January
1927
I was promised the papers within a short time and indeed after a few days they were delivered into my hands. … In this important document with the national emblem in the form of a lion, the Russian traveller was called a guest of Ethiopia and all local rulers were ordered to render him full assistance, to provide him with ammunition and provisions and to allow him to cross their borders without any obstructions.
The attentions of the French envoy when presenting me to the government of Ethiopia and his personal visit to my hotel, had inspired similar attentions of other diplomatic representatives. I received an invitation to dine with the Japanese envoy, who was preparing to open Japanese stores in Addis Ababa. In his time he had been a consul to Vladivostok and therefore he considered it a necessary politeness to make the acquaintance of the representative of the country to which he had been accredited. The Greek envoy, too, wished to see me. I myself wanted to meet the English envoy, since I was interested in entering Sudan and going from there to Egypt. However, in spite of the fact that this envoy turned out to be a former student at the University of Cambridge, where I, too, had gone to study for more than a year, we did not speak a common language.
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