Henty George Alfred
The March to Magdala
The road from Annesley Bay to Koomaylo can hardly be termed either interesting or strongly defined. It at first goes straight across the sand, and, as the sand is trampled everywhere, it is simply impossible to follow it. We were told that the route lay due west, but that just where the jungle began there was a sign-post. Compass in hand, we steered west, and entered the low thorny scrub which constitutes the jungle. No sign-post. We rode on for a mile, when, looking back at the rising sun, I saw something like a sign-post in the extreme distance. Riding back to it, it proved to be the desired guide, and the road from here is by daylight distinct enough. For the first six miles it runs across a dead-level of sand, covered with a shrub with very small and very scanty leaves, and very large and extremely-abundant thorns. Bustards, grouse, deer, and other game are said to be very abundant here, but we saw none of them. A sort of large hawk was very numerous, but these were the only birds we saw. At about six miles from the sea the ground rises abruptly for about ten feet in height, and this rise ran north and south as far as the eye could reach. It marked unquestionably the level of the sea at some not very remote period. From this point the plain continued flat, sandy, and bushy as before for two miles; but after that a rocky crag rose, rather to our right, and the sand became interspersed with stones and boulders. Our path lay round behind the hill, and then we could see, at about four miles’ distance, a white tent or two, at the mouth of an opening in the mountain before us. These white tents were the camp at Koomaylo. About three miles from Koomaylo we came upon a very curious burial-place. It was in a low flat, close to a gully, and covered a space of perhaps fifty yards square. The graves were placed very close together, and consisted of square piles of stones, not thrown together, but built up, about three feet square and as much high. They were crowned by a rough pyramid of stones, the top one being generally white. Underneath these stone piles was a sort of vault. From this point the ground rose more steeply than it had yet done.
Koomaylo is situated at the mouth of the pass which takes its name from it. The valley here is about half-a-mile wide. It is rather over thirteen miles from the sea, and is said to be 415 feet above the sea-level; but it does not appear to be nearly so high. At any rate, its height does not make it any cooler; for, hot as it is at Annesley Bay, it is at least as hot here. The greatest nuisance I have at present met with in Abyssinia are the flies, which are as numerous and irritating as they are in Egypt. Fortunately they go to sleep when the sun goes down; and as there are no mosquitoes to take their place, one is able to sleep in tranquillity. We found on arriving at Koomaylo that the troops had not been in very long. They had got scattered in the night, owing to some of the camels breaking down; had lost their guides, lost each other, and lost the way. Finally, however, all the troops came in in a body under their officers at about eight o’clock. The animals were not quite so unanimous in their movements; for a number of them took quite the wrong road, and went to Hadoda, a place about six miles from here, to the north, and twelve miles from Zulla. There are wells there, so they got a drink, and came on in the course of the day. A few, however, have not yet turned up, and one of these missing animals bore a portion of my own luggage and stores. The others will perhaps arrive; but I have a moral conviction that that animal will never again make his appearance. As the men were too tired upon their arrival to pitch their tents, many of which indeed had not yet arrived, they were allowed to take possession of a number of tents which had been pitched for head-quarters. When we arrived they were all shaken down; the men were asleep in the tents, and the camels had gone down to water. The first step was to go down to water our horses and mules, the next to draw rations for ourselves, our followers, and beasts. The watering-place is a quarter of a mile from this camp, which is on rather rising ground. The wells are, of course, in the bed of what in the rainy season must be a mighty torrent fifty yards wide.
