Ethiopia: A Wing on the Palace

In an age of rockets and revolution, monarchy rarely receives its due. Not so last week in the mountainous realm of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia. The Lion of Judah knows how to roll out a red carpet —and indeed when Queen Elizabeth II's bellowing VC-IO jetliner appeared over Addis Ababa last week, an Ethiopian army truck was still nudging its way through the airport crowd with yards and yards of the stuff.

Potholes Paved. There was only one word for all the preparations for Elizabeth's eight-day visit: imperial. Haile Selassie knew that it was the Queen's first call in East Africa since her father, King George VI, died in 1952 while Elizabeth was visiting Kenya's Royal Aberdare Game Preserve. As if to ease the memory of that painful experience, the Emperor had paved the pot-holed road from the capital to the British embassy compound on the outskirts of Addis, set 600 laborers to work planting trees and laying acres of sod to tidy up the city's new, U.S.-financed, $2,500,000 Municipal Center.

The Emperor added an entire wing to his splendiferous Jubilee Palace so that Elizabeth and her entourage of 31 could be properly housed. Meanwhile, fire engines roared through town hanging royal portraits from every lamppost. The Emperor's lions, which usually roam the palace grounds unattended, were hosed down, dusted with flea powder, and chained tight to avoid embarrassment.

Precarious Trail. The tour itself went off like African clockwork. Delays were commonplace. Vast crowds surged around Elizabeth and Prince Philip as they were whirled through Addis in the Emperor's Rolls-Royce, which broke down only once. At one point they transferred to the silken cab of a green and scarlet imperial coach pulled by a team of six Lippizaner horses. They dined on lamb, watt (Ethiopia's excellent meat and vegetable stew), tedj—a honey-based mead—and Taitinger champagne. The imperial touch was also present when Elizabeth journeyed over the dusty plain to Asmara, where she was greeted by dancing spearsmen and was delightfully dive-bombed by an Ethiopian army plane. The bomb load was flower petals.

Elizabeth visited the Wingate School, named for Britain's mystical guerrilla leader Major General Orde Wingate, whose troops had liberated Ethiopia from Italian occupation in 1941 and permitted Haile Selassie to return home from his London exile. The Queen also visited Gondar and hiked a mile up a precarious mountain trail to look out over Tisisat Falls, a breathtaking scene near the source of the Blue Nile. Less than a century ago, a 32,000-man British force under Sir Robert Napier had crossed the same kind of trails (along with some 30,000 beasts of burden, including 45 elephants) to defeat Haile Selassie's famous predecessor, Emperor Theodore. Quite naturally, none of that imperial adventuring was recalled last week.