A tall, broad-shouldered, powerful man, a man six feet four inches in height, sitting on “the largest horse ever seen in Scotland.” “Mr. Bruce ... is the tallest man you ever saw gratis,” said laughing Fanny Burney. Not a colossus or a Hercules like Belzoni, but a kind of eighteenth-century adult Olympian quite aware of the prestige of height and fine carriage, with the tolerant and humorous eye of an observer of life, and something of the pride and composure of a well-born Scottish gentleman.
The children of the folk who lived upon his estate used to stare at the huge man on the giant black horse. Their fathers had told them that the laird had visited the strangest kingdom in all the world, and that he had loved a great queen who was fair as the lady of Sheba in the Bible, and wore a golden crown. Sometimes at the “great house,” he would sit for hours in a chair, clad in magnificent robes, and the serving folk would whisper among themselves that the master was thinking of the old days and the great queen.
Sometime in the middle years of the eighteenth century, an extraordinary letter arrived at the house of His Majesty’s Prime Minister. It was addressed to “Mr. Pitt, Vizir of England”; its sender was the Dey of Algiers, and its message was terse and to the point. “Your consul in Algiers,” said the missive, “is an obstinate person and like an animal.” “Dear me,” said Mr. Pitt, “who is His Majesty’s consul at Algiers?”
A look at some great ledger, full of the brim of clerkly penmanship, and a question or two among the staff, soon elicited an answer. The consul at Algiers was Mr. James Bruce, a young Scot of excellent family, who had been recommended to the post by the honourable Lord Halifax. This young man was the son of David Bruce of Kinnaird in Stirlingshire, he had had an English education from tutors in London and at Harrow school, and he was interested in travel and archæological research. “Humph,” says Mr. Pitt, “anything else.” Yes, there was more to the story; he had married the daughter of a prosperous London wine merchant, taken over the business and then resigned it to his brother on the death of his wife scarce a year after the marriage. He had travelled in Spain, studied Arabic at the Escorial, was said to be “extremely good tempered and a good scholar.” And here was the Dey of Algiers saying that he was “like an animal.”
The angry phrase of the Dey, however, was quite natural. As master of a piratic kingdom cravenly humoured by the European powers, he had grown accustomed to obedience of the most servile kind from all Christians resident in his territories. If there is one supremely discreditable episode in the history of what is ironically called Western Christendom, it is surely this matter of the relations of the European powers and the Barbary pirates. Great European nations faint-heartedly directed their consuls to submit to incredible degradations,—the French consul in Bruce’s time had been loaded with fetters and harnessed to a cart for venturing to protest at some exaction, and another consul with gouty feet threatened with the bastinado—many thousands of unhappy European sailors were allowed to pass into the living death of Moorish slavery, and the cut-throat authors of these outrages timidly flattered and paid. The bare historical account does not tell the story; the reality of it is a ship’s crew of weary, thirsty and cruelly-beaten men standing fettered in the white glare of the Algerian sun, hearing “Christian dog” hurled at them like a stone meant to wound.
With the arrival of his British Majesty’s new consul, Mr. James Bruce of Stirlingshire, a brave spirit had appeared in this world of fatuous pusillanimity. The tall, composed Scot was decidedly not the man who would submit to degradation or any filthy foolery. When he had to fight, he fought, whether the case in hand was the rescue of some poor tar from his Moorish chains, or the protection of some minor official of the consulate. His composure and good humour,—there is a kind of good humour secretly rooted in the quality of courage—discomfited his pirate neighbours, for they knew that he knew that his life was in danger. The ferocious old shark of a Dey, being thus put out, had then addressed his complaint to the “Vizir” of England.
History does not record what Mr. Pitt did or said on this occasion, but it does mention that the tall consul who annoyed the Dey of Algiers by looking him squarely in the eye decided to waste no more time among these uninteresting sea jackals and slavers. He had taken the post of Algiers, not because he sought the haven of political office, but because he hoped to make his position a passport to North Africa. There were Roman ruins about, in Bruce’s own words “the large and magnificent remains of ruined architecture ... of exquisite elegance and perfection” and Bruce was a true son of a century that went in for ruins and elegance.
