The Chains of Heaven
PHILIP MARSDEN
AN ETHIOPIAN ROMANCE

For my parents,with love and gratitude

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

A Short History of Ethiopia

1

2

3

4

5

The Glorious Victories of Amda Seyon

6

7

8

The Story of Tekla Haymanot’s Leg

9

10

11

The Lesson of the Ant-Lion

12

13

14

15

The Ethiopian Book of the Dead

16

17

Emperor Menelik Learns to Drive

18

19

20

21

22

The Crown of King Kaleb

Epilogue

GLOSSARY

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

A Short History of Ethiopia

Aksumawi was the son of Ethiopis and the great-grandson of Noah. He established the kingdom of Aksum which is itself the ancestor of modern Ethiopia. Unfortunately a snake took power in Aksum and ruled for four hundred years. The snake was 170 cubits in length, had teeth a whole cubit long, and the people of Aksum had constantly to supply it with milk and virgins. One day a stranger came and slaughtered the snake. The stranger was called Angabo and he in turn became ruler of Aksum.

Angabo married the Queen of Sheba, and after he died she left the city of Aksum with 797 camels to visit Solomon in Jerusalem. There, with Solomonic guile, he seduced her. Back in Aksum she gave birth to a boy named Menelik, and when he came of age he journeyed to Jerusalem to see his father. When he left Jerusalem he had the Ark of the Covenant. With the Ark the blessing of the Lord was transferred from Jerusalem to Aksum, from the people of Israel to the people of Ethiopia. Menelik was the first of Ethiopia’s line of Solomonic rulers.

The land around Aksum was very fertile and it came to be known among the world’s peoples as a place of wondrous plenty. Every rock on its open plains was a loaf of bread. Once for eight days showers of gold and pearls and silver fell on its hills and filled the rivers with riches. Palaces and temples swelled the bounds of the city. The graves of its kings were marked by standing stones and with each passing king the stones grew higher until they scraped the underside of the sky.

In 1974, Ethiopia was still ruled by the 225th member of the Solomonic line. Emperor Haile Selassie was then an old man. On the morning of 12 September, Ethiopian New Year, some junior officers of the Derg came to his palace, read out a deposition order and took him away in the back of a Volkswagen.

Derg means ‘committee’ in Amharic. It was established as a small concession to the armed forces and ended up taking over the whole country. With the emperor gone, the Derg ruled from his palace. In the cellar below the throne room, they imprisoned about 150 men. They were members of the emperor’s family, his generals, his government ministers and senior clerics. They were kept there for eight years. When the Derg met in the throne room, the prisoners below could look up from their dungeon and through gaps in the floorboards see the feet of the new rulers pacing back and forth.

1

When I was twenty-one, I went to Ethiopia for the first time. I had never been outside Europe, had never in fact been any further south or east than the top of Italy. Ethiopia amazed me. It shocked me, revolted me, awed and terrified me. It reawakened in me the childlike sense that the world was a vast, diverse and wonderful place—a sense that has remained ever since.

It was the early 1980s, and it was the rainy season. Billows of cloud half-covered the Entoto hills. From the airport the road entered Revolution Square beneath a triumphal arch which read, in English and Amharic: LONG LIVE PROLETAR-IAN INTERNATIONALISM! Marx, Lenin and Engels gazed out from a giant hoarding beside it, and I crossed beneath them. In a small Soviet-style block beyond the square, I reached the rain-streaked, plate-glass front of Wonderland Tours.

The door squeaked open on a darkened office. Sun-faded tourist posters were taped to the wall. A man in a goatskin chair stirred from his sleep, leapt up, gripped my hand in both of his, and grinned—as if the sight of a stranger in Wonderland Tours was itself a great joke.

Teklu was a Tigrayan. I had never come across anyone quite like him. He was no older than me but had the advantage of not having just spent his adolescence in a petulant daze. From the age of fourteen he had fought for the Tigrayan rebels. He had lived in caves, conducted night assaults, sprung ambushes. He had been captured, tortured and escaped. He then walked to Addis where another Tigrayan, Dr Mengesha, gave him a job and anonymity. Dr Mengesha owned Wonderland Tours. He was also an enthusiast, a lovely, grinning man in a dark suit who came jogging down the stairs from his office to greet me. ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘Congratulations for coming to Ethiopia!’ He sent me off with Teklu to find a hotel.