I have seen many singular scenes, but I do not know that I ever saw a stranger one than these wells presented. They are six in number, are twelve or fourteen feet across, and about twelve feet deep. They are dug through the mass of stones and boulders which forms the bed of the stream, and three of the six have a sort of wooden platform, upon which men stand to lower the buckets to the water by ropes. The other wells have sloping sides, and upon them stand sets of natives, who pass buckets from hand to hand, and empty them into earth troughs, or rather mud basins, from which the animals drink. The natives while so engaged keep up the perpetual chant without which they seem to be unable to do any work. The words of this chant vary infinitely, and they consist almost always of two words of four or five syllables in all; which are repeated by the next set of men, with the variation of one of the syllables, and in a tone two notes lower than that used by the first set. Round these wells are congregated a vast crowd of animals – flocks of goats and small sheep, hundreds in number, strings of draught-bullocks, mules, ponies, horses, and camels, hundreds of natives, with their scanty attire, their spears, their swords exactly resembling reaping-hooks, and their heavy clubs. Here are their wives and sisters, some of them in the ordinary draped calico, others very picturesquely attired in leathern petticoats, and a body-dress of a sort of sheet of leather, going over one shoulder and under the other arm, covering the bust, and very prettily ornamented with stars and other devices, formed of white shells. Round their necks they wear necklaces of red seeds and shells. Some of them are really very good-looking, with remarkably intelligent faces. The scene round the wells is very exciting, for the animals press forward most eagerly, and their attendants have the greatest difficulty in preserving order, especially among the mules and camels. The supply, however, is equal to the demand, and by the end of the day the wells are nearly deserted, except by the soldiers, who like to go down and draw their water fresh from the wells. The upper wells, where buckets with ropes only are used, are really very fair water; those for the animals are not clear, but are still drinkable. All have a taste somewhat resembling the water from peat-bogs. Natives are employed digging more wells, which can be done, for the quantity which is drawn appears to make little or no difference in the level of the water in the present wells. Some of the camels occasionally get quite furious; to-day I saw one, whose saddle had slipped round under its belly, begin to jump and plunge most wildly, with its head in the air, and uttering the most uncouth cries. There was a general stampede, especially among the mules, many of whom have, I fancy, never seen a camel before. It was some minutes before the animal could be caught and forced down upon its knees by its driver, and by that time he had quite cleared the ground in his neighbourhood. The camels are kept as much as possible kneeling, and there were a hundred or two near him at the time he commenced his evolutions. When one camel rises, all in his neighbourhood always endeavour to do the same; and the efforts of these beasts to rise, the shouts of their drivers, and the stampede of the mules, made up a most laughable scene. Near the wells is another large graveyard; the tombs here are rather more ornate than those I have already described, some of them being round, and almost all having courses of white quartz stones. Upon the top of many of these tombs are two or three flat stones, placed on end, and somewhat resembling small head- and foot-stones. As there is no inscription upon them it would be curious to find out the object with which the natives erect them.
Having finished watering our horses, we proceeded to the commissariat tent. Here an immense quantity of work is got through, all the animals and men drawing their rations daily; and I have heard no complaint of any sort, except that some Parsees, while I was getting my rations, came up and complained bitterly because there was no mutton, and it was contrary to their religion to eat beef. The commissariat officer regretted the circumstance, but pointed out that at present no sheep had been landed, and that the little things of the country are mere skin and bone, and quite unfitted for the troops. The Parsees, who were, I believe, clerks to one of the departments, went off highly discontented. The moral of this evidently is that Parsees should not go to war in a country where mutton is scarce. As for the Hindoos, I cannot even guess how they will preserve their caste intact. It is a pity that their priests could not give them a dispensation to put aside all their caste observances for the time they may be out of India. As it is, I foresee we shall have very great difficulty with them.
Koomaylo, December 12th.
