Excerpt from My Abyssinian Journey: A Journey Through Abyssinia From the Red Sea to Nairobi in in the Days of Emperor Menelik Abyssinia, Kenya's mysterious, self-contained, and little known neighbour, had always possessed a fascination for me, and I had long hoped that some day the opportunity would come to explore the country far to the north of my earlier experiences in Africa. When at length I made up my mind to journey into the unknown, the outlook was by no means good. I knew that with the limited funds at my disposal it was a gamble with fate, in which the penalty, if I failed, was certain bankruptcy. No one had a good word for my project. General opinion in Nairobi was dead against me. I was told that there was little chance of my getting to the border, six hundred miles away, across uninhabited and waterless wastes, or through tribes of hostile Natives, and that, should I succeed in my forlorn hope: it was most unlikely that the Abyssinians would permit me to cross their frontier. Some useful help came from one or two sources. Prince de Chimay, a Belgian nobleman who was touring East Africa at the time, hearing of my proposed venture, asked if he might accompany me and offered his influence with the authorities. As it turned out, he was unable to come, but his co-operation at a critical time encouraged me, and is worthy of acknowledgment here. A still more important factor was the advice and experience of Mr. W. N. (later Sir Northrup) McMillan, a well-known settler in Kenya Colony, who had travelled via Egypt and the Sudan into Abyssinia, and was a personal friend of the Emperor Menelik. A special permit from this august and dusky potentate was necessary to enter Abyssinia, and when a telegram arrived from Addis Ababa, its capital, saying, "Emperor has given leave for Boyes and companion trading expedition," I knew this gentleman's goodwill had translated itself into action. The companion referred to was the Prince de Chimay, who was staying with Mr. McMillan at the time. However, I abandoned my plan of starting north overland from Nairobi - a change in my original programme which I never regretted - and decided to enter Menelik's country by sea via Mombasa and Jibouti. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.