Ethiopian incident
Sir: In Sandy Gall's article (September 30) — 'Congo and Uganda' — he refers to an incident at the Ethiopian court when Burton watched the Emperor shoot one of his pages.
He must have been thinking of John Hanning Speke, who witnessed something very similar at the court of King Mutesa of Buganda, only a few miles from where Mr Gall was recently imprisoned. The relevant extract from Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile reads as follows: "The king now loaded one of the carbines I had given him with his own hands, and giving it fullcock to a page, told him to go out and shoot a man in the outer court; which was no sooner accomplished than the little urchin returned to announce his success, with a look of glee such as one would see in the face of a boy who had robbed a bird's nest, caught a trout, or done any other boyish trick. The king said to him, 'And did you do it well?" Oh yes, capitally.' He spoke the truth, no doubt, for he dared not have trifled with the king; but the affair created hardly any interest."
Burton never met the Emperor of Ethiopia, and the only time he was in that part of the world — during his 1855 trip to Harar — he was in disguise and Ethiopia could hardly be said to have had an emperor. Oliver Carruthers 37 Acacia Road, London NW8
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