PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCLX. FEBRUARY, 1854. Vol. LXXV.
ABYSSINIAN ABERRATIONS.[[1]]
Locomotion, profitless and often aimless, is, in the opinion of Continentals, a condition of an Englishman’s existence. Provided with a dressing-case that would contain a Frenchman’s entire wardrobe, and with a hat-box full of pills “to be taken at bedtime,” every son of Albion is supposed to perform, at some period of his life, a distant journey, with the sole apparent object of acquiring a right to say that he has been “there and back again.” An Englishman, in the opinion of Europe, would be a miserable being, had he not continually present to his mind the recollection or the anticipation of a journey to the uttermost parts of the earth—to the North Pole or the South Seas, to the feverish heart of Africa or the scarcely less perilous wastes of Tartary. That opinion will be strongly confirmed by the peregrinations of Mansfield Parkyns.
There can be no reasonable doubt that when the handsome volumes, full of amusing letter-press and neat sketches, and externally decorated with a chubby and Oriental St George spearing a golden dragon, with bossy shields and carved scimitars, and lion’s mane and tail, which Mr Murray has just published, shall have been as generally read as they deserve to be, the tide of enterprising travel will set strongly in the direction of Abyssinia. Everybody will take wing for the land of the Shohos and Boghos; African outfits will be in perpetual demand; sanguine railway projectors will discuss the feasibility of a “Grand Cairo and Addy Abo Direct” line. Mr Parkyns tells us, in his preliminary pages, that he shall estimate the success of his book, not by his friends’ flatteries or his reviewers’ verdict, but by its sale. Sale!—why, it will sell by thousands, in an abridged form, with a red cover, as the “Handbook for Abyssinia.” Persons starting for those parts will ask for Parkyns’ Handbook, just as tenderer tourists, who content themselves with an amble through Andalusia, inquire for Ford’s. That many such starts will be made, we cannot doubt, after reading the book in which are so vividly described the charms of the pleasant land of Tigrè, the delights of the journey thither, and of the abode there. Never was anything so tempting. The mere introduction makes us impatient to be off. Mr Parkyns is resolved to lure his readers, in his very first chapter, not only to read his book, but to roam in his footsteps. Werne’s Campaign in Taka gave us some idea of the advantages enjoyed by those privileged mortals to whom it is given to ramble between the Blue Nile and the Red Sea; but the German’s narrative, which we thought striking and startling enough when we read it, is thrown into the shade by the vivid and lively delineations of the friend and comrade of Prince Shetou. The sanitary, dietetic, and surgical instructions, with which, for the benefit of future travellers in Abyssinia, he preludes his subject, would alone suffice to inspire us with an ardent longing to pass a season in the delightful regions where they are applicable. The preservation of health, he justly observes, should be every traveller’s chief care, since, without it, pleasure or profit from the journey is alike impossible. Then he proceeds to point out the chief dangers to health in Abyssinia, and the means of warding them off. The highlands, he tells us, are highly salubrious, but unfortunately one cannot always abide upon the hills; and down in the valleys malaria prevails, engendering terrible inflammatory fevers, to which four patients out of five succumb, the fifth having his constitution impaired for life, or at least for many years. Parkyns points out a preservative. Light two large fires and sleep between them. They must be so close together that you are obliged to cover yourself with a piece of hide to avoid ignition of your clothes. “Not very agreeable till you are used to it,” says the cool Parkyns, “but a capital preventive of disease. Another plan, always adopted by the natives, is not, I think, a bad one:—Roll your head completely up in your cloth, which then acts as a respirator. You may often see a nigger lying asleep with the whole of his body uncovered, but his head and face completely concealed in many folds”;—a sort of woodcocking which may be pleasant, but can hardly be considered picturesque. Tobacco is indispensable; in that country you must smoke abundantly. On the White Nile no negro is ever without his pipe, which sometimes holds a pound of tobacco. “The largest I now possess,” says Parkyns, somewhat dolefully, “would not contain much more than a quarter of that quantity.” The sun, generally considered formidable to travellers in Africa, is disregarded by him to whom we now give ear. “I never retired into the shade to avoid the noonday heat; and for four years I never wore any covering to my head except the rather scanty allowance of hair with which nature has supplied me, with the addition occasionally of a little butter. During the whole of that time I never had a headache”;—an immunity we are disposed to attribute less to the sun’s forbearance than to some peculiar solidity in the cranium of Parkyns. “In these climates,” he next informs us, “a man cannot eat much, or, even if he could, he ought not.” This probably applies exclusively to foreigners, for we are afterwards introduced to native dinners, where the gormandising surpassed belief, and yet none of the guests were a pin the worse. Indeed, in the course of the book, the Abyssinians are invariably represented as enormous feeders, capable of demolishing four or five pounds of meat, more or less, raw, as one day’s ration, and without ill effects. As long as you are moderate in quantity, the quality of what you eat is evidently unimportant in a sanitary point of view. “A man who cares a straw about what he eats should never attempt to travel in Africa. It is not sufficient to say, ‘I can eat anything that is clean and wholesome.’ You will often have to eat things that are far from being either, especially the former. I have eaten of almost every living thing that walketh, flyeth, or creepeth—lion, leopard, wolf, cat, hawk, crocodile, snake, lizard, locust, &c.; and I should be sorry to say what dirty messes I have at times been obliged to put up with.” As general rules for the preservation of health, we are instructed to avoid bad localities—the valleys, especially after the rainy season, when the sun pumps up malaria from stagnant pools and decayed vegetable matter—to be abstemious in all respects, and to follow the native customs with respect to food, injunctions which appear difficult to reconcile. Should all precautions prove ineffectual, and fever or other ills assail us, kind, considerate Parkyns, who himself, he tells us, has some knowledge of the healing art, instructs us what to do. “Local bleedings, such as the natives practise, are often highly advantageous; and firing with a hot iron may also be adopted at their recommendation. For severe inflammation of the bowels, when you cannot bear to be touched on the part, some boiling water poured on it will be a ready and effective blister,—a wet rag being wrapped round in a ring to confine the water within the intended limits. For bad snake-bites or scorpion stings, bind above the part as tightly as possible, and cut away with a knife; then apply the end of an iron ramrod, heated to white heat. This, of course, I mean supposing you to be in the backwoods, out of the reach of medicines. Aquafortis is, I have heard, better than the hot iron, as it eats farther in.” Actual cautery, boiling-water blisters, and “cutting away” really compose a very pretty basis for a surgical system. Professor Parkyns gives but few prescriptions, supposing, he says, that few of his readers would care to have more, or be likely to profit by them. Judging from the above sample, we are inclined to coincide in his supposition.
Mr Mansfield Parkyns is an amateur barbarian. Leaving England when a very young man, he plunged, after some previous rambling in Europe and Asia Minor, into the heart of Abyssinia, and adopted savage life with an earnestness and gusto sufficiently proved by his book, and by the regret with which he still, after three years’ return to what poor Ruxton called “civilised fixings,” speaks of his abode in the wigwams of Ethiopia, and of his hankerings—not after the flesh-pots of Egypt, but—after the ghee-pots and uncooked beef he so long throve upon in the dominions of the great Oubi, Viceroy of Tigrè. Fancy a civilised Englishman, gently nurtured and educated, pitching his tent for three years amongst filthy savages, adopting their dress and usages, rubbing his head with butter, sleeping with the but of his rifle for a pillow—the grease from his plaited locks being “beneficially employed in toughening the wood”—having himself partially tattooed, eating raw beef, substituting raw sheep’s liver soused in vinegar for oysters, discarding hats and shoes, and going bareheaded and barefoot under the broiling sun and over the roadless wastes of Abyssinia, burning and gashing his flesh in order to produce peculiar scars and protuberances, deemed ornamental by the people amongst whom he dwelt, and, upon his return home (to England, we mean to say, for the home of his predilection is amongst the savoury savages he so reluctantly left, and amongst whom he evidently considers himself naturalised), coolly writing down and publishing his confessions—in most amusing style, we freely admit, but not without a slight dash of self-complacency, as if he would say, See what a fine fellow I am to have thus converted myself into a greasy, shoeless, raw-beef-eating savage for a term of years! We have nothing in the world, however, to do with Mr Parkyns’ peculiar predilections. This is a free country—as the Yankee observed when flogging his nigger—whose natives have a perfect right to exhibit themselves in any character they please, from an Objibbeway to an alabaster statue, so long as they do not outrage decency, or otherwise transgress the law. For our part, we should have been sincerely sorry if Mr Parkyns had not en-cannibaled himself, and told us how he did it. We should have been deprived of two of the most extraordinary, original, and amusing volumes through which we ever passed our paper-knife. We accept the book, and are grateful for it. With the author’s tastes, depraved though we cannot but consider them, we purpose not to meddle. Men of his stamp should be prized, like black diamonds, by reason of their rarity. We are much mistaken, or Mr Parkyns will be the cynosure of all eyes during the approaching spring—particularly if he condescends occasionally to exhibit his tattooed arm, and to bolt a raw beef-steak. Gordon Cumming, on his return from his South-African slaughterings, was the lion of the London season; Mansfield Parkyns will receive much less than his due if he be not made its hippopotamus.
