing, and I was a British officer, oh Jesus help me—and then they flung back a great trapdoor in the floor directly under me, and I shrieked myself hoarse as I writhed vainly in that hideous steel coffin, staring at the unbelievable horror revealed beneath the floor of the chamber, which overhung the cliff-top on which the tower was perched.

A blast of icy air smote me as the trap crashed open. Mist was wreathing below, partly concealing the gaping void and the cliff-face which I knew dropped sheer for thousands of feet—and Yando was flourishing the steel chain, displaying its great length and taunting me in Amharic as he showed in mime how he could draw the pin free at a distance, dropping me to hideous death. In my panic even my voice failed me; I could only mouth silently at that dreadful face, so close that I could catch the foulness of his breath—and to this day I can still see the pores in his disgusting black snout.

He shouted an order, and two of his minions were at the wheel controlling the hook. There was a sudden clank, and as I fell abruptly a few inches with a sickening jolt, I found my voice again, screaming my head off as I was lowered with the steady clanking of that vile machine to the level of the trap, and then through it into the biting wind and swirling mist, knowing that the fine chain which could jerk free the pin was paying out above, its end in the hand of that fiend gloating down at me. The lowering stopped with ajar and a last distant clank, and I was hanging in my imprisoning cage, ten feet beneath the floor, staring down into eternity.

Or so it seemed. In my catalogue of terrors, heights come second only to physical torture, and I have nightmares still in which I’m toppling after de Gautet into the boiling depths of the Jotunschlucht, or being hurled down to the death-pits of Ambohipotsey, or dangling ballock-naked beneath that balcony in Lahore. But nothing can compare to the crotch-tightening horror of seeing, through the blowing mist, the limitless depth beneath me, down that cliff-face now clearly visible dwindling away to the jagged pinnacles of rock rising from its base, and beyond them the valley floor to which that bastard Yando could send me hurtling with one twitch of his hand, down and down and down, falling, falling, falling for an eternity through half a mile of freezing nothing with the shrill wind drowning my dying scream until life ended in shattering bloody impact far below.

I wonder I didn’t go mad, waiting for the moment when I’d be launched into emptiness. What devilish cruelty had devised this lingering horror, and what subterranean “dungeon” offered less hope of escape or could provide a more awful tomb? I daren’t even struggle, for fear of jolting loose the pin, sobbing feebly as I swung slowly to and fro, a helpless human pendulum… oh merciful God, was it possible the ghastly moment of release would never come, and I’d be left to hang until I starved or perished of freezing cold or did go mad at the last?

D’you know what saved me from gibbering lunacy? The anguish of cold and the bite of steel bars into my flesh may have helped, but I believe it was pure funk that made me lose consciousness, sinking into an oblivion in which pain and fear and misery and hopelessness merged into a kind of trance in which they ceased to have meaning. Or perhaps, as confounded Dick Burton suggested when I described my ordeal to him, I simply fell asleep. That, he opined, would have been the thing to do. Damned idiot had no imagination whatever.

Trance, coma, sleep, or delirium, it lasted for hours, for when I came to, in agony from the constriction of my bonds and the bite of the bars into my almost paralysed limbs, the wind had dropped and the cold somewhat abated; if it hadn’t I’d ha’ been dead. There was sunlight bathing the cliff, I remember, and then I must have swooned again, for when I regained consciousness for the second time the sun had gone, and it was early evening, although I’d no notion of this at the time.

Now, I’ve described as best I can what it’s like to be hung over the edge of the world, spider-fashion at the end of a thread (except that he can climb up and you can’t), but when all’s said and done, even the most hellish ordeal ends, in death or survival. Mine fin ished with a distant clank which meant nothing to me; I heard it, but didn’t understand it, or what was happening as I was drawn slowly upward through the trap and into the “dungeon” again.

Other things I remember: the crash of the trap closing; the steel frame being opened and strong hands lowering me on to a soft bed; my limbs being chafed and rubbed with warm oil; the sting of tej in my mouth and throat; voices in Amharic… and then, through a lamplit haze, Uliba-Wark looking down at me, the handsome face tense with concern, the fine eyes troubled—and that, I can tell you, was a happy sight to waken to. She was kneeling by the mattress on which I lay, still in that beastly “dungeon", but with the trap safely closed. Above her stood a tall, fine-looking fellow of about my age, dressed in princely fashion with not only a red-fringed shama and knight’s gauntlets, but a silver coronet in his braided hair, with little horns, and metal tails trailing to his shoulders.

I must have been still fairly lost, for all I remember after that is being covered with a blanket, and soft heavy lips kissing my brow, and then drifting into sleep undisturbed by visions of bottomless chasms. It’s a great advantage of cowardice that escape from peril elates you beyond terrified reaction; that comes later, when you think back, and is best treated by liberal applications of booze.

I didn’t stir for above twelve hours, and woke to find myself in the same spot, aching damnably in every joint, with weals on my torso from the pressure of those damned steel strips, but in my right mind, full of beans, ready for grub and for Uliba-Wark.

She came as I was contemplating a loving squeeze at either of the barely clad damsels who were massaging my tired limbs, or the third who was removing the remnants of my breakfast; fortunately, perhaps, contemplation was as far as I got, for she came briskly in, sent the wenches scampering with a sharp word, looked at me care fully, took my face in her hands and kissed me in excellent style, but withdrew when I became familiar, and seated herself at the foot of my mattress. My breakfast lass had left a flask of tej, and Uliba filled two cups. “Listen,” says she, so I did, and was treated to a tale fit for the wildest of penny dreadfuls—but true, as the wildest tales often are, in my experience.

As I’d guessed, Malee (whose eccentric behaviour we’ll discuss presently) had been the traitress within the gates, somehow getting word out to Yando, who’d been on the lurk nearby, and unbarring the gate for him and his gang in the small hours. They’d overrun the garrison of bints and dodderers without difficulty, and Yando, whose style I couldn’t but admire, had offered Uliba a stark choice: give Yando his jollies or it would be the long drop for Flashy.

“That godless bitch Malee, that deceitful snake, had told him you were dear to me!” She spat out the words as though they were red-hot. “Oh, let her come within reach of my hand, and I’ll make the lying harlot pray for death! As for Yando…” I waited agog for sensational details, for since I was here safe and sound I must suppose that she’d submitted to his beastly passion for my sake, the plucky little woman. But she was vague, hinting that she’d managed to temporise while some of her folk, who’d fled after Yando’s invasion, had run for help to an amba a few miles away.

Its owner was yet another of her admirers (of whom I must say there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply), a civilised and genteel one for a change, named Daoud. He had lost no time in bringing a troop of riders to the rescue, capturing Yando and slaughtering most of his followers. Malee had wisely made herself scarce, and Flashy had been wound up and revived.

Whether Daoud and Co. had arrived in time to save Uliba from a fate which most ladies of my acquaintance regard as infinitely preferable to death, I still ain’t sure, but from her subsequent behav iour I rather think they didn’t, and he had his wicked will of her. But you’ll judge for yourselves.

Another mystery which I still can’t fathom is Malee. Her rage at Uliba’s desertion of Sarafa I can understand, and her later pretended repentance and reconciliation with her mistress while preparing to betray her. But deciding along the way to pass the night romping with the lodger don’t quite fit, somehow. I’m as immodest as the next man, but it seemed odd, and still does. Not to Uliba.

“I told you, anything I have, she must have also. She believed you were my lover; that was enough.” She shrugged. “Besides, she needs men as a drunkard needs tej. But she is no matter. Yando is.” She stood up, pacing across the chamber while I took happy stock of the proud Ethiopian profile with its heavy braids, and the elegant shape in the ridiculously scanty tunic. She turned to regard me gravely.

“He knows who you are. I was a fool not to realise that he has been watching this amba for a week past, hoping to surprise me. He saw me leave three nights ago to visit Napier effendi’s camp, where you and I met. He saw me leave again with you, and knew you must be a British soldier—what else could you be?” She gritted her teeth in self-reproach. “And I am reputed shrewd! I, the woman of excellent head, forgot that there are no spies like the spies of Habesh!”

“What of it? It don’t matter two straws to Yando that I’m British! He chased us here to get you, not me, and however sharp he and his spies are, he can have no notion why I’m here, or what for… why, Malee told him I was your lover! Well, there you are! Why should he suspect that I’m an envoy, going south to—”

“What he may suspect matters nothing!” cries she. “What matters is that he knew three days ago you were British, so did his men, and two of them escaped us! So how long, think you, will it be before the news reaches Theodore, who has an eye at every window and an ear at every door?” She came to kneel by the mattress, face and voice urgent.

“What says Theodore, then? He says, ‘Here is a British army advancing against me. Here is a British officer riding by night with Uliba-Wark, half-sister of Queen Masteeat of Wollo Galla. What can this mean? Can it be that the English general is sending an envoy to enlist the aid of my enemies against me?’” She broke off impatiently. “That much a child could guess, and Theodore is no child!”

My first thought was, well, there’s an end to my mission, thank God. My second was that Napier wouldn’t think so. He’d never stand my crying off; Galla was too vital for that, whatever the risk. And giving up didn’t even cross Uliba’s mind.

“So now our journey will be doubly dangerous,” says she. “Theodore will have his watchers out for us from Gondar to the Ashangi lake. God willing, they will be seeking an Englishman, not an Indian horse-pedlar.”

“They’ll be looking for you, too—”

“Which is why I must teach you enough Amharic to act as our purchaser and bid good day to passers-by.” She looked me over. “Are you strong enough to start tomorrow, before dawn?”

“I’m strong enough for more than that,” says I, and caught her arm before she could stand up, drawing her down beside me. She didn’t resist as I clasped her to me, revelling in the suppleness of her body, and when I clamped my mouth on her lips they remained closed only for a long teasing moment, suddenly opening avidly, her tongue thrusting against mine, her hands clasping fiercely behind my head. Trumpeter, sound! thinks I, digging my claws into her buttocks and doing my level best to eat her, at which she sud denly writhed free with surprising strength and scrambled up, gasping, her mouth quivering and her eyes wide and wild. I was lunging up in pursuit, but she stayed me with a hand.

“Wait!” says she. “First, there is something to be done—some thing you should see!”

She went to the ladder-stair and shouted down. A female voice replied, and after a moment a man’s. She barked out a command, and presently there were disputatious voices raised below, sounds of ascension, and here came the princely chap who I realised must be the timely rescuer Daoud, followed by a couple of strapping lads who, to my amazement, were bringing with them a damned disgruntled Yando.

He let out a tirade of screaming abuse at the sight of Uliba, one of his escorts hit him a smashing blow across the mouth, and the pair of them gripped him while another two sturdy minions appeared, and, at Daoud’s instructions, brought out that hellish cage in which I’d been given the fresh air treatment, and which had been tactfully hidden away in the shadows since I’d vacated it.

Yando squealed like a steam whistle at the sight of it, bloodshot eyes bugging and ape face contorted in panic, and I’ve seldom seen a sight more gratifying. As you know, I’m a cruel bastard, and if there’s one thing I enjoy it’s seeing another cruel bastard get his cocoa. In this case it was so dam’ poetic, too; my heart went out to Uliba as she stood there sneering, arms akimbo, and my one regret was that I couldn’t understand the taunts with which she was encouraging Yando as they encased him.

They had the devil of a job, for he was as strong as a bull, and for a reason which I didn’t understand until later, they hadn’t bound his hands. It took all four of them, and they had to beat him half-senseless before they had him caged and the pin in place. Then they hung the cage on the hook and threw back the trap and we all stood round appreciating his screams for mercy—I knew that’s what they were because they sounded so like my own. On Uliba’s instructions he had been placed in the cage face up, so we were treated to his interesting expressions as he was lowered slowly into the void, the men on the windlass stopping the process when he was only a bare yard below the floor level, not nearly as far down as I had been, but convenient for the spectators.

The long chain to the securing pin was coiled on the floor, and Uliba picked it up, holding it out for Yando to see and smiling down at him. She gave it a gentle tug, moving the pin just a little, and addressed what sounded like a question to him, which had Daoud’s followers in whoops. Daoud himself gave the ghost of a smile, and I had a feeling that he regarded the adored object’s conduct as not at all the thing (as Elspeth would say). He said something to her, and she shrugged and replied offhand, at which Daoud, after a long look at me, bowed to her and retired, followed by his gang mighty glum; they’d been looking forward to watching Yando take flight.

Uliba was in no hurry to put him out of his misery. She stood on the brink of the trap mocking him in a voice husky with excitement while he woke the echoes with his pleas and curses, writhing so that the cage jerked and swung like a cork on a string. A diverting sight, but I was more intent on studying her face, lips parted, laughing in delight as she toyed with the chain, drawing the long pin ever so slowly and then, with a last taunt, suddenly whipping it free.

The cage flew open, spilling him out—and now I saw that leaving his hands free had been the exquisite refinement of cruelty, for he was able to grab the edge of the cage even as he fell, and there he was, clinging for dear life as he swung over the giddy mist-streaked abyss, shrieking his ugly head off.

