Bruce had attended the great banquets of raw bullock meat,—exactly such banquets are served today in the halls of Abyssinia’s present ruler, Ras Tafari—but he was unfamiliar with the eating of living flesh. Chancing one day to be riding down a forest road, he encountered two peasants driving a cow ahead of them. Presently, they became hungry, and Bruce saw a strange thing. Throwing the cow down, and trussing her securely, Bruce saw the natives feel the flesh along the backbone with their fingers, select a place, cut a square flap with a sharp knife, lift up this flap of hide, and cut themselves a square of living steak. This done, they put back the flap of hide in place, and tied it down with vegetable fibres. After their meal they drove the animal on ahead of them down the road.
Bruce questioned the men, and asked questions about the matter at the capital, but was told that he had seen nothing unusual.
On his return to Gondar from his expedition to the Nile, he found the kingdom once more in feudal disorder; enemies of Ras Michael were gathering their retainers, and the wild Galla tribes had been enlisted in the fray. The roar of battle and the thunder of charging horsemen shake the forest land, corpses of traitors and suspected folk hang on all the trees, the Abyssinian city reeks of death, and at night Bruce is troubled by hyenas dragging human carrion into the courtyard of his house. The court goes to battle, and Bruce goes with it to the great African plain by Gondar. Horsemen gathering by thousands and ten thousands stir the dust of the field to a tawny cloud, and in the haze their breastplates and lances catch the sun.
How completely Biblical is this fragment from Bruce’s account of the battle! “The first person that appeared was Kesla Yasous, and the horse with him, stretching out his hand (his face being all besmeared with blood for he was wounded in his forehead) he cried as loud as he could, ‘Stand firm, the king is safe in the valley!’”
The struggle ends in the crushing defeat of Ras Michael, the wild Galla tribes pour into Gondar, and the old Ruler goes to his palace to await the end. Alone in the turmoil, but master of himself and unconfused, Yagoube, the tall Scot, makes his way to the deserted palace of the once all powerful lord of Abyssinia.
The lives of vagabonds are full of romantic scenes, but there are few which so stir the imagination as the last meeting of the Laird of Kinnaird and the able, despotic old man who held kings in the hollow of his hand. The forest city was still; the great warriors with the mystical names,—Heart of Christ, Servant of the Holy Ghost, Shield of Jesus, were dead; the people waited to hear the war cries of the victorious factions in the streets. Bruce entered the palace unchallenged by a sentry. The throne room was “hung with mirrors brought at great expense from Venice by way of Arabia and the Red Sea; they were mostly broken; their copper gilt frames had been made by some Greek filigrane workers from Cairo.” And in this empty room of the broken mirrors, magnificently clad in his robes of scarlet and heavy golden thread, and throned in the seat of power, sat old Ras Michael silently waiting the arrival of his murderers.
The next morning, Galla savages occupied the palace, and Bruce saw them grimacing into the mirrors, breaking them, and grinding them to powder. Ras Michael had been led away. None could tell Bruce of the fate of Ozoro Esther.
One feels the approaching close of a drama. His old friends dead or in exile, the court dispersed, and himself heavily in debt, Bruce presently sought permission to leave Abyssinia. The new rulers were well disposed to him, and he might have stayed on, and retained his honours, but his world had been too violently re-made, and the European in him had awakened. Poor young Balugani had died of dysentery; the long and perilous journey home would have to be made alone.
The permission to depart was given unwillingly, and only after repeated entreaty. Once more the Abyssinian forest gathers the laird and his native escort into its greenery.
Suddenly Bruce sees another cavalcade approaching through the leafy quiet, and from the dress of the riders knows them to be nobles of the land. Are they partisans of the victors riding forth to visit the new lands they have been given, or friends of the old kingdom riding to silence and exile? The tall laird suddenly reins in his horse with a start,—the cavalcade is the train of Ozoro Esther. This meeting in the forest was the last sight tall Yagoube had of his Biblical queen.