That afternoon in a flophouse near Giorgis cathedral Teklu and I lay on the twin beds and, while rain fell like gravel on the corrugated iron roof, I let him conjure up another country. He spoke of rock-cut churches among fairytale peaks, monasteries accessible only by rope or chain, treasures hidden in caves of gold and holy men who would vanish even as you talked to them. He spoke of his native Tigray and his own local town of Aksum where miracles happened every day and a caste of mute monks guarded the true Ark of the Covenant.

‘If you try and get close,’ he laughed, ‘they kill you!’

‘Can we go to Tigray?’ I asked.

He politely shook his head.

The few expats in Addis were less forgiving: ‘You’re a damned idiot, boy—you come here expecting a nice little holiday. This country is a living hell!’

Over the coming days, it became obvious even to me. Addis Ababa was paralysed with fear. Not all the figures lying on the edge of the road were sleeping. The Red Terror, when thousands of counter-revolutionaries were shot, was over—but the disappearances and killings continued. Rumours of patrols swept through the shanty like the afternoon rains sending everyone scurrying for shelter. And over it all presided the man who gazed down from the wall of every office—Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam.

For days, Teklu and I did the rounds of ministries trying to get permission to travel. We met only the mumbles and head-shakes of frightened officials. After a week, I decided to cut my losses and return home. I went back to Wonderland Tours. Dr Mengesha was there. He heard out my story and saw my frustration.

‘Ethiopia is a wonderful country, you know.’

I shrugged. I was in no mood to agree.

He tapped a pencil on his desk and said, ‘Come back this afternoon at four.’

I still don’t know what he did, nor why he chose to stick his neck out for a useless and ignorant farenj. But later that day he handed me an envelope and again said: ‘Congratulations!’ In it were all the right papers with all the right stamps. He spread out a map and explained our route. He took Teklu and me to the store and handed us a tent, a stove—and lifejackets. He was sending us to Lake Tana. Teklu grinned at me and winked. In that cowed city, Mengesha and Teklu seemed the only people who were truly alive.

So we did go north. We spent days on the lake, walking its bouldery shores, paddling from island to island on papyrus rafts, visiting monasteries. We watched the islanders spear catfish in the shallows. We asked when the last foreigners were there and they said: ‘Never.’ We almost drowned when a sudden storm caught us on the lake. ‘It is a beautiful adventure!’ Teklu was a man whose enjoyment grew in proportion to the level of danger.

Teklu and I exchanged letters for months afterwards. ‘Dr Mengesha says hello and do not forget us.’ How could I? Ethiopia had gripped me by the shoulders and shaken me awake. ‘Not too many tourists these days,’ Teklu wrote, without irony. He told me he had taken some Soviet bigwigs down the Omo river. A hippo overturned their boat. ‘We had a beautiful adventure!’ Then the letters stopped.

At the time few people were going to Ethiopia and I was able to indulge the illusion that I was something of an expert. I wrote about it, lectured about it, bored anyone who cared to listen. Ethiopia was my country. It was the central column of a shaky structure—life in my early and mid-twenties.

I went back a few years later. It was the rainy season again; torrents of water sluiced down Africa Avenue and into Revolution Square. LONG LIVE PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM! was still there, as was the triumvirate of beards. I found myself again outside Wonderland Tours.

This time the plate-glass was daubed with swirls of white paint; traces of the name could just be read on the signboard. A paper seal covered the door and the jamb, with a purple ministry stamp. Wonderland Tours had gone. No one could tell me what had happened to Dr Mengesha or to Teklu.

