Ozoro Esther! Bruce remembered the day when she rose from beside Ayto Consu’s bed of sickness, and turned to him, superb in her dark and stately beauty. “But now,” she had said, “if I am not as good a friend to Yagoube who saved my children as I am a steady enemy to the Galla,—then say Esther is not a Christian, and I forgive you.” The great lady of the palace of the broken mirrors was on her way to Jerusalem to pray for Ras Michael.
“The troops of Begemder have taken away my husband, Ras Michael, God knows where,” said she.
A romantic episode enough, this meeting in the wood, yet it ends in a lighter key. Tecla Miriam, a young noblewoman who had chosen to follow the beautiful Ozoro, turned to Yagoube with a jest. The tall Scot seems to have been a favourite with the ladies.
“But tell me truly, Yagoube,” said Tecla Miriam, “you that know everything while peering and poring through those long glasses, did you not learn by the stars that we were to meet you here?”
“Madam,” answered the laird, “if there was one star in the firmament that had announced to me such agreeable news, I should have relapsed into the old idolatry of this country, and worshipped that star for the rest of my life.”
Instead of returning to Europe by the caravan route to the ports of the Red Sea, Bruce was on his way down the west slope of the Abyssinian plateau. At the foot of the wooded mountain slope lay the desert country of Senaar, and at the edge of the desert lay the Nile. The way proved long and dangerous. A simoon half smothered Bruce and his faithful Abyssinian followers, a scoundrelly Arab sheikh abused them and would have cut their throats and robbed them, and finally the camels began to die.
In order to save his notes, his observations and his scientific instruments, Bruce dismounted, and trudged the sand. “In this whole desert,” he wrote, “there is neither worm, fly, nor anything that has the breath of life.... My face was so swelled as scarcely to permit me to see, my neck covered with blisters, my feet swelled and inflamed and bleeding with many wounds.”
Now came a water shortage, and Bruce and his followers killed two camels to drink the camel water stored in their bodies. “We drew four gallons of camel water,” runs the account; “it was indeed vapid and of a bluish cast, but had neither taste nor smell.” Their strength still continuing to fail (Bruce had “three large wounds on the right foot, and two large wounds on the left which continued open”) they determined to save their lives by throwing away the quadrant, telescopes, and time-keeper and ride the camels alternately.
On the 28th of November they consumed the last of their black bread and dirty water, and at seven o’clock in the morning they saw the distant roofs of Egyptian Assouan. At a quarter to ten, on the 29th of November, 1772, James Bruce, Laird of Kinnaird, and late Lord of Geesh in Abyssinia, “arrived in a grove of palm trees” by the Nile. Here friendly souls helped him, and he even regained his abandoned goods.