158 ILLUSTRATIONS OF 



prison, would be consequent upon a perjured 

 imprecation made against the life of the Negoos. 

 Jospeh, accusing his brethren, in the fifteenth 

 verse of the forty-second chapter of Genesis, says, 

 " Hereby shall ye be proved : By the life of 

 Pharaoh ye shall not go forth hence, except your 

 youngest brother come hither ; " and again, in the 

 next verse, " or else by the life of Pharaoh surely 

 ye are spies." The very language substituting 

 the name Sahale Selassee for that of Pharaoh, 

 under similar circumstances, which would be used 

 in the court of Shoa at the present day. 



In the years 1830 and 1831, when cholera made 

 its circuit of the whole earth, it visited the kingdom 

 of Shoa. It was preceded for two successive years 

 by a great failure of crops, both of grain and 

 cotton, and the people in consequence, were reduced 

 to the greatest extremity for food and clothing. 

 Numbers fell victims from hunger alone, and to 

 relieve their necessities, numerous acts of violence 

 and robbery disturbed the usually peaceful state of 

 society in Shoa. The Negoos, at this time, secured 

 to himself the love of his subjects by the liberality 

 of his frequent distributions of grain ; but another 

 calamity made its appearance, the cholera com- 

 menced its ravages, and he began to fear that 

 his bounty must end by the exhaustion of his 

 means. The famine increasing from want of 

 the cattle which had died, to cultivate the land, 

 the difficulty of obtaining food began also to be felt 