After another three years I returned. I travelled in the south and east. I revisited Lake Tana and Gondar. But no armtwisting, no amount of lobbying could yield permission to see Lalibela or Aksum or Tigray, to reach the mountaintop monasteries of the north, the rebel heart of the old country. Nor was anyone forthcoming about Dr Mengesha and Teklu. The country was still in Colonel Mengistu’s grip, and I developed a perverse obsession with him. I listened to the whispered atrocities of war in Tigray and Eritrea, of the meetings when Mengistu himself would shoot his failing generals. I sought out dissidents, heard hinted fantasies of coup and assassination. But it was wishful thinking. I left Ethiopia sickened by its cruelty and torpor, convinced that Mengistu and the Derg would be in power for a generation or more.

For ten years I travelled. I roamed the Middle East and the regions of the old Soviet bloc. I never spent more than a few months in the same place. I found myself drawn to remote and restive minorities, to the passionate fringes of religious belief. I am convinced now that if I had not chosen Ethiopia, if I had not met Teklu, if Dr Mengesha had not procured the papers that afternoon in 1982, I would not have lived the life I have, would not have travelled quite so obsessively, and would never have begun to write.

All writing careers begin with a single sentence. Mine was: Teklu was a Tigrayan. (Actually it was Telku waS a Tigtayam, but a little Tipp-Ex remedied that.) I read it aloud—Teklu was a Tigrayan… It had a natural rhythm. It had alliteration, a declarative simplicity. I pictured prizes, heard plaudits, projected the entire range of human experience flowing through my fingertips. It was a long time before I wrote another sentence. When after five years the sentence was finally published, Mengistu was still in power and it read, for Teklu’s safety: Yared was a Tigrayan. The book that contained it was not a great success.

One spring I was in Armenia. Snow shone on the peaks of Zangezur, walnut trees were bursting into life and Grad missiles were falling on the town of Goris. The first of the post-Soviet wars was beginning—just as another was ending in the Horn of Africa. Mengistu’s military machine had been propped up for years by the Soviet Union, but now his brand of hard-line Leninism was out of fashion. The removal of Moscow’s support tipped the balance in the rebels’ favour. In that crumbling southern corner of the Soviet Union I crouched in the doorways of makeshift shelters listening to their progress on a short-wave radio. The TPLF and its allies were fighting along the shores of Lake Tana, at Bahir Dar. They were marching on Addis Ababa. Their tanks were entering Revolution Square. Then they were firing on the Ghibbi, the palace where the Derg was making a final stand. Mengistu had fled.

Twelve years passed. I was involved in other places, pursuing other ideas. But Ethiopia was where it all began—and it was unfinished business. At the age of forty-two, I went back.

The arch had gone. Above the entrance to Revolution Square there was no more LONG LIVE PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM! The hoarding of Marx, Lenin and Engels had been replaced by one which warned of the dangers of HIV/Aids. Stencilled on the plate-glass front of Wonderland Tours was the silhouette of a woman’s head and: LUCY UNI-SEX HAIR SALON. The door opened on a late-afternoon hubbub of coiffurerie. The air was steamy with hair-washing. Along one wall ran a line of space-helmet driers; two or three white-coated women were giving manicures. But yes, this was the place—there was the mezzanine where Dr Mengesha had had his office; and that was where his wife Almaz sat doing the accounts. The back room had been the equipment store, where Mengesha had handed Teklu and me the equipment for Lake Tana. Now it was the Gentleman Salon.

‘Sir, please. Haircut?’ a man in a barber’s coat asked.

‘Thank you, I’m just looking.’

Under the stairs, in half-darkness, was the cashier’s desk. A woman was sitting there. I could see her now more clearly. It was Almaz.

My heart was racing. ‘You won’t remember me, but I came here twenty-one years ago—when it was Wonderland Tours.’

She smiled. She didn’t have a clue who I was.

But we went through to the Gentleman Salon and sat on a two-seater sofa. Almaz was wearing a sky-blue jacket. She placed her long fingers against her cheek. Before she married Mengesha she’d been an air hostess; it had been her face that had gazed out from posters of Ethiopian Airlines. The years had done little to her beauty.

I asked about Dr Mengesha.

‘Mengesha? They came one night and took him.’

‘Did they give a reason?’

‘They did not need a reason.’ Her voice was detached, distant. ‘Just “against the revolution”—that was all they needed to say.’

