I returned to the Moors town, leaving Aylo with the queen. In the afternoon I heard Welleta Selassé was dead; and at night died her father, Welled Hawaryat. The contagion from Masuah and Adowa had spread itself all over Gondar. Ozoro Ayabdar, daughter of Ozoro Altash, was now sick, and a violent fever had fallen upon Koscam. The next morning Aylo came to me and told me, the faith in the saint who did not eat or drink for twenty years was perfectly abandoned since Welled Hawaryat’s death: That it was the desire of the queen, and Ozoro Esther, that I should transport myself to Koscam to the Iteghé’s palace, where all their children and grandchildren, by the different men the queen’s daughters had married, were under her care. I told him, “I had some difficulty to obey them, from the positive orders I had received from Petros to stay in the Moors town with Hagi Saleh till the Ras should arrive; that Koscam was full of priests, and Abba Salama there every day; notwithstanding which, if Petros and he so advised me, I would certainly go to do any possible service to the Iteghé, or Ozoro Esther.” He desired half an hour’s absence before he gave me an answer, but did not return till about three hours afterwards, and, without alighting, cried out at some distance, “Aya, come, you must go immediately.” “I told him, that new and clean clothes in the Gondar fashion had been procured for me by Petros, and that I wished they might be sent to his house, where I would put them on, and then go to Koscam, with a certainty that I carried no infection with me, for I had attended a number of Moorish children, while at Hagi Saleh’s house, most of whom happily went on doing well, but that there was no doubt there would be infection in my clothes.” He praised me up to the skies for this precaution, and the whole was executed in the manner proposed. My hair was cut round, curled, and perfumed, in the Amharic fashion, and I was thenceforward, in all outward appearance, a perfect Abyssinian. My first advice, when arrived at Koscam, was, that Ozoro Esther, and her son by Mariam Barea, and a son by Ras Michael, should remove from the palace, and take up their lodging in a house formerly belonging to her uncle Basha Eusebius, and give the part of the family that were yet well a chance of escaping the disease. Her young son by Mariam Barea, however, complaining, the Iteghè would not suffer him to remove, and the resolution was taken to abide the issue all in the palace together.