"I now," says Bruce, "for the first time since my arrival at Abyssinia, abandoned myself to joy;" but his constitution was too much weakened to bear this excitement, and accordingly, the following day, when he went home to Emfras, he was attacked by his old and relentless enemy the Bengazi ague. For some time he was unable to leave the house, and was even confined to his bed: his journal barely mentions this illness, but his handwriting during this period shows very affectingly the weak and exhausted state of his frame. The rebel Fasil had no sooner heard of Ras Michael's return to Gondar than he marched against the Agows. A bloody battle was fought at one of their principal settlements, in which Fasil proved victorious. A council was forthwith held, in which Ras Michael declared that, although the rainy season was at hand, the king's forces should immediately take the field. Gusho and Powussen having sworn to Michael that they would never return without Fasil's head, decamped next morning, but with the secret determination to arrange a conspiracy against the ras. While preparations for the war were making, the iteghe, or queen-mother, seeing the declining state of Bruce's health, endeavoured to dissuade him from the undertaking which was apparently always uppermost in his thoughts. "See! see!" said the royal moralist, "how every day of our life furnishes us with proofs of the perverseness and contradiction of human nature: you are come from Jerusalem, through vile Turkish governments, and hot, unwholesome climates, to see a river and a bog, no part of which you can carry away, were it ever so valuable--of which you have in your own country a thousand larger, better, and cleaner; and you even take it ill when I discourage you from the pursuit of this fancy, in which you are likely to perish, without your friends at home ever hearing when or where the accident happened. While I, on the other hand, the mother of kings, who have sat upon the throne of this country more than thirty years, have for _my_ only wish, night and day, that, after giving up everything in the world, I could be conveyed to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and beg alms for my subsistence all my life after, if I could only be buried at last in the street within sight of the gate of that temple where our blessed Saviour once lay!" It may here be observed, that this feeling still exists very generally and strongly throughout Abyssinia.