When I wrote two days ago I hardly expected to have dated another letter from Koomaylo. I had prepared to start for Senafe, leaving my baggage behind me, and returning in ten days or so. The great objection to this plan was that neither at Zulla nor here are there any huts or stores where things can be left. The only thing to be done, therefore, was to leave them in the tent of some friend; but as he, too, might get the route at any moment, it would have been, to say the least of it, a very hazardous proceeding. The night before last, however, I received the joyful and long-expected news that the ship which had left Bombay with my horses six days before I started myself was at last in harbour. My course was now clear; I should go down, get my horses, and then go up to Senafe, carrying my whole baggage with me. Vessels and troops are arriving every day, and the accumulations of arrears of work are increasing in even more rapid proportion. Major Baigrie, the quartermaster-general, is indefatigable, but he cannot unload thirty large vessels at one little jetty, at whose extremity there is only a depth of five feet of water. Unless something is done, and that rapidly, and upon an extensive scale, we shall break down altogether. It is evident that a jetty, at which at most three of these country boats can lie alongside to unload, is only sufficient to afford accommodation for one large ship, and that it would take several days to discharge her cargo of say one thousand tons, using the greatest despatch possible. How, then, can it be hoped that the vessels in the harbour, whose number is increasing at the rate of two or three a-day, are to be unloaded? In the Crimea great distress was caused because the ships in Balaclava harbour could not manage to discharge their stores. But Balaclava harbour offered facilities for unloading which were enormous compared to this place. There was a wharf a quarter of a mile long, with deep water alongside, so that goods could be rolled down planks or gangways to the shore from the vessels. The harbour was land-locked, and the work of unloading never interrupted. Compare that with the present state of things. A boat-jetty running out into five-foot water, and only approachable for half the day owing to the surf, and, as I hear, for months not approachable at all. It can be mathematically proved that the quantity of provision and forage which can be landed from these boats, always alongside for so many hours a-day, would not supply the fifth of the wants of twenty-five thousand men and as many animals. Everything depends upon what the state of the interior of the country is. If we find sufficient forage for the animals and food for the men – which the most sanguine man does not anticipate – well and good. If not, we must break down. It is simply out of the question to land the stores with the present arrangements in Annesley Bay, or with anything like them. The pier-accommodation must be greatly increased, and must be made practical in all weather, that is to say, practical all day in ordinary weather. To do this the pier should be run out another fifty yards, and should then have a cross-pier erected at its extremity. The native boats could lie under the lee of this and unload in all weathers, and there would be sufficient depth of water for the smaller transports to lie alongside on the outside in calm weather, and to unload direct on to the pier. I know that this would be an expensive business, that stone has to be brought from a distance, &c. But it is a necessity, and therefore expense is no object. I consider that the railway which is to be laid between the landing-place and this point will be of immense utility to the expedition; but I believe it to be a work of quite inferior importance in comparison with this question of increased pier-accommodation. There is no doubt that in spite of the troops and animals arriving from Bombay before things were ready for them here, things would have gone on far better than they have done, had there been any head to direct operations here. But the officers of the various departments have been working night and day without any head whatever to give unity and object to their efforts. I understand that General Staveley was astonished to find that before the arrival of General Collings, two days previous to himself, there had been no head to the expedition.
Sir Robert Napier was fully alive to the extreme importance of this question of wharfage, for in his memorandum of September 12th he recommended that planking, tressles, piles, and materials to construct wharves should be forwarded with the 1st Brigade. “There cannot,” he proceeded, “be too many landing-places to facilitate debarkation, and on such convenience will depend the boats being quickly cleared, and the stores removed from them dry. It would be advisable that a considerable number of empty casks should be forwarded to be used as rafts, or to form floating-wharves for use at low water, particularly should the shores shelve gently. Spars to form floating shears should also be forwarded.” Thus Sir Robert Napier, himself an engineer, had long before foreseen the extreme importance of providing the greatest possible amount of landing accommodation; and yet three months after this memorandum was written, and two months after the arrival of the pioneer force at Zulla, an unfinished pier was all that had been effected, and Colonel Wilkins, the officer to whom this most important work had been specially intrusted, was quietly staying up at Senafe with Colonels Merewether, Phayre, and Field. A second pier was not completed until the end of February, and consequently many vessels remained for months in harbour before their cargoes could be unloaded, at an expense and loss to the public service which can hardly be over-estimated.