Now comes his resignation from the post at Algiers and his appearance in a new rôle. He will roam the coast in the character of an itinerant Christian physician, a dervish of the art of healing. At Algiers he had prevailed upon the naval surgeon attached to the Consulate to teach him a little eighteenth century medicine, and had been quite successful with his “purgings, vomitings and bleedings.” This quasi-knowledge was to be of the greatest use to him in after life. “I flatter myself,” said he, “no offence, I hope, I did not occasion a greater mortality among the Mohametans and Pagans abroad than may be attributed to some of my brother physicians among their fellow Christians.” When the parson of the Consulate left, he took on the marrying and baptising.
In 1765, the year of his resignation from his post at Algiers, this paragon of consuls was thirty-five years old. He had some resources of his own, he was alone in life, and he had seen just enough of the world to make him wish to see more. A thirst for travel, like appetite, grows with indulgence. The mental fire driving him to his future of extraordinary adventure was an intellectual curiosity, and as one reads his own account of his vagabondage, one feels that he was far more interested in the human world than in the natural. He wanted to see people and events, and he went to strange countries because events and people there would be supremely worth while. This point of view again is decidedly of the eighteenth century. Just now, however, Roman ruins are on his mind, and he is gathering together an expedition.
A notion suddenly checks him. The Dey has resented his demeanour, and may possibly take revenge by refusing him an authorisation to go about in his dominions. And now a great surprise, for presently an obsequious official comes from the Dey bringing passes and an authorisation whose like had never before been issued to a foreigner, and a pair of “presents.” The presents are two grinning, good-natured young Irishmen, who stand in the courtyard clad in the scanty rags tossed to Christian slaves, and with the usual chains upon their legs. These young Celts, deserters from the Royal Navy to the Spanish service, had been captured and enslaved by the Algerians.
What can such an excess of benevolence mean? Little by little the story comes to Bruce’s ears; the old Dey has secretly admired his courage all the while.
The autumn of the year finds the antiquarian “dervish,” sketch-book in “hand, wandering off into the interior of the Barbary States”; he explores the dry, treeless mountain land of North Africa searching for temples and ruins, he ventures to the edge of the desert and sketches the Roman columns of some dead city overwhelmed by time, silence and sand. One pictures the antiquarian expedition led by this composed Olympian Scot, with a rich sense of humour lying half hid in a keenly intelligent eye, the cavalcade consisting of the Irish sailors, a young Italian architectural draughtsman, one Luigi Balugani, and Moorish attendants.
A classical column or a Roman shrine, suddenly seen through village palms, brings all to a halt, quiet descends, pencils flourish busily, measurements are taken; then follows the papery snap of a closing sketch-book, a stir of hoofs, a variety of equine snorts, and off goes the sometime consul of the eighteenth century in search of more antique “magnificence.”
At El Djem, the huge amphitheatre which is larger than the colosseum at Rome, had just had “two sections” blown to pieces to prevent its being used as a fortress by marauding tribes. A rumour stirred the camp, a rumour of a petrified Roman city with “petrified men and horses, women at the churn, the little children, the cats, the dogs, and the mice.” A romantic tale; indeed, it was all romance!
At Tunis the expedition gathered in one Osman, a “French renegade,” “very brave,” says Bruce, “but he needed a sharp lookout that he did not often embroil us where there was access to women or to wine.”
“I believe I may confidently say,” wrote Bruce, “that there is not either in the territories of Algiers or Tunis a fragment of good taste of which I have not brought a drawing to Britain.”
Adventure by sea now awaited this cultural cavalcade. Arriving at Ptolemais, a small port of Tripolitania, the whole muster of Moors, sailors, and attendants took passage on a small Greek junk bound for Crete. The African littoral being in the grip of a famine, the ship had arrived from Crete with a cargo of corn. Returning to Crete, a storm presently gathered up the vessel, and wrecked her on the Libyan shoals. Bruce swam ashore, and falling into the hands of Arabs who had come to plunder the wreck, was stripped naked, and beaten. Painfully hurt, and ignorant of the fate of his goods and his company, he took refuge from the continuing storm in the lee of bush. In the morning an old man and a number of young men came up to where he was sitting. Then Bruce:
“I gave them the salute Salam alicum! which was only returned by one young man in a tone as if he wondered at my impudence. The old man then asked me Whether I was a Turk, and what I had to do there? I replied I was no Turk, but a poor Christian physician, a dervish that went about the world seeking to do good for God’s sake, and was then flying from famine and going to Greece to get bread. He then asked me if I was a Cretan? I said I had never been in Crete, but came from Tunis, and was returning to that town, having lost everything I had in the shipwreck of that vessel. I said this in so despairing a tone that there was no doubt left with the Arabs that the fact was true. A ragged, dirty barracan was immediately thrown over me and I was ordered up to a tent in the end of which stood a long spear thrust through it, a mark of sovereignty.”