Talk about the female o’ the species if you like—Uliba cried in glee, clapping her hands, fairly revelling in the brute’s anguish, and now she sweetened his last moments with a gesture which I doubt even Ranavalona or the Empress Tsu-hsi or my little Apache charmer Sonsee-array would have thought of—and they knew how to tickle their male victims, I can tell you. She leaned over, jeering down into that glaring agonised face, and with slow deliberation undid the laces of her leather tunic and let it fall, leaving her naked but for a loincloth. She puckered her lips at him in a mockery of kissing, and told me to replace the trapdoor.

“Slowly, to give him time to think,” murmurs she, so I did as I was told, lowering the door gently; it couldn’t close entirely flush because of the suspending rope, but enough to cut off the horrid sight and sound of that wailing wretch, clinging in terror until pain and cold should loosen his hold. Uliba turned to me, her mouth shaking as if with an ague, and there was a light in her eyes which a lady novelist would certainly have called unholy. She flung her arms round my neck, pulling my face down to hers, gasping what I could only assume were indelicate suggestions, for in her agita tion the poor thing was babbling in Amharic. Let’s make hay while she’s hot, thinks I, and swung her up in my arms, unbreeching myself skilfully with one hand while clasping that lovely trembling flesh with the other, planted her firmly in the saddle to the accom paniment of gratifying squeals, and was making her the happiest of women as we subsided on to the mattress.

You never can tell, I’ve found, what different women will prefer as a stimulating accompaniment to la galop. I think of dear Lola with her hairbrush, Jeendan and her canes, Mandeville booted and spurred, Cleonie humming French nursery rhymes, and my own dear wife gossiping relentlessly to the last blissful moment and beyond. Each to her taste and God bless her, say I, but going at it like a Simla widow while a former admirer is dying by inches under the bed is not, I think, in the best of taste. Not that I gave a dam; Flashy in ecstatio has no thought to spare for tottering thrones or collapsing empires, let alone beastly rivals collecting their well-deserved rations.

Speaking of whom, when we’d exhausted our rapture and recov ered sufficiently to raise the trap for a look-see, Yando had gone.

If you take-a look at my map you’ll see how our road lay, from Ad Abaga south-west to Lake Tana, easy riding for the most part, while over the mountains to eastward Napier’s army was grinding its way through those impossible highlands of huge peaks and deep chasms, carving a road along precipices, round mountain tops, and across rock-strewn plateaux. Horse, foot, guns, mules, and elephants, growing lighter and hungrier by the mile as they abandoned gear and clothing and camp-followers, pressing on desperately beyond hope of return in the race for Magdala, while far to the south Theodore’s dwindling army and motley rabble of prisoners were closing on the capital from Debra Tabor, with fewer miles to travel but hampered by the ponderous artillery dragged in his train, including his mighty mortar “Sevastopol".

I don’t know which of them, the British general or the mad monarch, deserves the higher marks for leadership and determination and sheer ability in taking an army through and over hellish country, but you could say they were a matched pair and not be far wrong. They reached their goals against all the odds, and Hannibal and Marlborough couldn’t have done better.

Our immediate concern was to keep well clear of the various forces converging on Magdala, and somehow make our way to Queen Masteeat undetected. “We must ride wide to westward to avoid Gobayzy’s scouts,” says Uliba-Wark. “They will be along the Takazy river from Micara as far south as the Kerissa fork, so we shall go by way of Idaga, and then south over the river past Sokar and Gondar to the lake.” She traced a slim finger through the sand on which she had made a rough map with grass stems and pebbles. “It is a long way about, but there is no other safe path.”

“This one is safe, is it?” says I, and she laughed.

“In Habesh, where is safety? Who knows what raiding bands are abroad in Lasta these days, scavenging after the armies? Rebels, outlaws, brigands, slavers—perhaps even the main powers of Menelek and Gobayzy, although I think they will be farther south, in Begemder, watching Theodore and waiting. Somewhere thereabouts we should find Masteeat also, but only when we reach the lake will we have sure word of them. Meanwhile we ride carefully, by secret ways, approaching villages and ambas only when we must.” She swept a hand across the sand, obliterating her map, smiling lazily as she dusted her fingers and sat closer, stroking her cheek against mine. “It will be slow, but we have time… and we know how to beguile it, do we not?”

Having had her first taste of Flashy only the day before, she was still in honeymoon mood, so we beguiled away there and then, on the riverbank just within the edge of the woodland which she had pointed out to me from the top of her tower. We had slipped out of the citadel in the cold small hours, as she had planned, and she had picked her unerring way down to the valley floor and along the river in the dark to the shelter of the trees. Somewhere along the way we must have passed the remains of Yando spread over the rocks, but she didn’t pause to pay respects, and before daylight we were snug in cover, having breakfast and a flask of tej, considering our route, and enjoying the aforesaid bout of hareem gymnastics, in the course of which we rolled down the bank into the water, not that Uliba seemed to notice, the dear enamoured girl, for she thrashed about in the shallows like a landed trout.

A happy prelude to our journey, and a prudent one, I always think, for while the old Duke said one should never miss the opportunity of a run-off or a sleep, I say never miss the chance of a rattle, especially when going into mortal danger, for it may be your last, and you don’t want to die a prey to vain regret. Also, it puts you in fettle, and I was in prime trim when we set forward that morning through countryside as fresh and fair as an English spring, along wooded valleys where clear streams bubbled under the sycamores and wild flowers grew by the waters edge – and by afternoon we were pushing our way through fields of waving grass as high as our horses’ heads, and by evening ascending a rocky desert slope towards mountains of fantastic shapes, twisted peaks and ugly cliffs looming over us as night came down. That’s Habesh, elysium fol lowed by Valley of the Shadow, and not improved by the savagery of its inhabitants.

I’d seen the havoc wreaked by war and foray on the road up from Zoola to Attegrat, and what we encountered on our ride west to Idaga was of a piece: the occasional burned-out village and deserted farm, the carcases of beasts lying in neglected fields, the distant smoke-clouds where raiders had been at work, the peasants still going doggedly about their business but keeping their distance. There were armed guards on the ambas and hill-top communities, and escorts for the water porters carrying their cargoes up from the wells.

We kept well clear of them all at first, for Uliba was known in the countryside and in the towns of Adowa and Axum not far to our north, and we daren’t risk her being recognised. So the task of buying food and drink along the way fell on Khasim Tamwar, who needs must learn enough elementary Amharic to enable him to ask for woha (water), halib (milk), engard (bread) and quantah (dried meat), while putting on his most charming Hyderabadi smile and proffering the little sticks of salt which are the local small change and the only currency in the country apart from the Maria Theresa dollar—known as the gourshi, and worth five salt sticks. I’ve a gift for languages, as you know, and got a smattering of Amharic in no time. [30] It’s gone now, but I must have become reasonably fluent, because by the end of my Abyssinian odyssey I was conversing with Abs who had no Arabic; even in the first week, with Uliba’s tuition, I had enough to haggle with, for I remember at one farm I got two guinea fowls and a mess of kidmeat for two “salts", which she assured me was well below the going rate.

She stayed far out of sight with the led-beast whenever I went shopping, and since my foreign garb and eccentric vocabulary seemed to excite no interest, let alone suspicion, I began to think her fear of Yando’s rascals spreading word of our coming might be groundless. She shook her head, and said it would be different beyond the Takazy river. “Theodore will be on the watch for us down yonder, you may be sure. Hereabouts the folk care nothing for him and his policies, and they are used to foreigners far stranger than an Indian horse-coper.”

She told me that only a couple of years before a Neapolitan lunatic named de Bisson had invaded this region, hoping to found a kingdom; he’d had a rabble of mercenaries, uniformed, bemedalled, and armed to the teeth, and his beauteous wife in the full fig of a Zouave cavalryman, red britches, kepi and all, but the local tribes had given them the rightabout, and he and his gang had been lucky to get out alive, much the worse for wear. He’d tried to sue the Egyptian Government for not supporting him, without success, and retired to the Riviera in disgust.

“After such a portent, who is going to think twice about a mere wanderer from Hindustan?” says Uliba. “Whatever befalls later, all is well now, so let us be thankful, and travel well together.”

So we did, but if that ride to the Takazy passed without disaster it was thanks to her woodcraft; she was an even better jancada than Speedy had said, with that strange gift that you get in the half-wild (like Bridger and Carson) of being able to sense a living presence long before she’d seen or heard it. Time and again she turned us aside into cover of rocks or undergrowth where we waited until, sure enough, a few minutes later a camel train or a party of peas ants would heave in view and pass by. And once she saved our hides altogether, detecting the approach of a gang of slave-traders, armed and mounted, lashing along a wretched coffle of women and boys.

As we lay watching, one of the boys collapsed, and when flogging didn’t revive him, the gang rode on another thirty yards or so, when two of them, laughing and plainly challenging each other, turned in their saddles and used the feebly stirring form for target practice, hurling their lances—and hitting him, too, at that distance. They retrieved their lances from the dying boy’s body, yelling with delight, and galloped after their companions. I was as shocked by their accuracy as by their callousness, but Uliba merely remarked that a Galla warrior could hit any target up to fifty yards with a spear or a knife or even a stone snatched up at random.

“Those bastards were Gallas?” cries I, astonished. “But they’re your people, ain’t they? Why, they may know where Masteeat’s to be found! Why did you not—”

“Bid them good day? I thought of it,” says she, “when I recog nised their leader—one of those who speared the boy—as my cousin. But he is an Ambo Galla, a subject of Queen Warkite, and while he and some other of my relatives might well prefer me, or even Masteeat, as monarch of all Galla—for no one loves Warkite, a sour old bitch—still, he is a slave-trader, after all, and I would fetch a splendid price at El Khartoum… and even more,” she added complacently, “at Jibout’ or Zanzibar; the coast buyers have finer discernment than the Soudanis.”

“Holy smoke! D’you mean he’d sell you—his kinswoman? And a chief’s wife?”

“He would sell his own mother… and quite probably has. And if I am kin, and half-royal, still, I had the poor taste to wed a Christian. No, he would surely have sold me—and you. A white eunuch would be a novelty in Arabia.”

I almost fell over. “A white… I ain’t a bloody eunuch!”

“You would have been if they had seen us. Did you not mark the baubles which decorated their lances? Those were the genitals of prisoners and enemies.”

A discouraging tidbit of information, you’ll allow, and if I’d seen the remotest chance of a flight to safety, or even known where the hell I was, I might well have turned tail on the spot, Napier or no Napier. But being entirely out of reckoning, I’d no choice but to follow on, trusting to luck and consoling myself that there are worse travelling companions than a long-legged expert savage who’s taken a passionate fancy to you. That’s the best of memory, when terrors and hardships no longer matter, and I can look back and still see her reclining by the stream, dabbling her toes as she anoints those sleek limbs with her cosmetic oil until they gleam like bronze in the firelight, humming softly as she plaits her braids, and lying back smiling with her head on her little wooden pillow, holding out a hand to me.

But if that first week had its idyllic moments, they ended when we crossed the Takazy and rode south into a new and horrible world. I’ve seen more war-scarred country than I care to remember, from the shattered ruin of the Summer Palace and the corpse-choked waters of the Sutlej to the putrid mud of the Crimea and the scorched highway blazed by Sherman from Atlanta to the sea, but what lay before us now was beyond description. Even the war of the Taipings, the blood iest in human history, which seemed to carpet China with dead in heaps of countless thousands, was no more frightful than the charnel-house that Theodore had made in Lasta and Gondar and Begemder.

From the river down to Lake Tana is more than a hundred and twenty miles, and I doubt if we saw more than a score of living things in all that distance, bar vultures, hyenas, scorpions, and white ants, or a building whole and standing except for some of the flat-roofed stone houses which the better-off inhabit. Of the normal round thatched homes of the populace, there wasn’t one; every village and farm was a cold charred ruin in a vast graveyard where skeletons human and animal lay in the rubble. The fields and plain had been swept clean of people and their beasts; in the wooded valleys of the high country even the birds seemed to have gone, and we rode in an eerie silence. I dare say there were folk living in Micara and Sokar, small towns to which we gave a wide berth, as we did to the few ambas and adobe forts which showed signs of being occupied. I couldn’t fathom it, for plainly this had been a well-inhabited, pros perous land; where the devil had everyone gone?

“Most of them are dead,” says Uliba. “This was rebel country, remember, and it is not Theodore’s way to spare any who resist him, man, woman or child. If we have seen none of Gobayzy’s troops it can mean only that they have gone south after Theodore—and doubtless the banditti have gone also, for what is left to steal in Lasta?” We had reined in on the outskirts of yet another ruined village, beside a little walled enclosure filled with a great pile of bones, many of them plainly belonging to infants. I ain’t over-queasy, as you know, but the thought of how they’d come to be there turned my stomach. Uliba viewed them dispassionately.

“Thus Theodore wins the love of his people. You see now why Habesh rejoices in your British invasion; whether it deleivers your ca ptives or not, it will surely destroy him.”