We had quite a small excitement here this afternoon. I was writing quietly, and thinking what a hot day it was, when I heard a number of the soldiers running and shouting. I rushed to the door of my tent and saw a troop of very large monkeys trotting along, pursued by the men, who were throwing stones at them. Visions of monkey-skins flashed across my mind, and in a moment, snatching up revolvers and sun-helmets, three or four of us joined the chase. We knew from the first that it was perfectly hopeless, for the animals were safe in the hills, which extended for miles. However, the men scattered over the hills, shouting and laughing, and so we went on also, and for a couple of hours climbed steadily on, scratching ourselves terribly with the thorn-bushes which grow everywhere – and to which an English quickset-hedge is as nothing – and losing many pounds in weight from the effect of our exertions. Hot as it was, I think that the climb did us all good. Indeed, the state of the health of everyone out here is most excellent, and the terrible fevers and all the nameless horrors with which the army was threatened in its march across the low ground, turn out to be the effect of the imagination only of the well-intentioned but mischievous busybodies who have for the last six months filled the press with their most dismal predictions. I have heard many a hearty laugh since I have been here at all the evils we were threatened would assail us in the thirteen miles between Annesley Bay and this place. We were to die of fever, malaria, sunstroke, tetse-fly, Guinea-worm, tapeworm, and many other maladies. It is now nearly three months since the first man landed, and upon this very plain there are at present thousands of men, including the Beloochee regiment and other natives, hundreds, taking Europeans only, of officers, staff and departmental, with the conductors, inspectors, and men of the transport, commissariat, and other departments. From the day of the first landing to the present time there has not been one death, or even an illness of any consequence, among all these men upon this plain of death. As for the two companies of the 33d, their surgeon tells me that the general state of their health is better than in India, for that there has not been a single case of fever or indisposition of any kind in the five days since they landed, whereas in India there were always a proportion of men in hospital with slight attacks of fever. All this is most gratifying, and I believe that all the other dangers and difficulties will, when confronted, prove to have been equally exaggerated. The difficulties of the pass to the first plateau, 7000 feet above the sea, have already proved to be insignificant. There are only four miles of at all difficult ground, and this has already been greatly obviated by the efforts of the Bombay Sappers. The December rains have not yet begun, but yesterday and to-day we have heavy clouds hanging over the tops of the mountains. The rain would be a very great boon, and would quite alter the whole aspect of the country. The whole country, indeed, when not trampled upon, is covered with dry, burnt-up herbage, presenting exactly the colour of the sand, but which only needs a few hours’ rain to convert it into a green plain of grass, sufficient for the forage of all the baggage-animals in the camp.
While I have been writing this the Beloochees and a company of Bombay Sappers and Miners have marched into camp, with their baggage and camels. The Beloochees are a splendid regiment – tall, active, serviceable-looking men as ever I saw. Their dress is a dark-green tunic, with scarlet facings and frogs, trousers of a lighter green, a scarlet cap, with a large black turban around it; altogether a very picturesque dress. The Sappers and Miners are in British uniform. Both these corps go on early to-morrow morning to Upper Sooro. I have not decided yet whether I shall accompany them, or go on by myself this evening.
A letter has just come down from Colonel Merewether saying that all is going on well at Senafe. The King of Tigré has sent in his adhesion, and numbers of petty chiefs came in riding on mules, and followed by half-a-dozen ragged followers on foot, to make their “salaam.” I do not know that these petty chiefs, who are subjects of the King of Tigré, are of much importance one way or another, but their friendship would be useful if they would bring in a few hundred head of bullocks and a few flocks of sheep. It is, I understand, very cold up there, and the troops will have need of all their warm clothing.
Upper Sooro, December 13th.