Little by little the company and even the baggage come to light. The wanderings begin again; they become confused and difficult to follow; the tall Scot is acquiring a touch of the true vagabond mind; one now finds him roaming everywhere, ruin or no ruin. The sailors are sent home; the company drops away; his young Italian architectural draughtsman, Luigi Balugani, is now with Bruce, now waiting in some end-of-the-world town for his return.
Somewhere in Northern Africa he encounters a tribe who eat lions, and shares their repast. “The first was a he-lion, smelling violently of musk.... I then had a lion’s whelp six or seven months old; it tasted on the whole the worst of the three.”
In Egypt he ascended the Nile, fought off bandits in the Valley of the Kings, made friends with Ali Bey, governor of Egypt, and his Vizir, a Copt given to astrology. His fame as wandering Christian physician had opened the door, for Moslem rulers in the eighteenth century were as eager to have Christian physicians as Christian rulers were to have Moslem physicians in the twelfth. A case of telescopes, to which he clung with a true Scot’s persistence, won for him the special standing of an astrologer. As a reward for treating Ali Bey, the governor obtained from Constantinople a kind of supreme laissez passer, “a firman of the Grand Signor wrapped up in green taffeta, magnificently written and titled and the inscription powdered with gold dust.” Ali Bey also gave him a letter to Ras Michael, lord of Abyssinia.
The western coast of the Red Sea is a thing of lifeless burning rock and glaring beaches of blazing white sand; in the eighteenth century the region was still nominally a part of the Turkish Empire, and Turkish officials dwelt in the coral houses, and waddled to the beach to plunder travellers standing bewildered in the apocalyptic sun. In 1769, a tall man arrived who looked his would-be plunderers in the face, and even managed to awe them with his letter from the “Grand Signor” with its powder of gold. This gentleman was the Laird of Kinnaird, for His Majesty’s late consul at Algiers had succeeded to the paternal estate. The Laird of Kinnaird seeing the world as a Frankish dervish! Balugani, the draughtsman, was still with him; the young artist must have beep something of a man.
“The noblest of all occupations,” wrote Bruce in later times, “is that of exploring the distant parts of the Globe.” The Laird of Kinnaird was on his way to perhaps the most inaccessible country of his world, a land forgotten for five hundred years in the forests of Africa. Mr. Bruce had determined to reach the Kingdom of Abyssinia.
The forest kingdom of Abyssinia lies on a high and isolated plateau lifted above the tropical greenery of equatorial Africa; its slopes are steep, and its approaches mountainous and difficult. Once arrived on the heights, the traveller finds himself on a kind of land island with its own temperature, mountain-top climate, its own forest bred of the strange union of the fierce equatorial sun and the cool heights, and its own island people dwelling aloof in space and time. Though dark skinned, these folk are not negroes, but some Hamitic folk with a strong infusion of Jewish blood.
Their kingdom is one of the oldest in the world; their rulers claim descent from a son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba. Converted centuries ago from primitive Judaism to the Christianity of the African mind, this singular mingling of the testaments under the sun of Africa produced a kind of Jewish Christianity unique in the Christian world.
A forest land spread over mountains, a land thronged with black folk carrying burdens through mountain jungles, a land of lions roaring in the night, a land of spring rains and flooded water courses, a land of great feudal nobles clad in bright robes and riding with bare feet in the stirrup, a land of Biblical blood justice, Christian wonder-workings, wars and rumours of wars, a land whose sun beat through trees like a vast and terrible white sword, a land where almost the first thing seen by Bruce was the stuffed skin of a malefactor swinging from a tree.
The Laird of Kinnaird had arrived at the court of Saul, King of Israel. It was all there, the battles, the adventure, the death, the colour, and the cruelty. The head of the state was Ras Michael, governor of Tigre, the seventy-year-old soldier and intriguer who had assassinated one king, poisoned another and was now ruling in the name of a third. Like men coming one after the other to try a feat of strength, great feudal nobles and confederacies gathered together to thrust him from power; there were constant battles and new confederacies, and then the slinking hyenas carrying off human carrion in the night of forest shadows, brilliant stars and the odour of the battlefield. And in the morning priests, who wore the robes of the priests of Solomon, marching in company to sacrifice to the Sun.