Amen to that, thinks I. Until that moment I’d given little enough thought to this monster of an emperor and the atrocities he’d com mitted on his own people. You hear folk like Napier and Speedy talk of them, but it means nothing—and then you see ’em at point-blank, and can’t conceive of such wickedness. Until you come to Gondar, that is, and find yourself contemplating Hell on earth.

It lay about a hundred miles below the Takazy, and was once the capital of Abyssinia, a metropolis of forty-four churches and a great royal palace, standing on a hill from which there was a magnificent prospect of Lake Tana, forty miles away. For generations it had housed wealthy Muslim merchants and a revered priesthood, a magnet for traders from Egypt and the Soudan and the southern lakes, a city peaceful, flourishing, and rich—which was its undoing. Theodore had taxed it exorbitantly, virtually holding it to ransom, and not unnaturally the city fathers had tended to sympathise with the rebels fleeing the Emperor’s vengeance, and give them shelter.

This much Uliba told me as we came down towards it on the fifth day after crossing the river; I wondered if it would be safe to venture close to such a busy centre, and she laughed on a bitter note.

“Over the ridge yonder we shall see great Gondar on its hill,” says she, “and you can see how busy are its folk.”

We topped the ridge, and sure enough there was a distant rise crowned with buildings, some of ’em imposing adobe and stone structures, so far as I could tell from far off, but the lower slopes were covered in the burned ruins of thousands of the thatched houses of the common folk. There was an odd smell in the air, not the foulness of corruption, but more like an aftermath of decay, musty and stale. There was no sign of life on the hill, or on the plain below it, which was empty save for rows of upright objects that I took at first to be leafless trees, until we rode down to them, and I saw they were great crosses, hundreds of them to the edge of the city. And at the foot of each cross was a little pile of whitened bones, except for a few crosses on which were twisted blackened shapes that had once been human, preserved by some freak of the weather like so many withered mummies.

I could only sit and stare in disbelief, aware that Uliba was watching me with an expression of amused curiosity, resting easy in her saddle with one foot cocked up on the crupper. I dare say I was a sight to see, open-mouthed and appalled, asking myself such futile questions as what kind of creature could have done such a thing, and when, and above all, in God’s name, why?

Don’t misunderstand me. As I’ve said, I was inured to mass slaughter, and barbarous cruelty: when you’ve seen the mounds of Taiping dead, or the ghastly harvest of an Apache raid, you don’t gag or faint. But you can be stricken speechless at the sight of a mass carnage that has been conceived and designed and executed with meticulous care—no wild hot-blooded massacre, but a planned methodical operation, with hundreds of timber baulks cut and gath ered and fashioned into crosses, hundreds of victims condemned and marshalled and nailed or bound, hundreds of crucifixes reared and planted by hundreds of executioners, hundreds of tortured voices screaming—and whoever had ordered this must have nodded approval and commended it with a “Well done, men, a good day’s work", as he turned away from the ghastly sight and sounds and rode off to see what cook was preparing for supper.

Or perhaps he had given orders to crucify the population, and been miles away when his troops did the business.

“Oh, no,” says Uliba. “You may be sure that Theodore directed this in person. He would inspect every cross, every hanging body; he may even have driven home nails himself. That is his way, when the devil fit is on him.”

“He’s mad, then. Stark raving bloody insane!” I was thinking of other charming monarchs I had known, like Ranavalona with her death-pits, and that noble savage Gezo of Dahomey bouncing about on his throne fairly slobbering with glee as his Amazons sliced up his victims with cleavers. Plainly Theodore was from the same stable. It’s enough to make you turn republican.

Uliba shrugged. “Mad, perhaps. Or merely Abyssinian. Oh, you think of us as a fierce warlike people who love to fight—and we are, and you understand and admire that because it is in your nature also. But do you understand the joy of killing for its own sake? The delight in blood and the agony of the dying?” She shook her head. “From all I have heard, that is not in the British nature.”

You should see a Newgate scragging, you poor ignorant abor igine, thinks I. Or Flashy breaking de Gautet’s toes and pitching him into the Jotunschlucht with a merry jest, capital fun, and a deed after your own heart, sultana, you who gloated so joyfully over Yando’s performance on the flying trapeze. But sadistic spite in paying off a personal score is one thing; torturing to death an entire population whom you don’t even know, and whose only offence is that their civic rulers gave shelter to a parcel of rebels, is rather different.

It hadn’t properly sunk in, when Uliba had spoken of Theodore’s sparing no man, woman, or child, but it did now, as we rode through that ghastly forest of the dead which even the vultures had abandoned, and mounted the slope through the blackened ruins of Gondar city. Eerie silence hung over it like a shroud, and the stench of burned timber was overpowering, even though the fire had been dead for months. I’d have passed the infernal place by, not only for its foulness but because there might be enemies lurking, but Uliba, who seemed indifferent to the horrors we’d seen, brushed my fears aside.

“Only ghosts live in Gondar since Theodore destroyed it, more than a year ago. The peasants call it accursed, and even the outlaw bands avoid it.” She turned in her saddle to look back over the charred rubble to the rows of crosses below. “But it is well that you should see. If your general doubts the kind of enemy he has to deal with, you can tell him.”

I wondered if Napier would credit it, that a Christian king could spit in the eye of Christianity by turning crucifixion into a kind of blasphemy—for that’s how it would seem to my pious countrymen. And yet that wasn’t the worst of it, as I learned when we’d led our screws through the rubble-strewn streets and past the shattered walls of what had once been shops and churches and stone houses, and came to the broad plaza before the burned-out shell of the huge palace (once the largest building, they say, between Egypt and the Cape) where long-dead kings of Abyssinia had kept their courts amidst the wealth and splendour of a continent. If Prester John existed, this was where he’d sat his throne, where the scorpions and lizards now scuttled among the broken masonry. Once it must have been the wonder of Africa, a great city of fabulous wealth and ten thousand inhabitants; now it reminded me of those age-old ruins of North Africa and Middle Asia, and I must have asked aloud for the twentieth time what in God’s name had possessed Theodore to destroy such grandeur.

“Because he hated it,” says Uliba contemptuously. “Not only for its comfort given to rebels, but for its splendour and treasure and traditions that seemed to mock his stolen royalty. Gondar the Great, the glory of Habesh, a noble city of nobles, was a living reproach to the purge-seller’s brat.”

It came on to rain at sunset, one of those crashing tropical down pours with sheet lightning crackling on the western horizon and thunder booming overhead, so we bivouacked in the porch of one of the four churches which were the only buildings Theodore had left standing. It was dry and snug with the outer door pulled to, cutting us off from the city’s desolation, and when I’d lit a fire with one of my vesuvians [31] (Uliba, such a worldly-wise and cultivated little savage in so many ways, had cried out in alarm the first time I’d used one) she set to work preparing a stew of game and kid. I led our beasts through the arch into the empty nave, where I spread their fodder and rubbed them down, and took a quick dekko around in the last of the light from the high unglazed windows.

Theodore might have spared the building, but he’d stripped it bare. There was nothing but a broken font and a bare altar, behind which was another of those crazy frescoes which I’ve already told you of: this one depicted the Children of Israel crossing the Red Sea, pursued by Pharaoh’s army who were holding their muskets over their heads, presumably to keep their Ancient Egyptian powder dry.

For the rest, there was nothing but a heavy trapdoor in the wooden floor which covered the area before the altar; elsewhere the floor was bare earth to the walls, in one of which there was a closed side door. I heaved up the trap, whose slats were warped and shrunk with age, and there beneath was a small cellar, about twelve feet by twelve and eight deep, empty but for a few ancient pots and no doubt interesting assorted insect life.

I replaced the trap and joined Uliba in the porch, where we ate our supper by the shadowy firelight with the storm bellowing outside. And now she told me the full unspeakable tale of what Theodore had done to the old city in the autumn of ’66.

“He had wrested tribute from it in the past, so the people expected no more than another shearing of their golden fleece, and came out to greet their emperor, protesting loyalty and hoping to win his favour. They might as well have tried to charm a crocodile. Although the rebels had fled away at his approach, their recent presence was all the excuse Theodore needed to loot the city to its final ruin. The wealth of Selassie, the gold of Kooksuam, the silver of Bata, the gems from the mines of Solomon beyond the Mountains of the Moon, the silks and paintings and even the precious manuscripts were all plun dered to the uttermost scrap and coin. Never was such a pillaging… aye, they lived richly in the Gondar that was.”

She poured us cups of tej and sat back against the wall, golden in the firelight, sipping her cup and telling her dreadful tale as lightly as a fairy story.

“But to strip the city to its ruin was not enough, Gondar itself must cease to be. Its citizens, all ten thousand, were herded out like cattle, and the whole town given to the flames: the palace, the treasury, the forty churches, the fine homes of the rich and the hovels of the poor. Gondar burned from end to end, and the glow was seen in the sky from Lake Ashangi to the frontiers of Tigre and Soudan. And when the priests cried out, calling down curses on his head, he had them bound, hundreds of aged men, and thrown into the fire, so that they burned alive, to the last man. But did that satisfy him, d’you think?”

She leaned forward to pick up the tej flask, the black almond eyes watching to see the effect of her story, even smiling a little in anticipation.

“Let me fill your cup, you who love fair women, so that you can steady your spirit while you hear the rest. For now Theodore remembered that when the folk had come out to greet him, they had been led by the girls of the city, dancing and singing. ‘Their song was the signal for the rebels to flee!’ cries he. ‘Traitresses, bring them to me!’ And they too, every girl, from child to young woman, were thrown alive into the flames.” She paused to sip her drink. “The rest of the people he crucified or cut to pieces. What do you think of that, effendil It is true, you know, every soul in a great city exterminated by the fire, the cross, and the sword, thousand upon thousand. All Habesh knows it. [32] What will your general say?”

“Breathe a sigh of relief, most likely, since ’twill solve a problem that’s bound to be exercising him… what to do with Theodore, I mean. This makes it simple; the bastard’ll have to go.”

“You will try him, in a court, and put him to death?”

“Oh, I doubt that. What would we charge him with? We’ve nothing against him but kidnapping a few of our people, mistreating ’em and so forth. Can’t hang him for that. What he does in his own country, to his own folk, ain’t our indaba. Can’t quote you the law, but I’m pretty clear that’s how it stands. Why, I can think of two campaigns that I’ve been in, in India and China, where ghastly things were done by native rulers—women, in fact, dreadful bitches—but we didn’t lay a finger on ’em.” [33]

“But you said of Theodore, ‘he will have to go!’”

“So he will, one way or t’sother. Bullet in the back o’ the head, shot trying to escape, dead of a surfeit of lampreys, who knows?” I gave her a pr écis of my Harper’s Ferry adventure, where for reasons of state I was supposed to shoot mad John Brown so that the Yankee authorities wouldn’t have the embarrassment of trying and topping the daft old bugger—which I didn’t, as you probably know. “But that was a different case. Theodore’ll have to die, somehow; can’t execute him, but can’t have him hanging around Aldershot on a pension, either. Public wouldn’t stand it. He’ll just have to be done in on the quiet, accidental-looking.”

“What hypocrites you are!”

“No such thing. It’s just the civilised way of doing it, that’s all. What would you do with him, then?”

She leaned back against the wall in a way which stretched her tunic most distractingly, put her hands behind her head, and gazed pensively up at the flickering fire-shadows on the opposite wall.

“Given to me, he would take a year to die. Perhaps two. First of all I would have the bones of his hands and feet removed one at a time, then the larger bones of his arms and legs. This would be done by our most skilful surgeons, who would sew up the wounds, taking care to keep him alive and conscious…” She sighed contentedly, settling down to put her imagination to work. “Next…” But I shan’t tell you what she said next, because like me you may just have had dinner. I’ll say only that I hadn’t heard the like since my fourth wife, Sonsee-array, described what she’d done to captured scalp-hunters in the winter of ’49.

“You’d not give him the option of a fine, then?” says I. “Just so. Well, my dear, I hope you get the chance, because the evil swine deserves it. But I don’t suppose you will, what?”

“If I am Queen of Galla, who knows?” says she softly. “If your general wishes to avoid the responsibility of… punishing Theodore… might he not leave the task to the ally who had helped him to take Magdala?”

Fortunately I’m an old hand at keeping my countenance when mines are sprung under me, so I took a long pull at my tej and thought in haste. For this was her hole card faced with a vengeance, and I must take care.

“That ally, as I understand it, is Queen Masteeat,” says I. “She’s the one I’ve been ordered to approach, leastways.”

Uliba sat upright, very erect in the firelight, and pushed her hands beneath her braids, raising them from her head, letting them fall, and raising them again, then turning her head to regard me steadily from those slanting black eyes, the heavy lips parting as she took a deep breath. It was calculated and most striking, a gesture that said “Look at me, voluptuous romp that I am, female tigress and woman of destiny, for I’m turning my batteries on you, and by gad you’d best make your mind up.” She posed for a long moment, to make sure I noticed, no doubt, and then said: “If Masteeat were no longer Queen of the Wollos—” “Then I suppose I’d have to approach Warkite of the Ambos, wouldn’t I?”

