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‘A STRANGE NEW FISH EMITS A BLINDING GREEN LIGHT’, the article in National Geographic announced Off the coast of Bermuda, an intrepid correspondent curled up inside a Bathysphere, a round steel chamber with a porthole, had been lowered by rope into depths where no man had gone before His deep sea observations, appearing in the June 1931 issue, were followed by an account of another far-flung curiosity: the coronation of an African king In November of the previous year, Ras Tafari Makonnen had been crowned His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Kings, Elect of God, and Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah in a spectacular weeklong celebration in Addis Ababa In sixty-eight pages of text and colour photography, the magazine described how world leaders and monarchs, film crews, and chieftains in prickly lion-mane headdresses had converged from all directions onto the landlocked Christian kingdom, the last uncolonised territory in Africa From Great Britain came the Duke of Gloucester, King George V’s son, bearing a traditional English coronation cake and a trunk full of ancient manuscripts once stolen from the country From Italy came the Prince of Udine with the gift of an airplane; from America, President Hoover’s emissary came laden with an electric refrigerator, five hundred rose bushes, and a complete bound set of National Geographic Cover of ‘National Geographic’, June 1931                     ‘The studded doors of the Holy of Holies open ponderously,’ narrated Addison E Southard, the United States Consul General in Ethiopia, who was reporting on the ceremony for the magazine The Conquering Lion and His Empress entered the Throne Room at dawn, suffused with a golden-red light Forty-nine bishops in groups of seven had been reciting the Psalms for seven days and seven nights without ceasing, stationed in the seven corners of the Cathedral Ras Tafari, who traces his lineage back to the union of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba—in the Ethiopian version of the story, they sired a child—was anointed with seven