It has a very modern ring about it - a Third World leader takes several foreigners hostage, long negotiations lead nowhere, face-to-face diplomacy goes wrong and a final, thoroughly planned assault liberates the hostages and overthrows the despot, to the general relief of his people. But the defeat of the Abyssinian Emperor Theodore by a British military force at Magdala in the mountainous heart of what is now Ethiopia in fact took place back in 1868.

Ironically, Theodore was probably always an Anglophile at heart. When, as a successful bandit chief, he fought his way to the imperial throne in 1855 he invited Christian missionaries to Abyssinia. He got on well with Walter Plowden, his country's first British consul. When Plowden was killed in a local skirmish Theodore so ruthlessly punished his murderers that Queen Victoria rewarded the Emperor with a pair of inscribed pistols.

A devout Orthodox Christian himself, Theodore could never understand how Christian Britain and Christian France could ally with Muslim Turkey in the Crimean war against Christian Russia. Abyssinia was itself virtually ringed by Islamic lands and Theodore expected western help.

However, a letter to Queen Victoria suggesting an exchange of embassies went unanswered for over three years. This slight caused Theodore to imprison Plowden's replacement, the unpopular Consul Charles Cameron, and some 60 missionaries and their servants, many of them Swiss and German.

The British Resident in Aden, hearing of this, sent a three-man delegation to plead for their release. The three were themselves incarcerated.

After months of desultory wrangling, British Prime Minister Earl Derby ordered a military snatch expedition. This was mounted from India and commanded by Sir Robert Napier. Meticulously organised, it transported 12,000 men, British and Indian, 8,000 ancillaries and 44 elephants from Bombay to the Red Sea.

As well as missionaries, Theodore had invited gunfounders and artillery experts to build up an arsenal of cannons and mortars. Then he began to move his entire camp, painfully slowly, to a well-nigh impregnable mountain fastness at Magdala. At the same time Napier began his 720 kilometre march south through the mountains. Napier reached Magdala on Good Friday, 1868. Here he found Theodore, with 55,000 soldiers and camp followers and 20 mortars, including a seven-ton monster he called Sebastopol, installed on three flat-topped mesas.

Fatally for Theodore's cause, some 4,000 of these soldiers, mounted on ponies and mules, plunged impulsively down to the plain below and engaged Napier's infantry, the 4th Foot (King's Own Royal Regiment). The Royals were armed with the latest Snider rifles and the carnage was terrible. Some 700 Abyssinians were mown down and 1,500 wounded. The British suffered 20 wounded, of whom two died.

Theodore released some hostages but Napier decided to order an assault on the Emperor's lofty bolthole to free the rest. This was successfully achieved, against dwindling opposition, by the 33rd Foot (Duke of Wellington's Regiment) on Easter Monday. As the first infantrymen clambered over the defensive wall on the plateau's rim they heard a shot. Theodore had killed himself - with one of the pistols ealier given to him by Victoria.

Napier's men took care of the Emperor's widow and young son, spiked the guns, set Magdala afire and marched away with all the hostages. Sebastopol was immovable and virtually indestructible and the vast mortar remains up there to this day, almost the only visible vestige of this Victorian campaign.

My old friend Colonel John Blashford-Snell knew of my lifelong attraction to Ethiopia and how, despite six or seven visitsthere, I had never been to Magdala. It was good news when, in 1995, the Ethiopian Tourist Commission asked him to have a close look at the area of the battlefield and me to write a guide to it. The following year we went there with surveyors, military historians with metal detectors, ornithologists, doctors - and two descendants of the military hero, Field Marshal Lord Napier of Magdala.

The battle site is a hard place to reach: 80 kilometres north-west of Dese, the capital of Welo province. From the town of Tenta it is a 22 kilometre day-long mule ride. No facilities are found in the villages which scatter the tableland. Sebastopol lies there, having never fired a shot, and we discovered another smaller mortar at the bottom of a cliff. Few traces remain of the walls and gates which protected Magdala nor of the vast township which must have existed there before 1868.

Theodore was an unpredictable, volatile tyrant and his baleful spirit still seems to hang over the place. For people with an interest in the past it exerts a strong pull.

An Honorary Foreign Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, Richard Snailham has visited Ethiopia on numerous occasions. He is the author of four books and has had articles published in several publications, including the Weekend Telegraph and The Observer.

Published in Travel Africa Edition Eight: Summer 1999 Text is subject to Worldwide Copyright (c)