“Bah!” She spat it out in contempt, swirling her braids. “To what end? Who would follow that dried-up crone against Magdala? You think because she presumes to the throne of all Galla that she can command loyalty even from her own tribe? She is nothing, a name only! She is no rival to Masteeat!”

“Is anyone?” says I, and she fluffed out her braids again, tossing her handsome head, and then burst out laughing.

“So we come to it! Yes, there is one—and you know her!” She leaned towards me, proud and confident. “The Basha Fallaka Speedy will have told you all about the third pretender, the concubine’s bastard who has twice rebelled—you did not know?—and for her treason was sent from the court of her royal ancestors and forced to marry a commoner, a mere petty chief, a chief so feeble that Gobayzy holds him captive—so who is she to challenge Masteeat, her sister? Masteeat who is strong and crafty and has held her throne against Warkite and such warlords as Gobayzy and Menelek these two years? Masteeat who commands ten thousand swords, oh, aye,” she added, sniffing, “and has a way with men, soft-fleshed and indo lent as she is. Well, she is not alone in her way with men. Is she?” And she gave her braids another lift and flaunt.

No, she was not, but the diplomatic problem facing me was a nice one. In effect I was being asked: if Queen Masteeat was somehow (and God alone knew how) replaced by Queen Uliba, would I, as Britannia’s envoy, recognise and do business with her? That, plainly, would depend on whether she could fill Masteeat’s shoes, which at the moment, given her situation, seemed unlikely. Then again, she was plainly intent on a coup d’etat, so she must have reason to believe she could pull it off, no doubt by kicking Masteeat’s bucket for her. Ergo, she must be counting on mighty support from within the Wollo Galla community, and since, as she’d remarked, she did have a way of enlisting masculine sympathy, no doubt that support would be forthcoming. Sufficient to do the trick?

That I couldn’t tell. But the immediate question was, if she did succeed in mounting a palace revolution, what help, if any, would she expect from old Flashy?

You see my dilemma. She was my only hope of reaching Queen Masteeat, and must not be antagonised. And however unlikely it seemed, if by some freak of chance and design she managed to supplant Masteeat in the next two weeks, she would be the key to Galla support against Theodore—but if she tried a coup and it failed, I daren’t be any part of it. Not only would Napier be left without a Galla to bless himself with, my essentials would be used to decorate somebody’s spear. The whole thing was wild and impon derable and downright impossible to predict or plan for, so all I could do for the moment was keep this mad hoyden sweet and see how the sparks fell.

All this in a matter of seconds while she watched me as though I were an opposing duellist, the firelight glinting in her eyes intent on mine, lips parted and expectant. And since there’s only one absolutely safe response to that hopeful feminine regard, I gave her my sentimental gentle leer, took her shoulders tenderly in my hands, brought my lips towards hers… and stopped dead, the hairs bristling up on my neck.

The storm had blown itself out, and the only sounds about us were the soft crackle of the dying fire, the stirring of our horses in the nave, the faint splash and trickle of water across the ground outside the porch door… and now, of a sudden, not far distant, the clatter of a stone disturbed somewhere out in the darkness, the ring of shod hooves, and a voice raised in a harsh shout.

If there was a man in those days who could move faster in a crisis than H. P. Flashman, I never met him—but there was a woman who could have given me a head start, Uliba-Wark of Tigre, the nearest thing I ever saw to chain lightning with a link snapped. Before I’d even taken in the meaning of that noise without, she was past me like a whippet, kicking the water chatti on to the fire as she sped to the door. A second later I was beside her, peering through a crack in the ramshackle timbers, and there at the other end of the plaza, a bare fifty yards off, torches were flaring in the dark and shadowy figures of men and horses were moving through the ruins.

Had they caught a glimpse of our fire through the rickety timbers? It seemed not; Uliba’s quick action had doused it in a hissing cloud of steam, and there was no cry of alarm from the torch-bearers, whoever they might be—a question I put to her in a hysterical squeak as we crouched in the darkness.

“Brigands!” she gasped. “Soudanis, surely—no troops of Habesh or honest travellers would be abroad in this weather at night, least of all in Gondar the accursed!” She didn’t need to add that dis covery would mean rape and enslavement for her and unspeakable death for me; that’s what she’d expected from her own Galla kins folk, and Soudanis were notoriously monsters of cruelty. My instinct was that we should bolt from the side door with a couple of horses, but she cut off my breathless suggestion by retorting that they would run us down in no time, and if we lay low the odds were they’d pass us by. Ignoring the only decent shelter in this bloody town? says I, but before she could reply there was a sudden shout from the darkness, followed by a commotion in Arabic which I couldn’t make out, and then Uliba’s fierce whisper in my ear: “They’ve smelt our fire!” And as if that wasn’t enough, one of the bandits’ horses decided to neigh its confounded head off, which brought an answering high-pitched whinny from the nave behind us.

All things considered, I think Uliba and I showed uncommon presence of mind. Through the crack in the door we could see the bandit gang starting towards us in full cry, but before they’d gone a yard I had her by the wrist and was making tracks for the nave; flight from the church on foot was out of the question, there wasn’t time to mount up before they’d be on us, but there was that heaven sent cellar in front of the altar, and with the nave barely lit by the moonshine through the high windows they’d never see the trap. I had it flung back in a twinkling, but to my consternation Uliba pulled free from my grasp and raced to the side door, thrusting it open before running back to me, the clever lass—the bandits would see it and think we’d gone that way; I’d used the same dodge myself when pursued by peelers at home. I swung her down into the cellar, she dropped like an acrobat, and a second later I was slipping over the edge, closing the trap above me as I jumped the last few feet to the cellar floor.

We heard the church door crash open, and pounding feet, but they wasted no time in exclamation, and the first words I heard were a sharp, command in Arabic, directing pursuit through the side door. They were in the nave, taking quick stock like the profes sional chaps they were, and presently their voices filtered down to us through the ill-fitting trap, while we clung together instinctively in the dank little cellar, like children at hide-and-seek.

“Three of them, Sadat?”

“Nay, one of those beasts is a pack-animal. And only two have eaten and drunk by the dead fire, one of them a woman.”

“How can you tell?”

“Use your nose, fool! Musk-oil.”

“Ha, she should be young, then!” Coarse laughter. “Hey, Yusuf, look well out yonder! She can’t have gone far!”

Suddenly light was shining down through the cracks in the trap; they’d brought their torches into the nave, and must have fixed them, for the light shone steady. Oh, God, would they see the trap? We huddled as far back as we could go to the side of the cellar, in the hope that if the trap were opened we’d be out of eyeshot of anyone looking down—unless they dropped in, so to speak… Quite so.

We could only wait, Uliba’s cheek running sweat against mine, while heavy feet thumped the wooden flooring just above our heads, and Sadat the musk-oil expert was saying that this place would do as well as any other, so let Yakub and Gamal bring the stuff inside, and have a care how they handled it, careless dogs that they were. Now there was great bustle, with more of the gang arriving, sounds of heaving and exertion and commands, a ponderous weight dropped on the floorboards, and through all the clamour a voice gentling our horses which had been alarmed by the uproar, while another was roaring to Yusuf for news of the fugitives supposedly being pursued through the night. Someone close above us was demanding what should be done with the stuff—and my blood froze at the reply:

“There must be a cellar under the trap yonder! What better place for the goods?” Uliba couldn’t repress a gasping sob. Then:

“Why has God ordained that I should ride with fools?” wonders Sadat. “What worse place could there be than one where folk are sure to look?”

“Eh? Oh, aye… well, then, where shall we put it?” “Underground, camel-spawn! Yonder, by the wall, you dig a hole, and bury it, and cover all with rubble so that only one lynx-eyed and enlightened by God, like Mahmud here, could hope to find it!” “Did he call me lynx-eyed and enlightened by God?” “Aye, but he didn’t mean it. Get a spade, clown!” “Why must I be the one to dig? Oh, lend a hand, then!” Uliba was limp against me, gasping with relief, and I was shud dering weakly as I heard them hauling some heavy article across the trap, and then came the crunch and scrape and foul language of labourers delving in the packed earth. Above that we heard our horses being appraised and their burdens examined, men coming and going, a disgruntled Yusuf reporting that whoever the bastards were who had fled into the night, they were nowhere to be found, demands for rest and food, to which Sadat (who was evidently their captain) retorted that they were riding out as soon as the goods had been safely concealed, and other conversation of the kind you’d expect to hear from marauders discussing the affairs of the day. I wish now that I’d paid closer attention, for there was interesting stuff about the possibility of enlisting gang members as guards for the Metema caravan, or taking a slap at one of the supply depots being established by the godless farangi invaders, but I was in too fine a funk to concern myself with anything but keeping tight hold of Uliba as two interminable hours crawled past, and my heart stopped whenever a footstep came near the trap. Please, dear God, I kept muttering, don’t let any of ’em get curious about the cellar… and I was just beginning to believe they’d do their business and leave us undisturbed when…

“Aye, that’s deep enough. Lift it over.”

“Will it be safe? When do we return for it?”

“When we’ve scouted this farangi army and seen what’s to be had from them… perhaps from Theodore, too. He carries his treasury with him, like enough.”

“What, despoil Theodore? Go rob a lioness of her cubs!”

“Aye, we’d do better to carry our treasury safe to Kassala instead of burying it in this grave of serpents!”

“I hate to leave it here! God knows it cost enough in blood and sweat to get it!”

“Eh, Sadat, let’s have another look before we cover it! Just a look…”

Cries of agreement, and Sadat, the indulgent ass, let them go ahead, there was a crash as of a lid being thrown back, delighted gloating, a warning snarl to Mahmud to take care, and then an almighty clatter of coin being dropped, ringing and rolling across the boards—and, dear Jesus, dropping through the cracks in the trap to the floor of the cellar! Uliba sobbed, my innards did a cart wheel, and recrimination raged overhead,—Mahmud being cursed for an idiot, coins being scraped up, some mean son-of-a-bitch crying that a few had fallen through the trap, Sadat shouting to let ’em alone and get the chest closed and interred, and the mean bastard crying that he was shot if he’d lose them… and throwing back the trapdoor.

Torch-glare suddenly lit up the centre of the cellar, but we were in deep shadow against the side wall, and all that we could see through the open trap was two pairs of boots and robed legs up to the thigh; we must be out of their owners’ line of vision, but if they stooped to look under the floor, would they see us in the gloom? If they descended…

“There they are! By Shaitan, Sadat, if you don’t want ’em, I do!” There must have been a dozen or more dollars glinting on the stony rubble of the floor, and as a booted leg swung over the edge of the trap I caught the glint of steel in Uliba’s hand in the shadows and my hand was on the butt of my Joslyn—for all the good that would do. The second boot swung down…

“Wait, you fool!” roars Sadat, laughing. “Look before you leap, man!”

There was a sudden howl of alarm from the man about to jump, the booted legs shot upwards as he fairly threw himself out of the trap, his mates crowing with mirth, and I stood paralysed between relief and revulsion.

It is the practice of the female scorpion, after giving birth, to carry her young on her back, and even with six of the loathsome little transparent monsters in residence there was still no lack of room on the scaly top of the enormous yellow horror scuttling among the fallen coins. She must have been six disgusting inches long, not counting the great sting curved up and over her ghastly brood—and she wasn’t alone in her nest, either; Papa and a couple of uncles were on hand, and a joyous sight they all were, bless their horny little hides, for they’d saved us from detection and death, no error. Not that they’d have done our intruder any harm through his stout half-boots, but they were a grand discouragement to coin collecting.

The trap was slammed shut to a chorus of jeers and taunts, and we were left in darkness and, in my case, imminent danger of heart failure. I was drenched in sweat, and Uliba was shaking as though with an ague. The danger might have passed, but it hadn’t gone; the force with which the trap had been closed had broken one of its slats, and through the gap I had a view beside which Mama Scorpion would have looked quite charming: the head and shoulders of a Soudani brigand listening to the orders which Sadat was giving for their departure. The odds are you’ll never meet one of the Soudani criminal classes, so I’ll tell you that this representative looked like an indescribably evil cathedral gargoyle, hook nosed and vulpine, with a tuft of beard, a steel cap with chain-mail earguards over black hair falling to his shoulders, and a grinning mouthful of jagged yellow tusks. Happy the bride who wakes up to see that on the pillow, thinks I, and was dam’ glad when he moved out of sight.

Presently they left the nave, and we heard them mounting up, but by mutual consent (and not a word said) we stayed put until dawn, by which time we reckoned they’d be well away. It was not comfortable, for with those fine specimens of Buthus Arachnidae rustling about on the floor we daren’t sit or lie down, and while like the Soudani we were well shod against their stings, I found myself wondering if the horrid little buggers could climb or jump. [34] My legs were painfully cramped by the time daylight began to filter through the broken trap, but after chafing some life into them and satisfying myself that all seemed quiet Chez Scorpio, I took three hasty strides, hurled back the trap, and swung myself out. Uliba followed quickly—and there we were, chilled to the bone at dawn in an empty church in a ghost city and not a thing to bless our selves with except the clobber we stood in, my Joslyn and cartridge-belt, and Uliba’s knife. Our horses were gone with the saddle-bags containing all our food, gear, spare kit, and dollars, and we were a day’s march from Lake Tana and heaven knew how far from Queen Masteeat’s camp.

