Word: tsahai
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Until 1935 there was little to trouble a knobbly-kneed schoolgirl, Tsahai, about her father's rambling stone house or his loose-woven kingdom in Ethiopia. Going back home from school in Switzerland or France, she noticed unhappily the filth and disease which flourished on the ignorance of her father's people. And there was her father's household law, confining her to hidden rooms of the palace. But there were compensations...
Deepest of Tsahai's home contentments was the escape from the rigid isolation of the pink-skinned world: from teachers who taught her Christian precepts, but professed no sisterly love; from girls who smiled at her with their thin buttonhole lips, as across a chasm; from visitors whose English, French or German phrases she understood, but whose meanings she could only ponder. Because her skin was brown and because she was royalty, there had never been any expansion in the invisible walls which closed around her in the pink-skinned world...
Fearing air raids on the exposed royal palace, plump Empress Menen, her 14-year-old daughter Princess Tsahai and Prince Makonnen, 11, climbed into a special train and disappeared in the direction of French Somaliland. All that could be learned in Addis Ababa was that they were bound for a secret hideaway near the Danakil Desert...