The journey from the coast to Gondar, the capital of Abyssinia, took Bruce and his young Italian companion ninety-five days. Both made the journey wearing white Moorish robes.
Save for three Franciscan friars, of whose fate nothing is known, and of a certain French surgeon, no European had been seen in Abyssinia for close upon two hundred years. Bruce’s arrival had a decidedly dramatic quality. An epidemic of the smallpox had fallen upon the land; the nobles lay dying; the great houses trembled for their sons. Suddenly at the end of the caravan road had appeared the tall Laird of Kinnaird in his character of an observer and wandering physician.
A European and a wise man in their midst! It is the finger of Heaven! An attendant comes begging him to visit Ras Michael’s son, the young warrior Ayto Consu, who is dying of the plague.
Into the great dark den of the African palace walks the tall man who looked the Dey of Algiers squarely in the eye; he hears uneasy breathing in the half-darkness, and sees a magnificent youth tossing about on a bed of animal skins. A woman of extraordinary beauty and stateliness approaches; it is the Ozoro Esther, old Ras Michael’s young wife, and young mother of the warrior lad. This Biblical queen, this great lady of the ancient court of Israel, was to be Bruce’s unfailing friend and kind protectress.
Bruce opens the doors and windows, fumigates the rooms with incense and myrrh, and washes them with vinegar and warm water. The young prince passes the crisis of the plague, and lives.
The incident gives Bruce a name and a place. He is no longer the unknown European, but Yagoube, which is James,—Yagoube the physician, counsellor, and spring of secret wisdom. Slaves bring him new and clean clothes in the fashion of Gondar the capital. “My hair was cut round, curled and perfumed in the Amharic fashion, and I was thenceforward in all outward appearance a perfect Abyssinian.” From this day on, he will be a noble of the Abyssinians, he will ride with them, surprise them with his marksmanship, and follow them to battle with the wild, half-negro tribes.
He found the rôle of physician counsellor a congenial one, and carried it through with the best of humour. He thus described his visit to a young Abyssinian princess; the account and the humour of it are very characteristic of the man.
“The young patient being brought forward, soon after, one of the slaves, her attendant as in a play, pulled off the remaining part of the veil that covered her. I was astonished at the sight of so much beauty ... the rest of her dress was a blue shift which hung loosely about her and covered her down to her feet, though it was not very rigorously nor very closely disposed all below her neck. She was the tallest of the middle size, and not yet fifteen years of age, her whole features faultless.... Such was the beautiful Aiscach, daughter of the eldest of the ladies I was then attending.
“If Aiscach was ill,” said her mother, “you would take better care of her than of either of us.” “Pardon me,” said I, “Madam, if the beautiful Aiscach was ill, I feel I should myself be so much affected as not to be able to attend her at all!”
A scuffle with a kinsman of Ras Michael’s led to a feat which became the talk of Abyssinia.
In the king’s house, Bruce sat discussing the merits of gunnery with Guebra Mascal, a kinsman of the royal house. The Abyssinian, somewhat the worse for drink, took exception to something Bruce had said.
“He said I was a Frank and a liar,” Bruce recounted, “and on my immediately rising up, he gave me a kick with his foot. I was quite blind with passion, seized him by the throat, and threw him on the ground, stout as he was.” Guebra Mascal then wounded Yagoube slightly with his knife, but the giant Scot wrested the knife from his antagonist and beat him with the handle.
Any disorder in the king’s house being punishable by death, all present felt uneasy. Steps were taken to hush up the incident, but in some manner the story reached the ears of the king. The Abyssinian, as the aggressor, was summoned to the throne.
“What sort of behaviour is this my men have adopted with strangers?” cried the king. “And with my stranger, too, and in the king’s palace.... What! am I dead? or become incapable of governing longer?”
Matters seemed about to take an ill turn. At this Bruce became alarmed, for he was as generous spirited as he was courageous. Hastening to the palace, he pleaded with the offended king for the life of Guebra Mascal, and managed to save his life; yet the man long remained his bitter enemy.
