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Until 1935 the country was known mainly to foreign savants as a "museum of peoples" who remarkably preserve the habits and customs of their various antiquities. It was known, incorrectly, to hasty readers of a popular book, as the Hell-Hole of Creation. Actually the high plateau on which Addis Ababa stands and which comprises about half the Empire is suited in climate to the taste of an ordinary U. S. citizen although the altitude is trying. Rushing rivers criss-cross the plateau with deep gorges. Transportation of fantastic difficulty is enhanced by unimaginable mud in the rainy season, but the obstacles of Nature on the plateau are in every sense susceptible of being overcome.
In the desert regions, blazing and scorching some 8,000 ft. below the plateau toward the sea, are the Hell-Holes of Creation, inhabited by tribes of extraordinary hardihood and savagery. Explorers report that "some of these peoples have never heard of Haile Selassie." It is they who today with complete impartiality harry, snipe at and loot any small detachment of soldiers, be they Ethiopian or Italian.
The peoples of Ethiopia are very old but the Empire is very young. When Chief (Continued on p. 16) Justice Charles Evans Hughes was a youth of 18 there was properly speaking no Ethiopian Empire and the future Emperor Menelik ruled, as King of Shoa, the vicinity of Lake Tana, Aduwa, Aksum and Dessye. Three-quarters of the present Empire, including Harar and Ualual, he did not rule. Haile Selassie was born 44 years ago at Harar and in 1930 succeeded his cousin Menelik's daughter, Empress Zauditu, on the Throne.
The legend that Ethiopia's Imperial Family is descended from the seduction by King Solomon of Sheba's Virgin Queen is pure myth. Last month Oxford's University Press exploded it anew with A History of Abyssinia ($2.25) in which the adoption of this legend by Coptic priests to give Ethiopia's present dynasty a savor of ancient lineage and of Biblical if not Divine authority is traced with British scholarship.
Intimate Glimpse— Although good and wise, Haile Selassie, as recently pointed out by Dr. Sassard, his French physician of many years, has never been popular among his turbulent subjects. Every conversation the physician has had with his Imperial patient, writes Dr. Sassard, "gave me further reason to admire and respect this Sovereign, who is so different from those who surround him and from his own people, and who is so superior to them. ... In his motionless face only his eyes seem alive—brilliant, elongated, extremely expressive eyes. They bespeak boredom as well as polite indifference, cold irony, or even anger. The courtiers know these different expressions well and retire suddenly when the monarch's glance becomes indifferent, then hard. On the other hand, especially when he is dealing with Europeans, his eyes know how to be soft, caressing, affable—and even sincere."