“Well, at least we can put our finances in order,” says I. “Like old Ali Baba, we’ve lain doggo while the Forty Thieves cached their loot; now all we have to do is find it and fill our pockets.” She hadn’t heard the old tale, so I told it to her while we fossicked about—she was much taken with Morgiana’s boiling the robbers in oil, I remember. The cache was easy to find under a layer of rubble by the wall of the nave, and at the cost of skinned fingers and broken nails we clawed up the loose earth to reveal a stout iron-shod chest. It wasn’t locked, and when I heaved up the lid we were looking at a sizeable fortune in Maria Theresas, jewellery, wrought precious metal, gold pieces of a currency unknown to me, and carved ivory. We filled my pockets and her wallets with the gourshis, a hundred dollars apiece or thereabouts, and reluctantly abandoned the rest except for a fine ebony-hafted Damascus scim itar which I took, and various jewelled bangles, necklaces, and a gold fillet and veil which Uliba fell on with cries of delight—she was a very feminine Amazon, really, preening herself in a polished silver hand mirror and gloating as she threw it and other choice pieces into the cellar so that the Soudanis would have to brave the scorpions to retrieve them, and lamenting that we couldn’t capture the female and her young and enclose them in the chest before we reburied it, thus ensuring a jolly surprise for the returning robbers. Quite splendid in her malice, she was; I’d not have been surprised if her braids had stood on end and hissed at me.

Being famished, and not knowing how soon the Soudanis might come back, we made speedy tracks out of Gondar. From a vantage point on the south wall of the ruined palace we could survey the country as far as Lake Tana some forty miles away, a distant gleam of silver in the morning sun, its forested shore stretching away into the haze. The sooner we were under cover in those woods, the better, so we travelled at the Highlander’s pace, a mile at the trot and a mile at the stride followed by a moment’s rest standing, and then away again. Uliba ran like a Diana and I like a labouring bullock, but not too bad for forty-five, and within the hour we were in sight of a village of the plain called Azez, which I supposed we should avoid, but Uliba said the time for concealment was past now that we were afoot, and besides we’d get no news of Masteeat if we continued to skulk in rocks and bushes.

“We must seek it out, in a safe place where there are safe people to question. No, not in the village.” We had stopped in a grove some way short of the little cluster of thatched huts, and she was shading her eyes to scan the low hills beyond. “There should be a monastery over yonder, of monks of St Antonius the Hermit… if the wars have passed them by. Monks know everything…”

“And if they recognise you? They could pass word to this fellow Gobayzy who’s after you, or even to Theodore—”

“We’ve seen no trace of Gobayzy, no one will recognise me this far south, and Theodore has no more bitter enemy than the Church since he plundered and murdered at Metraha last summer. Anyway, we have no choice, so come, and keep your ears open for the monastery bell.”

We set off across the plain, and as we went, skirting well wide of the village, she told me of Theodore’s crowning infamy at Metraha, an island in Lake Tana which had been a holy place of sanctuary from time immemorial, and consequently a haven much used by mer chants to deposit their treasures—St Paul’s crossed with the Bank of England, if you like. Theodore had gained access to it by treachery, looted its vast store of gold, silver, grains, and precious stuff—and then herded the inhabitants, priests, merchants, women, and children into the principal buildings and burned them to death.

“So we run no risk of betrayal to Theodore. Rather,” says Uliba complacently, “will the holy fathers show all kindness and respect to a noble lady of Tigre bound for the court of the Queen of the Gallas, who had the misfortune to be robbed of her caravan by Soudani bandits who murdered her servants and would assuredly have slain her (or worse) had she not escaped by night with her faithful Hindee attendant. Hence her destitute condition—”

“Lucky for her she was able to deck her destitution with a few choice trinkets—oh, and a purse of dollars—which she was fortunate to be able to carry away with her, and from which she will make a generous gift to the monastery’s alms chest. If that does not move their pity,” says she, “I know nothing of Christian priests. Besides, these will be provincial simpletons, properly awe-stricken in the presence of rank.”

I didn’t doubt that, but one snag occurred to me. “They’re Coptic Christians, ain’t they… suppose they spot you for a Galla? After all, you’re on your way to Masteeat—can you pass as a Christian?”

She gave me her superior smile, and drew from the bosom of her tunic one of the necklaces she’d pinched from the Soudanis’ hoard: a fine cord of pale blue silk skilfully intertwined with gold and silver threads. “This is called matab; is it not beautiful? All Christians of Habesh wear them from their baptism; it is the first thing these Christos look for in each other. And this one, as you see, is of the most precious kind, such as only the high-born and wealthy would wear… ah, but listen! The bell!”

It was tolling faintly, but stopped as we entered the little valley in which stood a plain adobe building of no great size, walled, with an arched gateway, and surrounded by plots too small to be called fields in which white-robed Abs were digging and hoeing without enthusiasm. They stopped to stare as the high-born lady of Tigre, a striking figure in her scanty tunic, boots, and veiled fillet, sashayed towards the gate with her faithful Hindee attendant throwing a chest as he followed dutifully in her wake.

Chanting greeted us as we passed through the archway into a courtyard where a crowd of robed and turbaned jossers were waking the echoes with what I learned later was a Coptic psalm, and plainly we were intruding on a service—or, as it proved, a rehearsal for one, Palm Sunday no less, which fell a week hence. The turbaned lads were priests, bearing strange long wands with heads like crutches, while the commonalty and sundry infants carried palm fronds. To the fore was a dignified old file called the Abba (which I suppose is abbot); he wore a very stylish yellow leather coat and carried a curious article like a catapult with abacus beads between its arms, which he waved from time to time. In attendance were a priest bearing a fancy sort of decorated cross, a tiny chico with a bell as big as himself, and two deacons holding up an enormous Bible. (* For a description and illustration of the Palm Sunday ceremony, see Simpson, Diary.)

Even as we appeared the singing stopped and the Abba began to read from the Bible, but left off in some confusion when one of the deacons drew his attention to Uliba-Wark, who was listening attentively, hand on hip, nodding approval. Everyone goggled at waving a graceful hand to them to continue, and then turning aside to seat herself on a bench by the gateway. The Abba, who’d been taken flat aback (it dawned on me that there wasn’t another female in the courtyard), steadied up and began reading again in a shaky falsetto, but shooting little disturbed glances in Uliba’s direction as she crossed her legs and sat back, finger on cheek, gently smiling as though she were watching a show performed for her benefit. The reading finished (cut short, I suspect), the Abba and his gang retired through an inner doorway, shooting more little glances, and presently a bald chap with a staff of office approached Uliba and invited her within. She rose with dignity, made a little gesture to me which I interpreted as an order to scatter a few dollars to the hoi-polloi, and swarmed away. I distributed, smirking, bowed tact fully to the cross-bearer who was leading the peasantry in another psalm, and hastened after my mistress like a good little minion.

Even with my limited Amharic I could follow much that was said at the audience which followed in the monastery chapel. Uliba was conducted with great deference to a chair hurriedly placed between the front pews, while the Abba enthroned himself nervously on a stool before the altar, his attendants standing by with palms, crutches, and open mouths. I don’t know if Coptic priests are celibate, but these gaped at her like hayseeds at a burlesque show in the Chicago Loop; I don’t suppose their modest little God-hutch had ever seen her like, and she played it like the grandest of dames, surveying them coolly and turning that elegant profile as she swept off her fillet and veil and handed them carelessly to me, looking stern beside her chair. She charmed them with a gracious apology for interrupting their rehearsal, and the Abba near fell off his stool assuring her that it didn’t matter tuppence, honestly, and please how could they serve her excellency?

This before she’d said a word about being a great swell on her way to a queen’s court, or being despoiled; she did it simply by style and looks and those remarkable legs, and had them eating out of her dainty palm. Awe-stricken, she’d said they’d be, and awestruck they were.

The account of our adventures which she gave them was succinct and fairly offhand, but it had them agog, knuckles to teeth and gasping concern. The Abba didn’t know what Habesh was coming to, what with evil emperors and foreign invaders and plundering rebels and noble ladies molested and robbed by heathen brigands, God forgive them, but what protection and comfort the Church could offer, she should have, and her servant too, infidel though he was. This consisted of food, drink, attention, prayers, the best chamber in the monastery placed at her ladyship’s disposal (with a mattress in the passage for Vilkins the butler), and the promise of such clothing, equipment, and transport as could be drummed up overnight.

I was given my vittles in the monks’ refectory, watched by curious and none too friendly eyes, for they’ve no use for non-Christians, and as a “Hindee” I was right beyond the pale. Uliba dined in some state in the Abba’s private apartments, and if the news she got was confused and disturbing, it was definite at least on the main point.

“Masteeat has her camp on the Abai river, below the falls which the people of Metcha call the Great Silver Smoke.” She was jubi lant. “Five days’ journey by horse or camel, even by the western shore of Tana—see!” The Abba had given her a map, a pretty coloured thing with Lake Tana all little blue waves with boats afloat, and an Ark at anchor with hippos and pythons and monkeys clam bering aboard under the eye of a distinctly Ethiopian Noah, the whole lot being blessed by a dusky Jesus. “Here at Azez we are forty miles from Gorgora, at the head of the lake; another fifty at most to Zage, and perhaps fifty down the Abai—”

“Why not the straight way, by the east shore?” I could see it would cut the journey by as much as a third.

“Because Theodore had his camp at Kourata last year—” she tapped a finger on it “—and he will have troops there still, and who knows how many between the lake and his army which marches on Magdala? He has wasted all Begemder, and these churchmen say he is already at the Jedda ravine, but their news will be a week old; he may be close on Magdala by now.”

“And Masteeat’s army, by your reckoning, is about ninety miles from Magdala… where’s Napier, do they know?”

“They heard of him last at Antaloo, but that too will be old news. At best, he can hardly be more than a day’s march south of the Ashangi lake.” She traced a finger up from Magdala; Napier had a good hundred miles to go, by the look of it.

“Well, Theodore can win the race on a tight rein,” says I. “If he gets his guns into Magdala…” I didn’t care to think of that. The place was said to be impregnable, which was doubtless an exag geration; British troops can take anywhere, given a commander who knows his business, but the Bughunter didn’t have time for a siege, not with his striking force at full stretch, with food and forage running low. If he came to a dead stop before Theodore’s defences… well, it would be a dead stop indeed, far from home and no way back. His army would starve where it stood, and Theodore’s highlanders could cut up the remains at leisure… no doubt with the rebel warlords joining in. My consolation was that I’d be better placed as a free agent with Uliba, rather than as a hapless lump of cannon-fodder in Napier’s Last Stand… I had a sudden horrid rec ollection of Gandamack, with the 44th trapped on the icy slope, Soutar with the colours round his middle, and the Ghazis closing in…

I asked about the rebels, and she spat. “Cattle! Cowards! They run in circles, frightened of Theodore, fearful of each other! That much is plain from this old fool of an Abba’s tale, but he knows little more to any purpose. That drunken fat sow Masteeat,” sneers she with satisfaction, “had the game won, had she used the wits she wastes in guzzling and coupling! Two months ago she stood before Magdala with her army, while its garrison of weaklings and traitors wrung their hands, willing to surrender but in dread of Theodore’s vengeance when he returned from plundering in Begemder. Oh, had I stood in her place they’d have surrendered fast enough!” She clenched her fists and shook them, and I believed her. “But she puts off, and idles away her opportunity, and is forced to retreat at last because the hyena Gobayzy and the jackal Menelek come prowling into Galla country, afraid to attack Magdala, but still outnumbering her, so she withdraws to the Abai. It is very well,” says she, pleased as Punch. “Things could not stand better!”

Blessed if I could see that, and I said so. “If she has cut and run, what’s the use in our going on? She and her army’ll be no help to Napier if they’re ninety miles away!”

She waved that aside. “Galla armies can move at speed. Besides, she’ll have left more warriors in the hills about Magdala, ready for action, than she’ll have taken to the Abai. Let the Queen of Wollo Galla but say the word and there will be a steel ring—was not that what your general called it?—round the amba of Magdala, with Theodore held fast within.”

The Queen of Wollo Galla… but which queen? We had been discussing her ambitions, and what part I might be called on to play in realising them, when the Soudanis had interrupted us, and the topic had not been resumed; well, it could be let lie for the moment. That she’d make a bid for her sister’s throne, I knew, if not when, where or how. In the meantime it was enough that we knew Masteeat’s whereabouts, and that these jovial monks would speed us on our way.

