MARGINAL COMMENTS
By ROSE MACAULAY .
IN the year 1521, the Christian Emperor of Abyssinia was writing to the -Christian King of Portugal. "Because upon my borders," he wistfully said, "there are no Christians, I will freely give your subjects lands to inhabit there. . . . I have no Christian King near me to aid me and to comfort my. heart." Then a hint of righteous reproof creeps in. "I myself, oh King, can find no cause of rejoicing in the Christian kings of Europe, when I hear they are at discord and war among themselves. Be ye all united in one accord ; for you ought all to be conjoined together in a certain league of amity. And truly, if I -had any Christian King bordering upon me, I would not depart from him for a single hour."
Could he have looked ahead and seen bordering upon him two Christian kings and one secularist Republic, his heart would, presumably, have felt comforted. Yet we get once more the impression of a Christian monarch in Ethiopia looking out a trifle smugly, with grave and disappointed eyes (beneath a bowler hat and behind spectacles) upon Christian kings in Europe. "To be sure," he might be thinking, "you have none of you been Christians so long as we have, for we were con- verted under Queen Candace by Philip the Deacon ; indeed, far earlier, for did not our ancestress the Queen of Sheba, on - her journey to pay, in the fiftieth year of her reign, that brief but felicitous visit to King Solomon from which our royal line sprang—did not she, in a prophetic moment, kneel down.- and worship Christ ? Even if not (and I am modern enough to be sceptical of unlikely tales) do not our Kings descend from Noah, and were they not for centuries forbidden to wed any but the posterity of the three Magi; who Might be known by a star on their sides ? Still longer ago, did not Jupiter and the other gods feast with us on Mount Amara, which has also a claim (as Portuguese missionaries have testified) to be considered the original Eden ? or what other kings has it been written that they never .gO out riding without a hundred jars of wine of honey ? Or that if their floating hair and veil should catch in a tree as they ride, and expose their faces, the local authorities Must be hanged forthwith ? (Beware ! Beware ! His flashing eyes, his floating hair !) Or, if these be called "tales by enlarging travellers and boasting Abassins," like that of the unicorns which Father Jerome Lobo saw in our land; at least it cannot be denied that I spend my time translating the Scriptures from Gize into the vulgar tongue (and how vulgar Ethiopian tongues are, you cannot imagine) ; nor that I drove to my coronation in the second-hand coach of a German Emperor, attended by European potentates and journalists, presented by Germany with a signed photograph of Hindenburg and many bottles of hock, by Egypt with a bedroom suite, by Italy with an aeroplane and a shawl. What if many of our racial habits seem to you (indeed, to me) deplorably conservative, even barbaric ? My simple subjects still cling to the slavery, the torture, and the uncooked beef of an earlier age, but we are very- Christian, for we are baptized every year, and very League-minded, for we like to bring our little troubles to Geneva. Finally, may I quote another extract from my sixteenth-century predecessor's letters to European Kings ?—" When your forces shall resort unto these coasts, I will there be present with my armies also."
This is what this grave Abyssinian Negus looks as if he were thinking.
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