An iron bridge over the Awash had been built at the present location of Awash by Emperor Menelik II's favorite, Alfred Ilg, around 1890; this bridge replaced an earlier wooden one. The construction had to face the great difficulty of transporting the girders from Djibouti, but once the material had arrived, the structure had been finished in ten days; however Emperor Menelik had used for other purposes the cement imported from Europe to build the bridge with. When Count Gleichen encountered the bridge in 1897, during his mission to Emperor Menelik, he found "the bridge would be too weak to stand anything but ordinary pack-animal traffic. For nine months in the year it is blocked at each end by a broad abattis of thorn-bush, - to prevent people from using it when the river is fordable, - but during the rains it is left open."