So: every morning, the Emperor awoke and was dressed, and his first public action was to feed a ferocious menagerie of predatory cats in the sequential and nervous company of his three chief intelligencers. Each of these ministers lived in terror of the day when his collected information should be so incomplete as to cast suspicion upon himself, which would in the instant result in a fall that might terminate in a cell—or indeed might not terminate at all, but continue to the gullet of one of the lions. They therefore cultivated agents not only in one another’s camps and in the countless cliques and parties that teemed in Addis Ababa, but also in every household and family, however innocent. Fathers were constrained to keep watch upon their children’s opinions, mothers reported on their husbands, teenagers upon their friends and students upon their teachers. Teachers, often trained overseas and recruited by the agencies of other nations, were doubled by the Emperor’s espiocrats and then tripled by Langley’s, Moscow’s or London’s, and betrayed all of the above for whatever local plot had captured their hearts. There was no place in the city where someone was not watching, and that someone was watched in turn, and all this watching flowed upwards from the streets to the grand houses to the Imperial Person himself.