Chasm of the Chácha.

The King had oftentimes vaunted the extraordinary natural fortification of Angollála by the river Chácha, which for two days’ journey to the north-westward rolls through a deep precipitous valley, opposing an impassable barrier; and being then joined by the Beréza and by numerous other streams, skirts the celebrated sanctuary of Sena Márkos, whence the combined waters, taking the title of Jumma, roll on into the Nile. Setting out one morning at sunrise through the “sirkosh ber,” (i.e. The secret gate or wicket) he sent a page to conduct us to the junction of the tributary Fácha, which tumbles its torrent over a perpendicular wall seven hundred feet in height; and here His Majesty, surrounded by a crowd of noisy applicants for justice, already occupied his favourite seat on the brink of the giddy chasm.

A cloud had overcast the despot’s brow, for “Boro Winkee,” his favourite war-steed, had that morning fallen down dead whilst exercising in the meadow. Taken in battle from a potent Galla chieftain, whose name it inherited, the steed had long enjoyed a stall within the royal bedchamber, and strong fears indeed were entertained for the effeminate little page Kátama, who had been the luckless jockey. But no punishment followed the catastrophe. The boy was a court favourite, and Antonistye, his father, by far the most renowned warrior in Shoa, was mayor of the corporation of king’s herdsmen, who take the field in independent bodies, and under the title of Abelám (derived from the Amháric word “abélla,” “he may eat up”) form a distinct class, mingling with no other portion of the population.

“What think you of my Galla ditch?” inquired the monarch. “Have you any such in your country?”

There could be but one opinion regarding the yawning gulf, which extends a full mile in breadth, and has been rent by some violent convulsion in the bowels of the earth. Fifteen hundred feet below the otherwise uninterrupted plain, the mingled waters flow on like a silver cord, fed at intervals by foaming cascades, which raise a shower of white spray in their headlong descent: whilst frowning basaltic cliffs cast a deep gloom over wild steppes and terraces, whose lone hamlets and cottages are scarcely to be distinguished from the fallen masses of rock. Vast colonies of pig-faced baboons, the principal inhabitants, sally forth morning and evening from their strong city, to devastate the surrounding crops, in defiance of incessant war waged against them by the peasantry, armed with sticks and stones; but outcasts, and criminals too, find a safe asylum among the almost inaccessible crannies of the perpendicular scarps, where they hide amidst masses of foliage, unthought of, and unmolested.

Deep buried in the bosom of this stupendous chasm, and immediately below the roaring cataract, stands the little hamlet of Guréyo, the seat of the royal iron-works, and thither, after the sylvan court had closed, the king descended, leaning on the arm of the chief smith, great master of the Tabiban, or mechanics, and royal physician in ordinary. The process of smelting and refining pursued in Abyssinia has been common to almost every age and country from the earliest antiquity. Broken into small fragments and coarsely pulverised, the ore is mixed with a large proportion of charcoal, and placed in a clay furnace resembling the smith’s hearth, but furnished with a sloping cavity considerably depressed below the level of the blast pipes. The non-metallic particles being brought to a state of fusion by the constant action of four pair of hand-worked bellows, the iron with the scoria sinks to the bottom. This is again broken, and re-fused, when the dross flowing off, the pure metal is discharged in pigs, which, by a repetition of heating and welding, are wrought into bars; but owing to the very rude and primitive apparatus employed, the unceasing toil of ten hours is indispensable to the realisation of two pounds’ weight of very inferior iron, which after all, in private works, is liable to a heavy tax to the crown.

Embowered in a dark grove of junipers on the opposite brink of ............