Word: abyssinia
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Ringed about by British, French and Italian dominated territories, the quadruple Empire of Abyssinia or Ethiopia, comprising the Kingdoms of Tigre, Amhara, Gojam and Shoa, survives as the one potent aboriginal state in all Africa. There human slavery still flourishes. There the most trifling jubilation provides an excuse for tearing out the entrails of a living cow, that they may be gorged raw by old and young, washed down with brimming cups of mese (mead) or bousa (beer). A yard- wide French-operated railway climbs from French Jibuti on the Gulf of Aden 500 miles inland to Addis Ababa...
...innumerable rases (princes), subservant to the Empress. The term "Abyssinian," corrupted from the Arabic Habesh ("mixed," "mongrel") well describes this people who shade in different parts of the Empire from white through reddish-brown to ebony, and from Christianity to Mohammedanism. To the curious traveler's eye, Abyssinia presents a rural scene, picturesquely set off by civic stenches. Camels jog up to French Somaliland with gum and ostrich feathers which are bartered there for cheap Occidental jewelry and clothing or for rock salt, lumps of which pass current as money in the interior, as do cartridges. The Empress...
During the war the dissolute youthful Emperor Lij Yaser committed the disastrous dual stupidities of embracing the Islamic faith and the Germano-Turkish cause. Vexed, a majority of the feudal chieftains of Abyssinia, stout Christians according to their somewhat pagan lights, supported a successful pro-Christian, pro-Ally revolution. Prince Taffari, an able statesman but by lineage a mere great nephew of the revered late Emperor Menelik, was prudently installed as Regent for the Empress Zanditu, a daughter of the Emperor Menelik, and proclaimed heir to the Throne by the revolutionary feudal lords...
Human slavery exists today in Abyssinia, Tibet, Afghanistan, the Hejaz, Morocco, Tripoli, the Libyan Desert, Rio de Oro, Liberia, China, Arabia, Egypt, the Sudan, Eritrea, French, British and Italian Somaliland, Angola and Mozambique, in most independent Mohammedan States, and in Nepal and the Philippines...
Here is a novel-reader's novel, splashed with color, with consummate skill laid on. It begins in Abyssinia in afternoons hibiscus-red, rose-pink, iris-purple; in twilights of sapphire-matrix, gold lacquer, saffron fire, blood-scarlet; in sepia shadows of moonlight and, far and far away, star-spangled indigo of the lower sky. There, in a barbaric dawn, John Masterson, a normal middle-aged Englishman, ponders the news that he is heir to a fortune. Only a prayer-got sense of duty persuades him to accept it. Returning to London, he finds his fortune times and times bigger...