I must begin my letter by retracting an opinion I expressed in my last, namely, that the defile would probably turn out a complete bugbear, as the fevers, guinea-worm, and tetse flies have done. My acquaintance with most of the passes of the Alps and Tyrol is of an extensive kind, but I confess that it in no way prepared me for the passage of an Abyssinian defile. I can now quite understand travellers warning us that many of these places were impracticable for a single horseman, much less for an army with its baggage-animals. Had not Colonel Merewether stated in his report that the first time he explored the pass he met laden bullocks coming down it, I should not have conceived it possible that any beast of burden could have scrambled over the terrible obstacles. Even now, when the Bombay Sappers have been at work for three weeks upon it, it is the roughest piece of road I ever saw, and only practicable for a single animal at once. It is in all twelve miles; at least, so it is said by the engineers, and we took, working hard, seven hours to do it; and I found that this was a very fair average time. A single horseman will, of course, do it in a very much shorter time, because there are miles together where a horse might gallop without danger. I remained at Koomaylo until the afternoon, as it was too hot to start till the sun was low. Nothing happened during the day, except the arrival of the Beloochees and Bombay Engineers. The soldiers had two or three more chases after the monkeys, of which there are extra ordinary numbers. I need hardly say that they did not catch any of them: a dog, however, belonging to one of the soldiers seized one for a moment, but was attacked with such fury by his companions that it had to leave its hold and beat a precipitate retreat. I have just been watching a flock or herd – I do not know which is the correct term – of these animals, two or three hundred in number, who have passed along the rocks behind my tent, at perhaps thirty yards’ distance. They have not the slightest fear of man, and even all the noise and bustle of a camp seem to amuse rather than alarm them. They are of all sizes, from the full-grown, which are as large as a large dog, down to tiny things which keep close to their mothers, and cling round their necks at the least alarm. The old ones make no noise, but step deliberately from rock to rock, sitting down frequently to inspect the camp, and indulge in the pleasure of a slight scratch. These full-sized fellows have extremely long hair over the head and upper part of the body, but are bare, disagreeably so, towards the caudal extremity. The small ones scamper along, chattering and screaming; they have no mane or long hair on the head. The old monkeys, when they do make a sound, bark just like a large dog. In the afternoon an enormous number of locusts came down the pass, and afforded amusement and diet to flocks of birds, who were, I observed, rather epicures in their way, for on picking up many of the dead bodies of the locusts, I found that in every case it was only the head and upper part of the thorax which had been eaten. I shall accept this as a hint; and in case of the starvation days with which this expedition is threatened – in addition to innumerable other evils – really coming on, I shall, when we are driven to feed on locusts, eat only the parts which the birds have pointed out to me as the tit-bits. I am happy to say that there is no probability of our being driven to that resource at present; for on our way here yesterday I passed considerable quantities of native cattle, and any quantity is procurable here, and as for goats they are innumerable. We bought one this morning for our servants for the sum of a rupee. The commissariat have made up their minds that all servants and followers must be Hindoos, and therefore abstainers from meat, and so issue no meat whatever in their rations – nothing, indeed, except rice, grain, a little flour, and a little ghee. Now, the fact is that the followers are generally not Hindoos. Many of the body-servants are Portuguese, Goa men; and the horse-keepers are frequently Mussulmans, or come from the north-west provinces, where they are not particular. Even the mule-drivers are Arabs, Egyptians, and Patans, all of whom eat flesh. It thus happens that the whole of our five servants are meat-eaters, and it is fortunate that we are able to buy meat from the natives for them, especially as they have really hard work to do; and in the cold climate we shall enter in another day or two meat is doubly necessary.
We had intended to start at three o’clock, but it was four before our baggage was fairly disposed upon the backs of the four baggage-animals – two strong mules and two ponies – and we were in the saddles of our riding-horses. Our route, after leaving the wells, ran, with of course various turnings and windings, in a south-westerly direction. The way lay along the bottom of the valley, a road being marked out by the loose stones being removed to a certain extent, and laid along both sides of the track. The valley for the first seven or eight miles was very regular, of a width of from 200 to 300 yards. Its bottom, though really rising gradually, appeared to the eye a perfect flat of sand, scattered with boulders and stones, and covered with the thorny jungle I have spoken of in a previous letter. This scrub had been cleared away along the line of road, or there would have been very little flesh, to say nothing of clothes, left upon our bones by the time we came to our journey’s end. Backward and forward, across the sandy plain, as the spurs of the hills turned its course, wound the bed of the torrent – I should think that we crossed it fifty times. It is probable that on occasions of great floods the whole valley is under water. To our left the hills, though rocky and steep, sloped somewhat gradually, and were everywhere sprinkled with bushes. On the right the mountain was much more lofty, and rose in many places very precipitously. Sometimes the valley widened somewhat, at other times the mountains closed in, and we seemed to have arrived at the end of our journey, until on rounding some projecting spur the valley would appear stretching away at its accustomed width. Altogether, the scenery reminded me very much of the Tyrol, except that the hills at our side were not equal in height to those which generally border the valleys there.
