AM) THEIR DUNGEON. 421 



stamped several times upon the roof to intimate 

 that his sitting-room was over this secure place. In 

 this dismal dungeon, however, no person had been 

 confined for the last six or seven years, although it 

 was being then prepared, by a second door being 

 put up, for the occupation of the unfortunate 

 Samma-negoos, an ex-frontier governor, who had 

 assisted his brother, a denounced rebel, to escape to 

 Ahgobba, where he is now entertained by the 

 Mahomedan Prince of that country, Beroo Lobo. 

 When I visited Guancho, this prisoner occupied a 

 small den of sticks, not four feet wide in any 

 direction, and his hands and feet were chained 

 close together, so that his removal to the larger 

 subterranean cell will, at all events, afford him 

 some opportunities of exercise, though he will 

 then be deprived of light and fresh air. 



Although, therefore, the Royal prisoners did not 

 enjoy life in a valley of delight, they certainly did 

 not drag out a miserable existence upon the hill of 

 despair. This would have been adding unnecessary 

 cruelty to an exigency of State policy ; an evil that 

 would, I am convinced, have long before corrected 

 itself, by the frequent escapes that would have been 

 attempted, especially in a place that afforded such 

 opportunities for obtaining personal freedom. An 

 Abyssinian Baron Trenck would only have to wrench 

 open the thin bar of soft iron which constitutes 

 fetters in that country, and by three successive jumps 

 through, not over, as many fences of rotten sticks, 

 he would he as free as the wildest Galla, into whose 