The king, however, apparently continued to ponder on the affair, for presently he sent for the tall physician.
“Yagoube,” said the king, “did you soberly say to Guebra Mascal that an end of a tallow candle, in a gun in your hand, would do more execution than an iron bullet in his?”
Said Bruce—“Will piercing the table on which your dinner is served (it was of sycamore, about three-quarters of an inch thick) at the length of this room be deemed a sufficient proof of what I advanced?”
“Ah, Yagoube,” said the king, “take care what you say.”
Now follows an odd scene. Yagoube the stranger calls for a gun, and under the eagerly curious eye of the king and some attendants loads it with half of “a farthing candle.” Slaves then bring forth three stout battle shields of toughest and thickest bull hide, and set them one behind the other. One feels the incredulity, the sense of something miraculous about to happen, even the little touch of awe.
Now comes quiet, the aiming of the gun, a crash, and a palace room full of pungent powder smoke. Yagoube’s half of a farthing candle has pierced all three shields. Then comes the turning on its side of the royal table, and another roar; the candle has passed through the table top!
The principle involved is a simple matter of physics, but such learning of the devil had not yet arrived in Abyssinia. The prestige which Yagoube’s height, composed manner, and well-born air had already won for him was enormously increased. The old Ras presently heard of it, and begged the tall physician to repeat his miracle. “Magic!” said the Abyssinian priests, yet bore their guest no ill will; the exploit was visible proof of the world by which they lived.
Bruce now brought to light the mission which had really led him to Abyssinia. He was in search of the source of the Blue Nile, the true Nile of the ancients. The other half of the mystery, the source of the White Nile, the Nile of the inundations, apparently did not stir the eighteenth century mind, and it was not till 1856, when Burton and Speke arrived at the great Nyanza lakes, that the true source of the floods became known to modern Europeans. There is interesting evidence that the Romans possessed the secret, for Nero sent “two centurions” up the river, who returned with the report that it arose amid “great lakes.”
Yagoube’s notion of “going to see a river and a bog, no part of which he could take away” seemed incomprehensible to his hosts, and they were very loath to let him go into the wild, half-hostile hinterland. Coming to some realisation that his friend’s wish to reach the ancient river was the ambition of his life, the king solemnly invested Yagoube Bruce, the Laird of Kinnaird, with the feudal overlordship of the district of Geesh in which the springs of the Nile arose.
The road between the capital and his fief was a dangerous one, for it wound through the territories of a quasi-independent native prince named Fasil, and this prince was hostile to the then rulers of Abyssinia. Would not Yagoube, their friend, remain with them in the safety of the capital? Bruce, however, rose to the challenge to his courage and resolution.
Now comes an encounter with Fasil, and the refusal of the chieftain to let the laird pass. But Yagoube wins in the end, by captivating the savage with feats of gunnery and horsemanship. Presently Fasil, completely won, brings Bruce a present of a fine, loose, muslin garment fit for an African lord, and a handsome grey horse.
“Take this horse,” said the chieftain; “do not mount it, but drive it before you, saddled and bridled as it is.”
On into the forest goes the tall laird; the savages flee before the chief’s horse, and fall down before it. On the second of November, 1770, James Bruce arrives at the Blue Nile.
He stood on the brink of a steep hill, and saw the springs of the river below, and the river flowing away as a brook that had “scarcely water to turn a mill.” Hurrying pell-mell down the steep hillside, and falling twice as he ran, Bruce “the Abyssinian” reached the welling flood. In his hand he carried a large coconut shell which he had carried with him from Arabia, and this he filled with Nile water, and tossed off to the health of King George.
“I was arrived at the source of the Nile,” he wrote, “through numberless dangers and sufferings the least of which would have overwhelmed me but for the continual goodness and protection of Providence. I was, however, but then half through my journey, and all those dangers which I had already passed awaited me again on my return. I found a despondency gaining ground fast upon me, and blasting the crown of laurels I had too rashly woven for myself.”
While in Abyssinia, Bruce observed a certain extraordinary custom. Had he forgotten to mention this custom in the volumes of travel he later published, he would have done well, for his description of the custom did more to brand him as a marvel monger than all the rest of the fantastic realities set down in his careful and accurate history of his Abyssinian years.
This custom was eating of raw flesh from the living animal.