They didn’t stint us, either, with the loan of two camels, their saddle-bags filled with grub and flasks of tej, cloaks and blankets, and a couple of chicos to race ahead to make sure our coast was clear. Uliba made no offer of payment, simply fluttering a queenly hand at me, and I presented the chief deacon with a purse of fifty dollars, to which she added one of her bracelets which she presented in fine Lady Bountiful style to a small girl in the crowd—for every soul in the place, priests, lay brethren, labourers and menials, was on hand to see us off. We mounted the camels, they lurched to their feet, the Abba blessed us, and off we went with a camel groom trot ting in our wake; he would bring the beasts back from Lake Tana, where we would seek other transport. A chorus of farewells fol lowed us, and before we were out of earshot they were making a joyful noise to the Lord, either in rehearsal for Palm Sunday or rejoicing for the dollars.

I’m no old Africa hand, and what I’d seen of Abyssinia so far had jaundiced rather than impressed, but I’m bound to say that the Lake Tana country is as close to earthly paradise as I’ve ever struck, for scenery at least. From Azez to Gorgora on the northern shore is nothing out of the ordinary, but the lake itself beats anything in Switzerland or Italy, a great blue shimmering inland sea fringed by tropical forest, hills, and meadows, for all the world like a glorious garden of exotic flowers and shrubs in groves of splendid trees and ferns. The woods are alive with birds of every colour and size, from tiny feathered mites hardly bigger than butterflies to the mighty hornbill, a black-and-white monster as big as a man, braying as it rushes overhead like some flying dragon. There’s an abundance of game, deer and antelopes and monkeys everywhere, buffalo ranging on the slopes, huge hippos surging and bellowing in the lake itself, and the biggest snakes in Africa, twenty-foot pythons in shining coats of many colours, gliding through the shallows.

Good camels can cover the ground as quickly as horses, and we made our first-night camp in a little palm grove only a few miles from the lake. Uliba said it would be safer to steer clear of Gorgora, so next morning we made a bee-line for the western shore and the cover of the jungly forest. It had not been determined precisely where on Tana the groom should turn back with the camels, and when Uliba said we’d like to take them as far as the Abai source he had severe conniptions; he was one of your tough, lean Abs who run like stags, and had kept up easily with his long loping stride, but he was shot if he was going to venture any nearer the dreaded “Negus Toowodros" (* “Theodore, King of Kings".) than he had to; everyone knew of the carnage that had been wreaked south of the lake, of the burning and blinding and hacking off of ears and noses; why, all Metcha was a smoking desert.

Uliba came the headmistress with him, but he wasn’t to be moved, and it was only when she’d offered him twenty dollars and he’d beaten her up to thirty that he reluctantly agreed to come as far as Adeena, near the foot of the lake.

“We could have killed him and kept the camels,” says Uliba as we rode on our way with the groom trotting moodily after, “but he might have fought, and what is thirty dollars?” I wondered if she’d have expected me to do the dirty deed; knowing her style, prob ably not.

It took us the best part of the day to reach Adeena, a little fishing village in a pretty clearing by the shore. They were almost the first folk we’d seen since leaving Azez, friendly enough peasants but, like our groom, apprehensive of what lay farther south, and thankful that Theodore’s campaign of terror had not touched them so far. Zage and Baheerdar had been razed to the ground and all the people killed or driven away; yes, Theodore’s soldiers were still at Kourata across the lake; but no, nothing would induce them to ferry us any where near the city—or indeed, even down the coast. Having seen their boats, crazy coracles of woven bulrushes that were perma nently waterlogged, I was happy to continue our journey on foot.

To Uliba’s fury, our groom, gossiping at the evening meal which we shared with the village headman, mentioned that we were on our way to find Queen Masteeat. It seemed harmless to me, but she was spitting blood later when she explained that the nearer we got to our goal, the greater our danger, with Theodore’s lances on hand. “I knew we should have slit the chattering bastard’s throat! Well, he has our dollars, but we’ll not bid him goodbye. When all are asleep, do you take the saddle-bags from the camels, and we’ll be away before dawn!”

It seemed to me she was starting at shadows. “These folk hate Theodore more than you do! They ain’t going to give us away.”

“And is their hate greater than their fear? Will they be silent if Theodore’s riders chance this way? We are not safe this side of the Silver Smoke. The camels could carry us there in a day, but to steal away with them by night might bring a hue and cry down on us.”

So we took French leave of Adeena in the small hours, slipping through the shadows with such stealth that I doubt if more than half the population heard us go, but they paid us no mind, pre sumably turning over and thanking God to be rid of a pair of unwel come guests. There was a good moon, and with Uliba surefooted as ever it was a pleasant promenade through the shadowy groves until the light went and the chilly mist came in off the water. Then we built a fire, had a welcome snack of the monastery’s bread and ham washed down with tej, and rolled up together in one blanket, keeping warm in the jolliest way I know.

Next morning we rounded the bay which is the south-western limit of Tana, both in high spirits in the sunshine, swinging along like Phyllis and Corydon in Arcady, with not the least foreboding of the horror ahead. There were a few fishers abroad on the lake, staying afloat for a wonder, and we passed a couple of villages where the peasantry seemed to be taking no harm as they loafed about in their plots. We nooned in a secluded cove where a few water-fowl were disporting themselves out beyond the shallows, and Uliba asked me if I fancied duck for tiffin. I said by all means, if she’d catch them, and she laughed and asked, if she killed ’em, would I fetch ’em ashore? Kill away, says I, wondering, and she picked up a handful of pebbles from the beach, juggled them from hand to hand, and all of a sudden whipped them away like a fast bowler, side-arm, one-two-three! And blessed if she didn’t crack the heads of two ducks and lay a third squawking and thrashing in the water!

She’d told me of the Gallas’ skill with missiles, but I’d not have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. I plunged in and retrieved the poultry, full of congratulation, but she made light of it, saying they had been real sitting birds, and next time she would bring one down on the wing. Again, I believed her. An odd thing: none of the other ducks had so much as stirred, and she told me that the birds and beasts of Lake Tana were so tame that they never minded hunters, not stir ring even when the critter beside them was hit.

It was such a glorious day that we swam in the lake, icy cold as it was, and I have a happy memory of LTliba sitting on a smooth black rock like the little mermaid, naked, wet and shining.

We made good time in the afternoon, leaving the forest for a more broken and rocky shoreline, and I noticed that we saw fewer folk along the way, and at last none at all. That was the moment when I caught a drift on the air of that same flat stale stench there had been at Gondar, and Uliba stopped, head raised, and said: “Zage.”

We had crossed a few streams running through the rocks into the lake, and now we came to another, a small river really, with steep banks, and as we prepared to descend the weather changed with that speed so typical of Abyssinia, and a storm of hail came down like grapeshot, great lumps the size of schoolboys’ marbles that drove us under cover and churned the river mouth and lake surface into foam. You could barely hear yourself speak above the rattle of the downpour, but Uliba was laughing as she pointed to the stream and shouted: “Little Abai! Only a few miles farther now!”

I couldn’t make this out: the stream was flowing into the lake, and I knew the Abai, which is the Blue Nile, should run out of Tana—and thereby hangs a tale, which I heard first from Uliba as we crouched under the broad leaves of a baobab to shelter from the hailstorm, and again years later from the Great Bore of the Nile himself, Daft Dick Burton, at the Travellers’ Club. He had a most tremendous bee in his bonnet about it, with which I’ll not weary you beyond saying that the Little Abai runs into Lake Tana west of the town of Zage, and out again east of the town, when it becomes ¦the Great Abai and eventually joins the White Nile which rises ’way up yonder in Lake Victoria—or so I gathered from Burton, who was full of bile against the chaps who’d discovered it. God knows why: he’d ha’ fought with his own shadow, that one. [35]

At all events, when the hail stopped we crossed and came to the promontory of Zage, the site of a once-populous town now ruined and deserted, thanks to Theodore, who had looted and burned it months before—hence that stale stink of charred wood and desolation. It was half-hidden by trees at the base of the promontory, through which we passed to open ground where there were signs of a disused camp-site, and so came to a swampy tangle of roots, on the verge of the lake. Out on the water we could see a couple of fishing craft heading up in the direction of Adeena, and Uliba surveyed them frowning for a long moment before turning to follow the edge of the swamp away from the lake.

She paused again to point eastward to where, beyond the swampy ground, there was a small cluster of huts on the shore. “Baheerdar,” says she, smiling. “Remember? D’you think you could have found it?” I said I was glad I hadn’t had to try, and she led on again by the swamp, which was now flowing south, quite distinctly, and presently, when we’d pushed our way through marshy thickets buzzing with mosquitoes, and mounted a grassy rise, the swampy flow had become a stream between jungly banks. A mile or so farther on it was broadening into a river proper, shining ruddy in the sunset, and Uliba gave a great heaving sigh and stretched her arms high above her head.

“There it runs—the Great Abai! A few miles to the Silver Smoke, and not far beyond, the camp of my people.” She came to my side and put an arm about me, inviting an embrace. “Have we not trav elled well together, effendiT

I cried by gad hadn’t we just, and gave her a loving squeeze and a hearty kiss, telling her she was the queen of guides—while noting to myself that she was now talking of the camp of her people, not Queen Masteeat’s. Very soon now I must discover what was at work behind that triumphant smile, and whatever it was, prepare myself for some nimble footwork—oh, and if possible carry out the task Napier had given me, and ensure that the Wollo Gallas closed the trap about Magdala… whoever was occupying their tribal throne. I half expected Uliba to advert to it, but she volunteered nothing, so I must wait and see, composing myself to sleep on the banks of the Great Abai, and reflecting unprofitably on the irony that given a small boat and enough grub (and if the Napiers and Ulibas and assorted Abs and Bedouin let me alone) I could have floated a few thousand miles downstream in peace and tranquillity to Shepherd’s or the Hotel du Nil in Cairo.

I awoke suddenly with a hand gripping my arm and another over my mouth, and was about to lash out in panic when I realised they were Uliba’s hands, it was just on half-dawn, and she was hissing a warning in my ear.

“Still! Keep down!” She was out of her blanket, snaking away across the turf damp with dew, and I followed her with my innards turning over at this sudden alarm. “See—yonder, across the river!”

I followed her pointing finger, and froze where I lay. On the far side of the water, which was barely fifty yards broad at this point, a line of horsemen was emerging from the jungle, pricking down to the bank. They were lancers, forty or fifty of them, trim in white robes and turbans and breastplates, one or two with chain-mail shoulder guards, their leader wearing a steel casque and knight’s gauntlets and carrying a silver shield. They ranged along the bank, dismounting at his word of command to water their horses, their voices drifting across the misty surface.

More in desperation than hope I wondered if they might be Masteeat’s people, but Uliba shook her head impatiently and wormed her way backwards into the shelter of the bushes, dragging blanket and saddle-bag with her, and signing to me to do likewise.

“They are Theodore’s guardsmen, his household cavalry. That silver shield is carried only by nobles high in his service.” Her whisper was fierce but steady. “Those boats we saw last night, making towards Adeena—they must have been at Kourata, bearing word of us and where we were going!” She screwed her eyes shut in fury, clenching her fist. “God of gods, why did I not kill that loose-tongued fool!?”

“Hold on—how d’ye know they’re looking for us? You can’t be sure—”

“A silver shield abroad before dawn with picked troops of the Emperor? I can be sure they are not on manoeuvres! He would never leave such an elite to garrison Kourata when he is marching on Magdala! No, he will have sent them west the moment he learned (doubtless from Yando’s vermin!) that a British officer was coming south, plainly to enlist aid from Masteeat and the Wollo Gallas! They will have been scouring Begemder for us, and now those peasant scum at Adeena have given them our scent. And they are following it.”

Talking like a book, as usual, and keeping her head. She signed me to silence and crawled forward again, to a solitary bush, the braided head cocked to listen. After a moment she was back, her lips at my ear.

“They are looking for a place to cross, then they will sweep both banks downstream. And we must be the quarry; no ordinary fugi tive would be worth such a hunt.”

“Oh, God! What can we do?”

She smiled grimly. “Run!—away from the river, before they can cross. We can circle wide and come back to it, for we’ll be swifter afoot in jungle than they can be on horseback. If we can reach the Silver Smoke ahead of them we shall be safe, for they’ll venture no closer to Masteeat’s army than that.” A word of command sounded across the water; they were mounting up again. “But we’ve no time to lose. It is twenty miles through jungle to the falls.”

If you’ve never travelled in jungle you may be under a false impression, thanks to the tales of blowhards who’ll tell you how they’ve hacked their way through impenetrable undergrowth and been lucky to make two miles a day battling snakes and great hairy spiders. Well, such jungle does exist, and sufficiently hellish it is, as I should know who have gone my mile in Borneo and the Fly River country, but as a rule it ain’t so thick, and what you have to look out for is where you’re putting your feet. Even such good rain forest as the headwaters of the Blue Nile has its hazards, like sudden swamp and potholes and solid fallen trunks which crumble rottenly and drop you unexpected into the slime; by and large, though, it’s fair going, with more trees than thickets, and space to move in. I reckon Uliba and I made a good four miles an hour, which is faster than marching, and if it was hot work it wasn’t unbearable in the shade. I doubted if Theodore’s cavalry could do as well; with luck, when we circled back to the river, we’d be comfortably ahead of them, provided we kept up our pace.