A man brought us tea on a stainless steel tray.

Slowly Almaz sipped from her cup, then replaced it in the saucer. She eased into speaking. ‘After Mengesha was taken, our son became very agitated. His school said to me, He is daydreaming, he cannot concentrate. So I thought if we could just see his father, it would be better. I went to the kebelle. I told them, Please, let me see my husband, you must let me see my husband…’

Her voice drifted off. She looked out through the open door.

‘Did they let you?’

‘We went to see him.’

‘How was he?’

‘The same old Mengesha! Joking and laughing. He was telling me, Don’t worry, Almaz, they are going to let me out very soon! He was so optimistic, always optimistic.

‘After that my son was better. But I was still worrying. I was imagining all the time, what will happen to Mengesha? And I was becoming very afraid for my son. Most mothers are pleased when they see their sons growing. But I just thought, they will take him to the army or to prison. In the end, I had to send him away. I said he was my servant’s son. They allowed him to go to the United States. It was many years before I saw him again.’

‘What about Mengesha?’

‘They moved him to another prison outside Addis. It took a long time before I could find out where it was. I used to go there with food—but I was not allowed to see him.’

A fat man in a suit came in, followed by the barber. The man took off his jacket and hung it on the coat rack. Braces swelled over his bell-shaped belly. The barber flicked open the folds of a towel and tied it around the man’s neck. He leaned back in the chair and fell asleep.

‘Then someone told me he was dead. But someone else said no, he was alive. I couldn’t imagine Mengesha dead so I convinced myself he was coming back. When the house needed redecorating, I did it in the colours he liked. He loved his books, and I took each one of them and cleaned them. After the Derg went, they opened up the prisons. I waited at home for him to come.’

We could hear the scrape of the razor on the man’s cheek. He was still sleeping.

‘One day on television there was a list of names. They said they had found papers saying Dr Mengesha Gabre-Hiwot had been killed in prison. That was how I discovered, like that.’

She was silent for a moment. ‘He loved this country. He was so proud of Ethiopia. He just wanted people to see it—“wonderland”, that’s what he thought it was.’

Reminiscence had made her fluent. ‘When I think of Mengesha now, I think of him always as an optimist. It made me afraid sometimes. It didn’t matter under the emperor. But in the Derg time, well, it was dangerous. I told him, It’s changed now, Mengesha, you cannot do that, not now. He just said, You must not worry, Almaz! He was always such an open man, so generous…

‘You know, before we were married, and he was away in Europe or America, he would telephone me every day. I would tell him it was expensive—he should not telephone. All right, Almaz, he laughed—and then the next day he would telephone me again. That was how he was.’

‘I know. What he did for me—it changed my life.’

We stood. We made our way to the front of the shop. As we

said goodbye, she cocked her head. ‘I remember you now—you went on a bus, didn’t you?’

‘That’s right. To Lake Tana.’

‘Of course. No foreigners went on buses. I said to Mengesha, This is not safe. There will be trouble. He just told me not to worry!’

‘What about Teklu, Almaz?’

‘Teklu?’

‘Teklu Abraham.’

‘He escaped to Kenya,’ she said. ‘Walking.’

‘Is he still there?’

‘No, no. He went to America—I hear he has a liquor store in Denver, Colorado.’

2

Addis Ababa was always a dog city. You’d hear them at night, after curfew, ranging the empty streets in yelping packs. Sometimes there would be the sound of a military Jeep and the stutter of gunfire, but once it had gone, it left just the sound of the running dogs. It was said they were the guard dogs and pedigree pets of the old nobility—those families whom the revolution had chased abroad or imprisoned or shot. It was also said that during the Red Terror they had developed a taste for human flesh.

There were still stray dogs. But the years in between had levelled the pedigrees to a sort of uni-dog. The sounds of the night now were more varied—screeching cats, night traffic, and at dawn the sound of a dozen muezzin echoing through the city. The churches’ amplified prayers began a little later.

