"
The prison guards were the greatest ruffians I have ever seen. They
had been for so many years in contact with misery in its worst shape
that the last spark of human feeling had died out in their callous
hearts. Instead of showing compassion or pity for their prisoners,
many of them innocent victims of a low treachery, they added to
their misery by the harshness and cruelty of their conduct. Had a
chief received at last a small sum of money from his distant province,
he was soon made aware that he must satisfy the greed of his rapacious
gaolers. But that was nothing compared to the moral tortures they
inflicted on their prisoners. Many of them had been for years
confined on the amba, and had brought their families to reside near
them. Woe to the woman who would not listen to the solicitations
of these infamous wretches; threatened and even beaten, few indeed
of the sorrowful wives and daughters held out; others willingly met
advances; and when the chief, the man of rank, or the wealthy
merchant, left his day house, he knew that his wife would immediately
receive her chosen lover, or, what was still more heartrending, a
man she despised but feared.
Such was the daily life of those whose fault was to have given ear
to the fair words of Theodore, an error that weighed heavier upon
them than a crime. But when the Emperor, on his way, stopped a few
days at Magdala, what anxiety, what anguish, reigned in that accursed
place! No day house, no hours spent with the family or the friend,
no food hardly; the prisoners must remain in the night houses, as
the Emperor at any moment might send for some one of them to set
him at liberty, or, more likely, to put an end to his miserable
existence.
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