Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 2.djvu/367

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cians. It was very probably their intention to have sent to them people who would very soon have put a fatal period to the million, had not Emanuel Baradas, with a number; of Abyssinians, and officers, and plenty of all things necessary, joined the patriarch on the 16th of June 1625; while their late conductors, conscious of misbehaviour, fled without seeking their hire.

In five days they came to Fremona, where they staid till November; and, in December, arrived at Gorgora, where they were introduced to the king in his palace. Socinios ordered the patriarch to be placed on a feat equal in height to his own, on his right hand; and at that very audience, which was on the 11th of February 1626, it was settled chat the king should take an oath of submission to the see of Rome.

This useless, vain, ridiculous ceremony; was accordingly celebrated on the nth of February, with all the pageantry of a heathen festival or triumph. The palace was adorned with all the pomp and vanity that the church of Rome, and especially that part of it, the Order of the Jesuits, had solemnly abjured. The patriarch, as a mark of his superiority over the Abunas, preached a sermon in the Portuguese language upon the primacy of the chair of St Peter, full of Latin quotations, which is said to have, had a wonderful effect upon the king and Sela Christos, neither of whom understood one word either of Latin or Portuguese.

That part of the patriarch's discourse, which was applicable to Socinios's conversion, was answered by Melca Christos, governor of Samen, (himself a schismatic) in the language of Amhara, which neither the patriarch nor his re-