From tHe "Norta-Cuma Dairy Nev or OCTOBER 4, 1877
Only those to whom: the natives of every land on the far side of this-Red-Seit are: mately "blacks" will fail to recognize in King John of Ethopia, whose game of ambition our Abyssinian Expedition helped to play, a striking and picturesque personage. As Kassa; Prince of Tigre, claiming equal descent with Theodorus from King Solomon, he figured largely in the Blue-books which formed an exceedingly interesting but little read history of the events which preceded the expedition; and that, impression is deepened by the account given by Mr. de Casson, who, in company with the late General Kirkham, visited King John at his camp, near Gendar, the ancient capital of Abyssinia, in 1873, of the King and his surroundings. The country, its people, their ways, and their faith, are not like any of the African types in other portions of the continent, and yet they are not "Oriental," as we loosely, but always with the notion of Mahomm attaching to it, employ that word. They remind us of the Old Testament Scriptures; the whole picture is like that of the tribes and the feuds which we find in that book of Genesis and the books of the Kings, these four or five millions of warlike people, shut in to their mysterfo country by three great mountain ranges, a like Israelites with Christianity tacked on to them without any solution of continuity. Long before the King is reached, the traveller hears tales of him—his strength, his wisdom, and his prowess in war. At Axum, the former capital of igre, he is shown the great monolith, seventy feet high and told how Kassa used to cast his heavy spear over it—a great feat to do with an ordinary lance—and still practises this exercise when he comes to Axum.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.