Note 69 — Chapter VIII

Stern gave the following interesting account of the monarch de jure:—“Whilst at Gondar we visited various personages of rank and dignity; amongst others Atzee Johannes, the Shadow King, and according to Abyssinian annals, the legitimate successor to the throne and lineal descendant of Solomon by the Queen of Sheba’s son. He was seated on an alga in a dirty little room, with a monk’s skull-cap on his head, reading the Psalms. He asked me many questions on geography, and unlike the majority of Abyssinian savants did not believe that beyond Jerusalem the sun never shone, and that only serpents and other venomous reptiles occupied the untenanted land. I was told that whenever Atzee Johannes visits King Theodore, the latter stands before him, as an acknowledgment of his title to a crown which he could not defend. He receives an annual pension from the Royal Treasury” (“Wanderings among the Falashes in Abyssinia,” pp. 212, 213).