One morning I revisited the Institute of Ethiopian Studies. I used to spend days up in the empty reading room, countering the fear and reticence of Addis with the enthusiasm of previous generations of travellers, historians and archaeologists. The institute was housed in the emperor’s first palace. Under the Derg, Haile Selassie’s private quarters were closed off, but now, at the end of a corridor behind the museum, I found myself in the empress’s bedroom. Across the hall were the emperor’s own rooms, and in his bathroom I met a man who for thirty years had worked as his valet.

Our voices echoed off the marble surfaces. Through the window, students went to and fro beneath the date palms. Mammo Haile had chaotic teeth, a hangdog expression, and an undimmed devotion to his master.

‘Day and night His Majesty thought only about his people. He was always thinking how to develop them. I have such a deep emotion when I think of him.’ Mammo Haile looked away. ‘His Majesty had a special way with dogs. If we were travelling and he saw some stray dogs he would say, Mammo Haile, please round up those dogs! I want to give them breads. His Majesty’s favourite dog was Lulu.’

I had seen a picture of Lulu sitting in the emperor’s lap while he stroked her with his small, feminine hands. She was a tiny, frog-eyed Chihuahua.

‘If there was a reception Lulu would go round among the legs of the officials. If one of them was holding a bad feeling about His Majesty, Lulu would touch the man’s foot and that was how His Majesty knew. One minister was very popular but Lulu touched his foot and after that no one trusted that man again. Lulu was a very brilliant dog.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Paul killed her.’

‘Paul?’

‘Big palace dog. Like a big fighter, like a wrestling man. He took Lulu by the neck and shook her and shook her. She was only a tiny dog—and finito! Lulu finito. Such a tiny little dog.’ He looked down, toeing the ground with his shoe. I thought he would cry.

‘It was only a year or two after that when they took His Majesty away.’

During that first week back in Addis someone gave me the name of Dejazmach Zewde Gabre-Selassie, who had been a minister under both the imperial regime and the Derg. He was the great-grandson of Emperor Yohannis IV, and was now living with a friend while he tried to get his own house back. ‘Wretched Derg confiscated it.’

Dejazmach Zewde was a charming, egg-shaped man with a marcel wave in his hair and a patrician manner. He had spent years as an academic in Oxford—‘I think my happiest years’—but a few months before the revolution, Haile Selassie had called him back to be Minister of the Interior.

‘It was my job to deal with the Derg. At that time I have to say they were really pretty amateurish. Used to park a tank outside the ministry for meetings, that sort of thing. Once they came to me and demanded the release of political prisoners. I said to them, Do you mean a complete amnesty, or some sort of selective policy? And they said, We don’t know.’ The dejazmach laughed. ‘They didn’t know! Well, come back when you do, I told them, and they just sat there. Well? I said. We can’t go back to barracks empty-handed. So I decided to call their bluff. Why not demand constitutional reform? Two weeks later they came back and said, We demand constitutional reform! So we appointed another committee to look at reform. Thought it might check the Derg’s power. Trouble is, the Derg started to arrest that committee.’

‘Did you know Mengistu?’

He nodded. ‘First time I met Mengistu was at a big meeting I called with the Derg. He was just a low officer then. Fifty members came and the senior ones were sitting and the rest were standing. One of those standing held up his hand. Minister, please, what do you think of socialism? he says. Well, I told him, there are different shades of socialism. In England there is Fabian socialism and then you have Swedish-style socialism and at the other end Albanian socialism. So if you mean policies aimed at achieving equality, I would say yes—but in general I am not for socialism.’

‘And that was Mengistu?’

‘That was him, yes.’

‘So what about the emperor?’ I asked. ‘Did you admire him?’

The dejazmach did not answer at once. He gazed up at the ceiling with such trance-like neutrality that I thought he hadn’t heard.

‘Earlier on, he was an astonishing figure. Decisive, effective, punctual. His greatest weakness was that he could not share power. I think that was it…Yet right at the end he had an amazing calm. Everyone else was nervous and jumpy, but he was calm. Just before he fell, I went to see him. The Derg were pretty much in control by then. They’d shown the Jonathan Dimbleby film exposing the famine, and said on television that no one should go to the palace, none of the workers or retainers. I was really very upset by the film—on the emperor’s behalf. So I went to see him. He was alone. The palace was completely empty. Just the two of us. He wanted to talk about foreign matters. I had just been in Iran and he said: So tell me, how is the shah? Two days later they took him away. They asked me to be foreign minister. I still thought it would all turn out all right, so I accepted. But then came Black Saturday.’