Moving away from the river must have added two or three miles to our trek, but by sunset Uliba reckoned we had covered enough ground for the day; you don’t move in jungle after dark if you have any sense, so we camped among the banyans and acacias, not risking a fire but enjoying the rays of sundown gleaming through the groves, and the last chirping and calling of the millions of coloured birds in the branches overhead. It reminded me of the Madagascar forest, and you mayn’t believe it but I felt my eyes stinging at the memory of Elspeth blue-eyed and beautiful, smiling up at me with her golden hair tumbled about her head on the grass, her arms reaching up to me and those lovely lips parting… “My jo, my ain dear jo!”

Dear God, that had been more than twenty years ago, that strange idyll of joy and terror mingled, when we’d fled from Antan’ with Ranavalona’s Hovas on our trail… Theodore’s riders might be a fearsome crowd, and most professional by the look of them, but at least they were part-civilised, unlike those black monsters… Strange, though, how history repeated itself: here I was again, fleeing the forces of darkness through tropic forest in the company of beauteous tumble—not that Uliba could begin to compare in looks, style, deportment, vivacity, elegance, complexion, allure, voluptuousness, abandoned performance, erotic invention, or indeed in any way at all to my glorious Elspeth, at the thought of whom I was beginning to dribble… and whom I loved dearly and truly, I may say, and had seen only at brief ecstatic intervals in the past four weary years—no, five, dammit! It was too bad, and I missed her so, and God alone knew what she’d been up to while I was shirking shot and shell at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Yellow Tavern, Ford’s Theatre, and Queretaro, and look at me now, lachry mose in Ethiopia with the little grey monkeys sneering at me from the trees. Then the rain came on. [36]

It dawned gloriously sunny, however, and we were up and making for the river before first light. The closer we got to it, the thicker grew the jungle, which meant worse going for Theodore’s cavalry. At last we sighted the gleam through the undergrowth, and presently came out on a long stretch of sward running along the water’s edge. The river was about quarter of a mile across, I dare say, and a land scape painter’s dream, grey-green and shining as it slid smoothly by through the little forested islands. The far bank was luxurious foliage backed by green foothills rising to mountains, and to our right, a mile or two downstream, a faint mist hung over the river, with a perfect rainbow above it. Uliba clapped her hands and pointed.

“The Silver Smoke! Am I not the queen of guides, as you said?”

For the first time since we had left Tana there were folk to be seen, fishermen pottering about their ramshackle boats a few hundred yards downstream where the sward margin ended and the jungle overgrew the river’s surface. Closer at hand two girls were busy dhobying clothing and hanging it to dry on a line by the water’s edge, their little coracle drawn up on the bank. They stood up to stare at us, and when one of them waved, Uliba raised a hand. My spirits were rising as we set off down the bank, the birds were carolling, there was a perfumed breeze blowing from the water, we were within a few miles of journey’s end, I was absolutely humming “Drink, Puppy, Drink", the larks and snails were no doubt on their respective wings and thorns, God was in his heaven, and on the verge of the jungle, not twenty yards away, a white-robed helmeted lancer was sitting his horse, watching us.

For three heartbeats we simply stared at each other, while I told myself this couldn’t be one of the troop we’d seen yesterday, they’d not had time—and then his eyes were wide, a hunter sighting the game, I was snatching out my Joslyn, Uliba was shouting “No!", dashing my hand aside and racing past me, drawing her knife as she ran. Without breaking stride she threw it, straight as an arrow, for his breast, but this fellow knew his business, whipping his shield across to deflect the flying blade, shouting with triumph as he wheeled his mount for the forest.

She’d known that a shot would bring the rest of his gang down on us, but I was bound to risk it now, and was drawing a bead on his back when she stooped, grabbed up a stone, stood poised for an instant, and hurled it after him. It took him just below his helmet rim with a thunk! like an axe hitting wood, his horse reared as he hauled on the reins, and then he was toppling from the saddle, helmet going one way, lance t’sother, and hitting the ground with an almighty crash of his back and breast. I bit back a yell of delight, but it was precaution wasted, for before we could stir another step half a dozen lancers were bursting out of the green, taking in the scene in a second, and sweeping down on us.

It was blind instinct that made me blaze away at the leader, for an instant’s thought was enough to convince me that I couldn’t hope to down them all, and it was folly to waste time firing when I could be flying for dear life. Anyway, I’d missed the bastard, and he was dropping his lance-point and charging me. Uliba was flinging stones, the mad bitch, and yelling defiance; she caught the leader full in the clock and he swerved his horse into the path of a comrade, both coming down in a splendid tangle of lashing hooves. She screamed with delight, and I thought, good luck, lass, you give ’em what for, for I ain’t stopping. The river was a bare fifty yards away, and I made for it like a stung whippet; from the tail of my eye I saw Uliba hurl a last missile and then come racing after me.

My goal was the two dhobi wenches who had a boat beached; I’d barely have time to thrust it afloat and leap aboard before the hosts of Midian arrived, but it was the only hope—and even as I high-tailed it with Uliba a few paces behind, I found myself thinking, my stars, I’ve done this before, on the banks of the Ohio, with Cassy the runaway legging it after me and the slave-catchers roaring behind, and they shot me in the arse on the ice-floes, and she’d dragged me to safety—aye, but this time there’d be no Abe Lincoln on the far shore to face down our pursuers…

Hooves were thundering horrid close, and I stole a glance which showed a lancer coming full career, point down, not twenty yards behind me; the dhobi girls were screaming and scattering, I knew I’d never reach their boat in time, and as I tripped and went down on the shingle, Uliba swerved aside in her flight and leaped like a panther into the path of my pursuer, somehow catching his lance just behind the point with its ghastly burden of somebody’s goolies. The glittering steel was diverted, driving into the ground a foot from my hip as I sprawled helpless, the lancer was flung from the saddle, and Uliba, keeping her grip on the weapon, rolled away, came to her feet like an acrobat, wrenched the point free, and drove it into the fallen man’s body, screaming like a banshee.

It was no time for thanks or congratulation: I scrambled up and fairly flung myself at the boat, knocking one of the dhobi lasses flying, seized its prow and thrust it down the bank into the water. It was more like a canoe than their usual woven tubs, and almost capsized as I heaved myself inboard, grabbing wildly for one of the flat sticks which these benighted clowns use as paddles. Still on shore, Uliba was hurling rocks and howling abuse; at her feet the fallen lancer was kicking like a landed fish with his own weapon pinning him to the earth, there were half a dozen of his fellows within ten yards, but keeping a wary distance, one of them nursing an arm to testify to Uliba’s accuracy.

“Noseless pigs! Bullies of the bazaar! Cowardly bastards got by lepers on street-corner whores! Can one unarmed woman make you turn tail, dunghill disturbers that you are!” She was in rare voice, but now two of them couched their lances and charged, and with a last shrieked insult she turned and did a racing dive which brought her within reach of the stern even as I lashed the water with my clumsy oar and the current carried us swiftly downstream and out of their reach. She scrambled in, shouting with laughter and blood-lust, taunting them with obscene curses and gestures as they stood helpless on the shore.

“Procurers of perverts! Offspring of diseased apes! Tell Theodore how Uliba-Wark, Queen of the Gallas, whipped you single-handed!” She stood up to rail at them, and the canoe rocked alarmingly.

“You’ll have us over, rot you—sit down and paddle!” The current was strong, and we would have our work cut out to reach the far bank before it took us down to the little jungly islands where I could see the surface breaking into white water which must mean rocks and rapids. But even as I weighed the distance I saw that it was impossible; the green shore was at least four hundred yards off, and with these near-useless paddles we could hardly make headway across the river.

The nearest islands were perhaps a mile distant; with luck we might adjust our course to find the smoothest water between them. I shouted to Uliba to paddle in harmony, but it was all we could do to keep the crazy little boat steady as the speed of the river increased. I turned my head to see how our pursuers were faring; the stretch of open shore from which we’d escaped was enclosed at its downstream end by jungle, so they would make only slow progress that way, but there were the fisher-folk’s boats, and I thought they might take to the water after us. But no; they were mounting up, in no haste that I could see, apparently giving up the chase.

We were bearing down at speed on the islands now, and the current was so swift that I could see the water absolutely sloping as it rushed between them. I shouted to Uliba, but there was little we could do to steer the boat; it slipped smoothly down the grey foamy slope which broke either side in white flurries as it dashed over the rocks, but immediately ahead the surface was unruffled, and if the canoe could pass through the great eddy at the foot of the watery slope without foundering, there was smooth water beyond. The islands were slipping past—and once again memory took hold, as I recalled the brown flood of the Ganges below Cawnpore, when we had to scramble in panic on to the mudflats with the muggers snapping at our heels.

There were no crocs this far up the Nile, but I didn’t know that as I clung to the gunwale of that rickety craft, absolutely bellowing in dismay as we struck the eddy, wallowed half-submerged for a frightening moment, and then surged through on to the calmer surface. We were sitting in a foot of water, but stayed afloat by a miracle—surface tension, I believe, although I did not define it as such just then. The river was carrying us on at a gentler pace now, but we were in midstream with the banks as far away as ever; we must wait for a bend, when we might be able to guide ourselves to one shore or the other, no matter which, for pursuit must be far behind by now.

I cried this over my shoulder to Uliba, and she called a reply, but I couldn’t catch it above the sound of the river, which seemed to be growing louder. I thought that strange, since we’d left the noisy rapids behind, but then I realised it was coming from ahead, a distant rumbling from beyond another crop of little jungly islands strung across the stream. In the distance there was a mist drifting up, stretching from bank to bank, the rumble was growing to a roar, the speed of the current was increasing, rocking us from side to side, and suddenly Uliba was clutching my shoulder, pointing ahead and yelling:

“The Silver Smoke! The Great Silver Smoke!”

I distinctly remember shouting: “The what!”—and then it struck me like a blow: it was the Ab name of the Blue Nile falls beyond which Queen Masteeat had her camp. Uliba had said nothing of their size, but from the increasing noise and the appearance of white water ahead among the islands, I guessed that they must be more hazardous than the rapids we’d already passed through, and that it would be a sound move to seek terra firma without delay. Had I known that they were the height of Niagara, I dare say I might have joined Uliba’s frenzied paddling with even greater enthusiasm; as it was I flailed the water, blaspheming vigorously at the futility of our efforts to guide the canoe to one of the islands towards which we were rushing. She was shouting something, but the roar of the river had risen to a thunder that blotted out every other noise, even my own anguished bellowing.

It was the damnedest thing: the din was deafening, we were racing along at the very deuce of a clip, and yet the water around us was as smooth as oil. Right in our path was a line of black rocks, great rounded masses gleaming like polished marble, for all the world like the backs of whales, and as our boat collided with the nearest I was sure it must be shattered to pieces. I seized the gunwale, screaming, but the rock must have been slick with river slime, for we shot along its surface for a sickening second before being flung into the eddies beyond; the current whirled the canoe clean round, branches were lashing across my head and shoulders, and I grabbed at them in desperation, tearing my hands on the thorny twigs but holding on, feeling the canoe slew round beneath me.

I’m strong, but how I kept my grip, God knows. We were at the downstream end of a little overgrown islet, a few yards ahead the smooth water was being smashed into foam by the jagged teeth of a rocky ridge, and beyond that a mass of raging white water was vanishing into a mist as thick as London fog. We must be almost on the lip of the fall, and my arms were being dragged from their sockets by the appalling strength of the current tugging the dead weight of the canoe and our two bodies.

I was half-in-half-out of the canoe, and it was slipping slowly away from beneath me. Another second and it would have been gone, leaving me behind, but Uliba, floundering in the water that was swamping it, made a frantic lunge towards me, seized my leg, and clung on with the strength of despair. I shrieked with pain as my palms slipped along the whiplash withies; they were cutting like fire and I was losing my hold, the intolerable weight was drag ging me loose, and in another moment both of us would be swept away into that thunderous white death in the mist.

There was only one thing to be done, so I did it, drawing up my free leg and driving my foot down with all my force at Uliba’s face staring up at me open-mouthed, half-submerged as she clung to my other knee. I missed, but caught her full on the shoulder, jarring her grip free, and away she went, canoe and all, the gunwale rasping against my legs as it was whirled downstream. One glimpse I had of the white water foaming over those long beautiful legs, and then she was gone. Damnable altogether, cruel waste of good woman hood, but what would you? Better one should go than two, and greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down someone else’s life for his own.

With that dead weight gone I could just keep my grip, and with a mighty heave hauled myself into the thicket, catching a stouter branch and getting a leg over it—and suddenly there was an appalling crack, the branch gave way, and down I went, entangled in a mesh of leaves and withies, under the surface, helpless in the grip of the current which swept me away. I came up, half-drowned, into the fury of the rapids, buffeted against rocks and snags, tossed like a cork this way and that and clutching blindly for a hold that wasn’t there, unable even to holler with my mouth and throat full of choking water. A massive black shape surged up before me, one of the great boulders worn smooth by the centuries, and even as I was flung against it with shattering force, hanging spreadeagled half out of the water, I saw beyond it a sight which has since pro vided me with much food for thought.