Mr Parkyns started from Smyrna for a tour of the Nile, in company with the poetical member for Pontefract, Mr Monckton Milnes, then pondering his “Palm Leaves.” Of the Nile tour, so repeatedly made and so well described by others, he abstains from speaking, in order the sooner to get to Abyssinia. After an agreeable boat voyage of two months’ duration, he parted from his companion at Cairo. Mr Milnes must surely have regretted quitting so lively and intrepid a fellow-traveller, and Mr Parkyns, we cannot doubt, equally deplored their separation. The cool of the evening would have been so pleasant in the desert. But parliamentary duties summoned one of the travellers northwards; the Wander-trieb, the vagabond instinct, impelled the other southwards, and so they parted. A double-barrelled gun, a single rifle, a brace of double pistols, and a bowie-knife, composed Mr Parkyns’ travelling arsenal; he also took with him three pair of common pistols, a dozen light cavalry sword-blades, some red cloth, white muslin, and Turkey rugs, as presents for Abyssinian chiefs, and in March 1843 he sailed from Suez for Jedda, on board a miserable Arab boat, loaded with empty rice-bags and a hundred passengers. The throng was too great to be agreeable, but Mr Parkyns, who has evidently a happy temper and a knack at making himself popular amongst all manner of queer people, was soon on most friendly terms with the Turks, Bedouins, Egyptians, Negroes, and others who composed the living freight of the clumsy lateen-rigged craft. The voyage from Suez to Jedda varies from nine days to three months. Mr Parkyns was so fortunate as to accomplish it in little more than three weeks. We pass over its incidents, which amused us when we first read them, but which have lost their piquancy now that we recur to them with the highly-spiced flavour of the Abyssinian adventures hot upon our palate, and we go on at once to Massawa Island, on the Abyssinian coast, whose climate may be estimated from the remark made by an officer of the Indian navy to Mr Parkyns, to the effect that he thought Pondicherry the hottest place in India, but that Pondicherry was nothing to Aden, and Aden a mere trifle to Massawa. “Towards the latter end of May I have known the thermometer rise to about 120° Fahrenheit in the shade, and in July and August it ranges much higher.” Indoors, the natives, men and women, wear nothing but striped cotton napkins round their loins. Most Europeans suffer severely from the heat of the place. Mr Parkyns, who is first cousin to a salamander, suffered not at all, but ran about catching insects, or otherwise actively employing himself, whilst his servants lay in the shade, the perspiration streaming off them. He is clearly the very man for the tropics. After ten days at Massawa, he started for the interior, previously getting rid of his heavy baggage, to an extent we should really have thought rather improvident, but which, if he had already made up his mind to content himself with the comforts, and conform to the customs of the people he was going amongst, was doubtless extremely wise. We have enumerated his stock of arms, and his assortment of presents for the natives. The list of his wardrobe, after he had given away his European toggery—partly at Cairo, and partly to Angelo, a Massawa Jew, who made himself useful and agreeable—is very soon made out. When he landed on the mainland, opposite Massawa, it consisted of “three Turkish shirts, three pair of drawers, one suit of Turkish clothes for best occasions, a pair of sandals, and a red cap. From the day I left Suez (25th March 1843), till about the same time in the year 1849, I never wore any article of European dress, nor indeed ever slept in a bed of any sort—not even a mattress; the utmost extent of luxury I enjoyed, even when all but dying of a pestilential fever, that kept me five months on my beam-ends at Khartoum, was a coverlet under a rug. The red cap I wore on leaving Massawa was soon borrowed of me, and the sandals, after a month, were given up; and so, as I have before said in the Introduction, for more than three years (that is, till I reached Khartoum), I wore no covering to my head, except a little butter, when I could get it, nor to my feet, except the horny sole which a few months’ rough usage placed under them.” The sole in question had scarce put its print upon Ethiopian soil when it was near meeting with an accident that would have necessitated the use of the sharp knife and