At half-past six it had become so dark that we could no longer follow the track, and the animals were continually stumbling over the loose stones, and we were obliged to halt for half-an-hour, by which time the moon had risen over the plain; and although it was some time longer before she was high enough to look down over the hill-tops into our valley, yet there was quite light enough for us to pursue our way. In another three-quarters of an hour we came upon a sight which has not greeted my eyes since I left England, excepting, of course, in my journey through France – it was running water. We all knelt down and had a drink, but, curiously enough, although our animals had been travelling for nearly four hours enveloped in a cloud of light dust, they one and all refused to drink; indeed, I question if they had ever seen running water before, and had an idea it was something uncanny. This place we knew was Lower Sooro, not that there was any village – indeed, I begin to question the existence of villages in this part of the world, for I have not yet seen a single native permanent hut, only bowers constructed of the boughs of trees and bushes. But in Abyssinia it is not villages which bear names; it is wells. Zulla, and Koomaylo, the Upper and Lower Sooro, are not villages, but wells. Natives come and go, and build their bowers, but they do not live there. I fancy that when there is a native name, and no well, it is a graveyard which gives the name. We passed two or three of these between Koomaylo and Sooro, all similar to those I have already described. From Lower to Upper Sooro is a distance of four miles. It is in this portion of the road that the real difficulties of the pass are situated, and I never passed through a succession of such narrow and precipitous gorges as it contains. The sides of these gorges are in many places perfectly perpendicular, and the scenery, although not very lofty, is yet wild and grand in the extreme, and seen, as we saw it, with the bright light and deep shadows thrown by the full moon, it was one of the most impressive pieces of scenery I ever saw. The difficulty of the pass consists not in its steepness, for the rise is little over three hundred feet in a mile, but in the mass of huge boulders which strew its bottom. Throughout its length, indeed, the path winds its way in and out and over a chaos of immense stones, which look as if they had but just fallen from the almost overhanging sides of the ravine. Some of these masses are as large as a good-sized house, with barely room between them for a mule to pass with his burden. In many places, indeed, there was not room at all until the Bombay Sappers, who are encamped about half-way up the pass, set to work to make it practicable by blasting away projecting edges, and in some slight way smoothing the path among the smaller rocks. In some places great dams have been formed right across the ravine, owing to two or three monster boulders having blocked the course of the stream, and from the accumulated rocks which the winter torrents have swept down upon them. Upon these great obstacles nothing less than an army of sappers could make any impression, and here the engineers have contented themselves by building a road up to the top of the dam and down again the other side. We were three hours making this four-mile passage, and the labour, the shouting, and the difficulties of the way, must be imagined. Of course we had dismounted, and had given our horses to their grooms to lead. Constantly the baggage was shifting, and required a pause and a readjustment. Now our tin pails would bang with a clash against a rock one side; now our case of brandy – taken for purely medicinal purposes – would bump against a projection on the other. Now one of the ponies would stumble, and the other nearly come upon him; now one of the mules, in quickening his pace to charge a steep ascent, would nearly pull the one which was following, and attached to him, off his feet; then there would be a fresh alarm that the ponies’ baggage was coming off. All this was repeated over and over again. There were shouts in English, Hindostanee, Arabic, and in other and unknown tongues. Altogether it was the most fatiguing four miles I have ever passed, and we were all regularly done when we got to the top. I should say that the water had all this time tossed and fretted between the rocks, sometimes hidden beneath them for a hundred yards, then crossing and recrossing our path, or running directly under our feet, until we were within a few hundred yards of Upper Sooro, when the ravine widening out, and the bottom being sandy, the stream no longer runs above the surface. Altogether it was a ride to be long remembered, through that lonely valley by moonlight in an utterly unknown and somewhat hostile country, as several attempts at robbery have been made by the natives lately upon small parties; and although in no case have they attacked a European, yet everyone rides with his loaded revolver in his holster. A deep silence seemed to hang over everything, broken only by our own voices, except by the occasional thrill of a cicada among the bushes, the call of a night-bird, or by the whining of a jackal, or the hoarse bark of a monkey on the hills above.
