noble valley, gradually eating its way down until its bed attained its present enormous depth. It was this ravine which had been the cause of the immense detour we have had to make. Forty miles back, at Santarai, we were said to be as close to Magdala as we were when we stood prepared to descend into the Djedda. But the perpendicular walls barred our progress, and we have marched along nearly parallel to its course until we have reached the one spot where a break in its iron walls allow of our descent. By this route Theodore marched, and when we saw the road he had made for us, we felt for the first time since our arrival really grateful to the Abyssinian tyrant. It is really a wonderful road, almost as good as could have been made by our own engineers; the only difference being that they would have thrown a layer of earth over the loose stones to bind them together, and to afford a firm and level surface. The road is really constructed with great engineering skill. Blasting-tools have been freely used wherever the rock required it. Every wind and turn, every shoulder and slope, has been taken advantage of in order to make zigzags, and render the descent more gradual. It is true that in places it is fearfully steep—an incline of one and a quarter to one—which, to convey the idea more popularly, is about the slope of the bank of a railway-cutting. The leaving the road in its present state, with loose stones, may have been done with an object, for upon a solid road of this angle it would have been next to impossible to have kept heavy cannon on wheels from running down, whereas upon a very loose and heavy road the matter was comparatively easy. The length of the descent is four miles and a half, that of the ascent three miles and a half. Two miles and a half of the former, and a mile and a half of the latter, are across and partially along the shoulders, where the slope was very slight. In consequence, it may be said that actually three thousand feet of depth were on either side attained in two miles, which would give an average incline of one in three. The road is from twenty to thirty feet in width; generally it is made through basalt, which, in cooling, had crystallised, so that its surface resembles a mosaic pavement, and this readily breaks up. Parts, however, are cut through a hard stone, and portions through a conglomerate, which must have tried to the utmost the tools and patience of Theodore’s army. How he achieved the task with the means at his disposal I am at a loss to understand; and the road has certainly raised Theodore very many degrees in the estimation of our men. Upon every level space in the camping-ground of his army, there are their fireplaces, and innumerable little bowers of five feet high and little more in diameter, in which his troops curled themselves up when their day’s work was over. It was a long and very weary descent. Going down a steep place is comparatively easy when one carries no load; but when one