white-hot ramrod. On his way to the house of Hussein Effendi, a government scribe, at the sea-coast village of Moncullou, Mr Parkyns put his bare foot near an object that in the twilight had the appearance of a bit of stick or stone. “I was startled by feeling something cold glide over it, and, turning, saw a small snake wriggling off as quickly as possible. From what little I could distinguish of its form and colour, it seemed to answer the description I had heard of the cerastes, or horned viper, which is about a foot and a half long, rather thick for its length, and of a dirty, dusty colour, mottled. The horns are nearly over the eyes, and about the eighth of an inch in length. This is considered one of the most venomous of the snake tribe, and they are very numerous in this neighbourhood. I tried to kill it, but without success.” He soon came to think very little of such small deer as this. Snakes are as common as rats in those torrid latitudes, and about as little heeded. On his way to the hot springs of Ailat, a day’s journey from Massawa, he killed another horned viper, as it was coolly wriggling across his carpet, “spread in a natural bower formed by the boughs of a species of mimosa, from whose yellow flowers, which emit a delicious fragrance, the Egyptians distil a perfume they call ‘fitneh.’” After this he makes no mention of adventures with snakes on account of their frequency, until he gets to his chapter on the natural history of Abyssinia, towards the close of the second volume, to which we shall hereafter refer. We are at present anxious to get up the country, to the court of King Oubi, whose capital, Adoua, was Mr Parkyns’ headquarters during his residence in Tigrè. There he had what he calls his town-house, of which he presents us with a plan and sketches. He remained for some weeks at Ailat, the Cheltenham of Abyssinia, whose healing springs attract visitors from great distances. There he lodged in the house of a sort of village chief, called Fakak, and passed his time shooting. It was rather an amusing residence, caravans of Bedouins and Shohos frequently passing through on their way to and from Massawa, and he had excellent sport. The evening before starting for Kiaguor, three days’ journey on the road to Adoua,
“I went out to procure a supper for myself and numerous friends and attendants; and, to tantalise my English sporting readers, I will tell them what bag I brought home in little more than an hour. My first shot brought down four guinea-fowl; my second, five ditto; third, a female of the little Ben Israel gazelle; fourth, her male companion; and, fifth, a brace of grouse; so that in five shots I had as good a bag as in England one would get in an average day’s shooting, and after expending half a pound of powder, and a proportionate quantity of shot, caps, and wads. But I feel it my duty to explain that I never shoot flying, considering that unsportsmanlike. A true sportsman shows his skill by getting up to his game unperceived, when, putting the muzzle of his gun as close to the tail-feathers as he possibly can, he blazes away into the thick of the covey, always choosing the direction in which he sees three or four heads picking in a row! At any rate, this is the only way you can shoot in a country where, if you entirely expend your powder and shot, you must starve, or else make more, as I have been obliged to do many a time. I cannot understand how people in Europe can enjoy shooting, where one is dependent on a crowd of keepers, beaters, dogs, sandwiches, grog, &c.... My sole companion on ordinary occasions is a little boy, who carries my rifle, whilst I carry my gun, and we do all the work ourselves. His sharp eyes, better accustomed to the glare than my own, serve me in every point as well as a setter’s nose. The country (about Ailat) is sandy and covered with large bushes. Most of the trees are thorny, being chiefly of the mimosa tribe, and their thorns are of a very formidable description, some of them being about two inches and a half in length, and as thick at the base as a large nail; while another variety, called in Abyssinian the ‘Kantàff-tafa,’ have thin short-curved thorns placed on the shoots two and two together. These catch you like the claws of a hawk, and if they enter your clothes you had better cut off the sprig at once, and carry it with you till you have leisure to liberate yourself, otherwise you will never succeed; for as fast as you loosen one thorn another catches hold.”