Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 2.djvu/96

80 him, his principal friend Meherata Christos, to be loaded with irons, and banished to the top of a mountain; and it is hard to say where this punishment would have ended, had not the monks of Debra Kosso and Debra Libanos, and all those of the desert, (who thought themselves in some measure accomplices with his mother), by exhortations, pretended prophecies, dreams and visions, convinced the king, that Providence had decreed unalterably, that none but his son, Bæda Mariam, should succeed him. To this ordinance the old king bowed, as it gave him a prospect of the long continuance of his family on the throne of Abyssinia.

was no sooner dead, than his son, Bæda Mariam, who succeeded him, began to apply himself seriously to the affairs of government. From the reign of Judith, (in the tenth century), when so many of the princes of the royal family were massacred, the custom of sending the royal children to confinement on the top of a mountain had been discontinued. These children all lived at home with their respective fathers and mothers, like private persons; and the kings seemed to connive at abolishing their former practice, for no mountain had been yet chosen as a substitute to the unfortunate Damo. The disagreement between Zara Jacob and his queen, with the cause of it, and the prince's frankness and resolution, seemed to point out the necessity of reviving the salutary severity of the ancient laws. Bæda Mariam gave orders, therefore, to arrest all his brethren, and send them prisoners for life to the high mountain of Geshen, on the confines of Amhara and Begemder, which ever after continued the state-prison for the royal children, till a