Not two yards away the canoe was caught fast beneath the over hanging foliage of another of those islands, and climbing clear of the wreck was Uliba-Wark. She had hold of a stout vine, swinging herself like a gymnast to a clear patch of solid ground, and given a moment for quiet reflection I might have concluded that if I had not been an unutterable swine and selfish hound in kicking her loose, I’d like as not have been safe beside her gasping, “Will you have nuts or a cigar, ma’am?”

As it was, I was slowly slipping from the boulder. Its surface was like a frozen pond, my hands could get no grip as I flailed them on the stone, squealing like billy-be-damned, and while Uliba could not have heard me, she absolutely saw me for a split second before I slid from her view into the torrent, inhaling a bellyful of the Blue Nile as I continued my progress downstream, presently descending one hundred and fifty feet without benefit of canal locks.

Falling down one of the highest waterfalls on earth (so far as I know only the Victoria Falls are appreciably higher) is not like top pling from the lofty side of a ship (which I’ve done) or from any other dry height. I say “dry” because being engulfed in water which is undoubtedly drowning you quite takes away the sensation of falling, and there is no shock of entering the water at the end of your enforced dive; you arrive cocooned in the stuff and are borne into the depths in a state of complete confusion: you can see nothing but blinding light and hear nothing but continuous thunder, you can’t tell which is up and which is down, and only at the uttermost limit of your plunge does some inkling of your situation enter your consciousness, as you begin to rise again.

Even then you’re entirely helpless, for your limbs are paralysed by the sheer battering shock, as is your will. I’ve known what it is to drown, on several occasions, most memorably in the Skrang river with a blowpipe dart in my ribs, and upside down in that infernal drain beneath Jotunberg Castle, and at the bottom of a bath in the amorous clutches of the demented Queen of Madagascar, but only in the maelstrom under the Blue Nile falls was I unable even to struggle feebly as I drifted upwards through that silvery radiance, the agony of suffocation gradually changing to a dreamy languor—and then my head must have broken surface, for I was gasping great painful gulps of air, retching and trying to scream as I felt the undertow drag at my legs, sucking me under again, and reason returned to tell me that to give up now, or faint away, or allow that torpor to enfold me again, was to die.

Whether my pathetic attempt to swim, or some freak of the current, or just a plain miracle took me clear, I can’t tell, for all I remember is an engulfing white mist, and after a while gravel under my knees and body, and crawling on to wet rock and lying exhausted in pouring rain—in fact it was the spray thrown up by millions of tons of water pouring over that colossal natural weir into the enor mous lagoon at its foot. I managed to roll over on my back and stare up through a glittering rainbow haze at that gigantic white curtain of water falling with the roar of a thousand thunderstorms; I was lying on a flat stone bank apparently at one side of the river and about two furlongs from the fall itself; as I say, how I came there, God alone knows.

If I’d been a half-decent Christian I dare say I’d have sent up a prayer of thanksgiving for my deliverance. Or I might have mar velled at the devil’s own luck that preserves rotters where good men get their cocoa. But neither of these things occurred to me, and my last thought before slipping into unconsciousness as I gazed up at that towering cataract, was: “I wonder if anyone’s ever done that before?”

I know now that I must have come over the middle of the falls, where the force of the river drives the torrent well out from the cliff, so that I’d been thrown clear of the rocky base and landed in deep water; if I’d taken the plunge from the eastern lip, where the current is slacker and the water pours directly down the cliff-face, I’d have been mangled on the rocks or drowned in the eddy for certain. Even so, I’d fallen from the height of Nelson’s Column, and you need nine lives to survive that.

No one believes it, [37] of course, including the small boy and his sister who found me dead to the wide on the rocky shore, and their fisher-folk parents who nursed me through a bout of fever—malaria, by the feel of it—that left me weak as a baby. As for the junior officer commanding the file of Galla soldiers who arrived when word of my presence had spread beyond the little village, he laughed to scorn the notion that anyone could live through the Silver Smoke, even if he was a Hindu heretic and therefore doubtless a sorcerer in league with Shaitan.

“For you are Khasim Tamwar, are you not?” says this handsome young savage, smiling courteously as he squatted down beside my pallet in that peasant’s hut. “Horse-trader out of India, seeking audience with our most illustrious queen, Masteeat the Looking Glass?”

And how the devil should he know that? Had I babbled in my fever—or could word have preceded us from the monastery at Azez? He smiled at my astonishment, the cocky subaltern to the life, for all that his classic features were as black as my boot and his braided hair was smeared with butter dripping on to his bare shoulders.

“It is our business to know who comes and goes along the Abai, and when a foreigner speaking Arabic comes from the north, who should it be but the expected traveller from… Hyderabad, or some such name?”

“Expected, you say? But how -?”

“No doubt her majesty will tell you,” says he coolly. “And you would be wise not to insult her with talk of leaping over waterfalls. She is a kind and loving ruler, but she has a short way with liars… Are you fit to travel?”

I was, more or less, so after I’d thanked the peasants and dashed them a few of the dollars which, with my Joslyn, had been bestowed in my sash and so survived the fall, we set off through the jungly forest which encloses the Abai beneath the Tisisat. From an emi nence about a mile south I was able to get a full view of that extraordinary wonder of the natural world, all six hundred yards of it from the broken cataracts at its western end to the splendid horseshoe on the east. Aye, the devil certainly looks after his own, thinks I, while my Galla escorts sneered and nudged each other and mut tered “Walker!” in Amharic.

They were a formidable crew, the very sort of men I’d have expected from my acquaintance with the female of the species, Uliba-Wark: big, likely youngsters, not one under six feet, active as cats, muscled like wrestlers, and African only in colour. Speedy had said that of all the countless Galla tribes, the Wollos were the pick, and I could believe him and thank God they were Theodore’s sworn enemies, for if they’d opposed us I doubt if one of Napier’s army would ever have got back to the coast. They’re warriors from their cradles, expert fighters, splendid horsemen, and would rather cut throats than eat dinner. Fortunately for their neighbours, the fifty or sixty families of the nation are never done feuding among themselves, for if ever they united they could sweep north Africa from the Red Sea to the Sahara. They must be the most independent folk on earth; those of their tribes who are republican acknowledge no law and pay taxes to no one, and even the Wollos, who recog nised Masteeat as their queen, served in her army as volunteers without obligation.

There were a dozen in my escort, all well mounted and dressed accordingly with trowsers not unlike Pathan pyjamys under their robes, but barefoot and without head-dresses. They were armed with sickle-swords and those disgusting ballock-festooned lances, but no muskets or pistols. Their subaltern, whose name was Wedaju, explained that while Abs generally were familiar with firearms brought in centuries ago by the Portuguese, the Gallas, being crusty traditionalists who enjoyed slaughter at close quarters, were only now beginning to adopt them. Our conversation arose from the envious interest he showed in my Joslyn, asking if he might examine it; the fact that he didn’t simply take it suggested that he regarded me as a guest rather than a prisoner, which set me wondering again how he’d known who I was. But I didn’t ask: I’d find out eventually, and it was enough for the moment that I was being civilly treated.

My first concern was plainly Queen Masteeat, and how to present Napier’s proposal. One complication at least had been removed: whether Uliba-Wark was still in flight from Theodore’s cavalry or had been collared by them, she was no longer in a position to embarrass my mission by trying to usurp her sister’s throne, thank God. Fine woman in her way, good jancada and capital primitive ride, but she could have been an almighty nuisance, and I was well shot of her. I’d make my pitch to Masteeat in my own way, deploying the Flashy charm and the promise of fifty thou’ in Maria Theresas, and see how her majesty played the bowling. And if and when the Wollo Gallas marched forth to besiege Magdala, I’d con trive to keep my safe strategic distance from the action.

Our way lay through forest which thinned out after a few miles into pleasant wooded plain, with low hills on our flank, each with a sentry on its summit. Presently we came on pickets camped out in the groves, passing us through most professional, watchword and all, every man on his feet and jumping to their guard commanders’ orders. So we came into their camp proper, a great spread of tents and huts not unlike a Red Indian village, but clean and orderly, and although there were women and children by the hundred, there was no confusion or stink. Everywhere there were Galla warriors, mounted and infantry, plainly at ease but not loafing or lolling; this was a disciplined host, thousands strong and in no way encumbered by their families. No one would ever take this crew by surprise, and I knew just by their look that they’d be able to break camp and be off at an hour’s notice. My opinion of Queen Masteeat and her followers was rising swiftly; the most formidable African queen since Cleopatra, Speedy had said, and if her travelling cantonment were anything to judge by, he was right. [38]

Our arrival caused a stir, scores of white-robed armed men closing in on us and a couple of seniors in red-fringed shamas calling out to Wedaju in a language I didn’t understand. He’d spoken Arabic to me, none too fluently, but what I was hearing now was the Gallas’ own tongue, which isn’t Amharic or anything like it. Fortunately the Galla aristocracy speak Arabic well; one of the seniors, having cross-examined Wedaju, called out to me:

“Where are your horses, trader?”

I said I was here to buy not to sell, and he cocked his grizzled head and grinned, with his hand on his hilt.

“And you carry purchase money with you through Habesh in time of war? Truly, you are bold travellers who come from Hindustan!”

Those who understood shouted with laughter, watching to see what I made of this jest with just a hint of threat behind it. Wedaju was about to intervene, but I got in first.

“I carry money enough. I carry this also—” And I conjured the Joslyn out of my sash, spun it on my finger, did the border shift, presented it to the senior butt first, and as he reached for it wide-eyed I spun it again to cover him. The watching crowd gave a huge yell of surprise, and then fairly roared. My senior clapped his hands with delight, and in a moment I was surrounded by grinning black faces—if there’s one thing the Wollo Gallas like, it’s ready wit and impudence, and that silly little incident won me an admiring public before I’d been in their camp five minutes. Style, you see… and I tipped my metaphorical hat in memory of dear old Lou Maxwell who’d taught me how to spin a gun in Las Vegas all those years ago. [39]

In the centre of the camp, within a stockade, was a group of permanent buildings: typical Ab dwellings of various sizes, dominated by a great two-storey structure with a conical thatched roof and upper and lower verandahs, which I guessed was the royal resi dence. Wedaju conducted me to one of the lesser buildings where a dignified old file in red-bordered shama and turban, sporting a fine white beard and bearing a red-shafted spear of office, ran a cold eye over me; they conversed in Galla, and at last the chamberlain, as I took him to be, made a stately departure, and Wedaju held out his hand and demanded my Joslyn.

“You are to go into the Queen’s presence,” says he. “Have no fear, I shall keep it for you, and doubtless it will be returned when her majesty has spoken with you.” He paused, weighing the piece in his hand. “That feint you used out yonder—would you show it to me? Some day I shall have such a weapon as this, and it would be good to know…”

I showed him, and he practised, chortling, and was expert in no time. “Thank you, friend!” cries he, and I decided that one of my calculated good deeds wouldn’t hurt.

“If all speeds well with the Queen, you shall have such a pistol,” I told him, and he was still exclaiming his gratitude when the cham berlain returned with two turbaned guardsmen and led the way out, Flashy being ushered in his wake. The guardsmen thrashed aside the crowd who’d been craning their necks at the doorway to see the funny foreigner, and with Wedaju at my elbow we crossed to the big two-storey building, passed in between more turbaned sen tries, and waited in a large dim hall while the chamberlain went ahead through a great bead curtain which was presently held aside by two of the loveliest handmaidens you could ever hope to see, true Galla girls with cool damn-you-me-lad expressions and figures to match. The chamberlain’s voice called out from within, Wedaju prodded me forward, and I strode into the presence of Masteeat the Looking Glass, Queen of Wollo Galla, and with luck guardian angel of Her Britannic Majesty’s army in Abyssinia.

You never know what to expect on encountering royalty. I’ve seen ’em stark naked except for wings of peacock feathers (Empress of China), giggling drunk in the embrace of a wrestler (Maharani of the Punjab), voluptuously wrapped in wet silk (Queen of Madagascar), wafting to and fro on a swing (Rani of Jhansi), and tramping along looking like an out-of-work charwoman (our own gracious monarch). But I’ve never seen the like of the court of the Queen of Galla.

Her majesty was at luncheon, which she ate surrounded by lions, four huge maned brutes grouped about the great couch where she lounged on cushions, an arm over the neck of one of the beasts while with her free hand she helped herself to dainties from trays presented by two more fair attendants. Another lion was nuzzling her shoulder from behind, and the remaining two crouched at her feet, one with its head against her knee—for all the world like four great tabbies toadying for scraps, which she fed them from time to time, dainty fingers popping tidbits into jaws I’d not have approached for a pension.

And if that were not enough to bring me to a dead stop, there was something else: seated on a low stool a little way from the couch, regarding me with venomous dislike, was Uliba-Wark.