Bruce had attended the great banquets of raw bullock meat,—exactly such banquets are served today in the halls of Abyssinia’s present ruler, Ras Tafari—but he was unfamiliar with the eating of living flesh. Chancing one day to be riding down a forest road, he encountered two peasants driving a cow ahead of them. Presently, they became hungry, and Bruce saw a strange thing. Throwing the cow down, and trussing her securely, Bruce saw the natives feel the flesh along the backbone with their fingers, select a place, cut a square flap with a sharp knife, lift up this flap of hide, and cut themselves a square of living steak. This done, they put back the flap of hide in place, and tied it down with vegetable fibres. After their meal they drove the animal on ahead of them down the road.
Bruce questioned the men, and asked questions about the matter at the capital, but was told that he had seen nothing unusual.
On his return to Gondar from his expedition to the Nile, he found the kingdom once more in feudal disorder; enemies of Ras Michael were gathering their retainers, and the wild Galla tribes had been enlisted in the fray. The roar of battle and the thunder of charging horsemen shake the forest land, corpses of traitors and suspected folk hang on all the trees, the Abyssinian city reeks of death, and at night Bruce is troubled by hyenas dragging human carrion into the courtyard of his house. The court goes to battle, and Bruce goes with it to the great African plain by Gondar. Horsemen gathering by thousands and ten thousands stir the dust of the field to a tawny cloud, and in the haze their breastplates and lances catch the sun.
How completely Biblical is this fragment from Bruce’s account of the battle! “The first person that appeared was Kesla Yasous, and the horse with him, stretching out his hand (his face being all besmeared with blood for he was wounded in his forehead) he cried as loud as he could, ‘Stand firm, the king is safe in the valley!’”
The struggle ends in the crushing defeat of Ras Michael, the wild Galla tribes pour into Gondar, and the old Ruler goes to his palace to await the end. Alone in the turmoil, but master of himself and unconfused, Yagoube, the tall Scot, makes his way to the deserted palace of the once all powerful lord of Abyssinia.
The lives of vagabonds are full of romantic scenes, but there are few which so stir the imagination as the last meeting of the Laird of Kinnaird and the able, despotic old man who held kings in the hollow of his hand. The forest city was still; the great warriors with the mystical names,—Heart of Christ, Servant of the Holy Ghost, Shield of Jesus, were dead; the people waited to hear the war cries of the victorious factions in the streets. Bruce entered the palace unchallenged by a sentry. The throne room was “hung with mirrors brought at great expense from Venice by way of Arabia and the Red Sea; they were mostly broken; their copper gilt frames had been made by some Greek filigrane workers from Cairo.” And in this empty room of the broken mirrors, magnificently clad in his robes of scarlet and heavy golden thread, and throned in the seat of power, sat old Ras Michael silently waiting the arrival of his murderers.
The next morning, Galla savages occupied the palace, and Bruce saw them grimacing into the mirrors, breaking them, and grinding them to powder. Ras Michael had been led away. None could tell Bruce of the fate of Ozoro Esther.
One feels the approaching close of a drama. His old friends dead or in exile, the court dispersed, and himself heavily in debt, Bruce presently sought permission to leave Abyssinia. The new rulers were well disposed to him, and he might have stayed on, and retained his honours, but his world had been too violently re-made, and the European in him had awakened. Poor young Balugani had died of dysentery; the long and perilous journey home would have to be made alone.
The permission to depart was given unwillingly, and only after repeated entreaty. Once more the Abyssinian forest gathers the laird and his native escort into its greenery.
Suddenly Bruce sees another cavalcade approaching through the leafy quiet, and from the dress of the riders knows them to be nobles of the land. Are they partisans of the victors riding forth to visit the new lands they have been given, or friends of the old kingdom riding to silence and exile? The tall laird suddenly reins in his horse with a start,—the cavalcade is the train of Ozoro Esther. This meeting in the forest was the last sight tall Yagoube had of his Biblical queen.
Ozoro Esther! Bruce remembered the day when she rose from beside Ayto Consu’s bed of sickness, and turned to him, superb in her dark and stately beauty. “But now,” she had said, “if I am not as good a friend to Yagoube who saved my children as I am a steady enemy to the Galla,—then say Esther is not a Christian, and I forgive you.” The great lady of the palace of the broken mirrors was on her way to Jerusalem to pray for Ras Michael.
“The troops of Begemder have taken away
