At Sallal Hoola, another hovel had been provided by the royal bounty, smaller in dimensions, more dark, dirty, and dismal, and infinitely better garrisoned with vermin than the abode wherein the last fortnight had been passed. Environed by miry swamps and stagnant pools, it presented an appearance the most gloomy and wretched, whilst the materials for comfort were, as usual, denied by the officious functionaries, who had taken care to deposit the baggage most needed in quarters of the village where, at so late an hour, free access was impossible. The gloomy recesses of the veranda were crowded with female slaves, occupied in the various processes of preparing bread, which the population had been called upon to supply in large quantities to the palace against the approaching arrival of the foreigners. In one corner, two old women who alternately plied their pestles to a most monotonous ditty were pounding grain in a wooden mortar. In another a group of buxom lasses were rocking themselves to and fro over mills fashioned like the high-heeled slipper of the days of good Queen Bess, upon the inclined surface of which they contrived, with a stone and great personal labour, to convert the grain into a form something resembling flour. It trickled in a scanty stream into a vessel placed below the depressed plane for its reception, and was presently wrought into thick cakes, full a foot and a half in diameter. These were merely shown to the fire, and a crude substance was thus produced, which by a well-fed Indian elephant would certainly have been rejected with a severe admonition to his keeper. In this dreary and soul-depressing spot, destitute of beds and not overburdened with food, were experienced the very opposite of the delights of the Salt Lake--cold, damp, and wet in perfection; but the glad prospect of an interview with His Majesty on the morrow buoyed up the spirits of all, and misery was disregarded. Ayto Katama had proceeded in advance to Machal-wans to seek at the royal hands permission to fire a salute of twenty-one guns on the British Embassy reaching the royal lodge--a point previously urged, but without success. It had already been brought to the King's notice that the foreigners partook of food which had been prepared by Mohammadans--a proceeding which in Shoa is reckoned equivalent to a renunciation of Christianity. Ideas the most extravagant were, moreover, in circulation relative to the powers of the ordnance imported, the mere report of which was believed sufficient to set fire to the earth, to shiver rocks, and dismantle mountain fastnesses. Men were said to have arrived with "copper legs," whose duty it was to serve these tremendous and terrible engines; and in alarm for the safety of his palace, capital, and treasures, the suspicious monarch still peremptorily insisted upon withholding the desired licence, until he should have beheld the battery "with his own eyes." Volume One, Chapter XLV. PRESENTATION AT COURT.