‘What was that?’

‘Hauled sixty of those out of the cellar beneath the throne room and shot them. I was in New York when I heard. Resigned at once.’

Two days later, through a coffee merchant, I was introduced to the emperor’s grandson. Prince Ba’eda Maryam Makonnen had a business importing coffee machines. He was an ordinary looking Ethiopian in a zip-up cardigan—but on his index finger he wore a signet ring with a gold relief of a lion and staff, the Conquering Lion of the King of Judah.

Ba’eda was the son of Haile Selassie’s favourite child, the Duke of Harar, who had been killed in a car crash when Ba’eda was only fourteen days old. With his brothers and sisters he had then gone to live with his grandfather in the Jubilee Palace. Later he was one of those imprisoned in the Ghibbi, the Grand Palace.

‘When we were in prison Mengistu came to see us. He was always very polite. He called my grandfather Getay—master—and always made sure to salute him.’

In the end Ba’eda was moved to the cellar beneath the throne room. He passed me on to another of its inmates. I went to see Teshome Gabre-Maryam on a warm, sunny afternoon. He had served in the emperor’s government and was now a prosperous lawyer. He worked in an office in the leafy compound of his home. When I arrived he was with another man, General Negussie Wolde-Mikhael.

Thirty years of power shifts had seesawed the lives of these two men. They had both begun their careers under the emperor. They were both high-fliers: Teshome had helped draft the constitution, General Negussie was chief of police in Addis. But when the Derg came, it had imprisoned one and promoted the other. While Teshome counted off the months and years in the palace cellar, General Negussie was made Chief Justice of the Martial Court.

‘One day, they took me for trial,’ explained Teshome. He reached out and, with a smile, took the general’s hand. ‘Who was there presiding in the court?’ He raised the general’s hand. ‘He could have had me executed!’

‘Why did you let him off?’ I asked, smiling.

The general glanced at Teshome. ‘He was a lawyer. He stood up in the court and convinced me.’

‘That he was innocent?’

‘No—that the court had no validity.’

Teshome laughed. He was still holding the general’s hand.

Teshome was released, and when the Derg fell General Negussie himself was imprisoned. He had only just been released. Now Teshome was helping him; he had given him a car.

‘Did you approve of the Derg?’ I turned to General Negussie.

‘To begin with, I was very happy with the ideology. We really believed it would help Ethiopia. But for me it changed completely when they executed my uncle. I was so filled with anger—I wanted to kill every one of those Derg men. My colleagues suggested I apply for a transfer. They probably saved my life. For six and a half years I was administrator of Hararge region. Then in 1982 the Derg asked me to become a minister—Minister without Portfolio.’

‘Did you accept?’

He shrugged. ‘I had ten children.’

‘What do you remember of Mengistu?’

‘Very moody. Very violent. My office was just above his and I could always hear his shouting. The only quality I know he had was that he loved his country. Also he was not corrupted at all. He was very honest with money. And he was very good at listening. He always knew exactly what the important point was.’

‘Did you admire him?’

He looked at me. Prison had greyed his hair; his face was soft and troubled. ‘Every day I was with Mengistu, I was thinking: how can I kill this man? We were always searched before going to our office. But when I was alone with him I would watch him and think how could I do it—he was a small one and I am a judo expert. I travelled with him to different provinces and I sat behind him on the plane looking at the back of his head and he had one little scar just here—’ the general leaned forward and tapped the top of his neck ‘- and I was thinking, that would be the place, that would do it. A bullet just there…’

General Negussie stood and said goodbye. He walked stiffly to the door. For a moment after he had gone, Teshome and I were silent. A yellow weaver bird was pecking at the windowpane—tap-tap…tap-tap-tap.

Teshome and I carried on talking. I told him about my first trip to Lake Tana, about Wonderland Tours and Teklu and Dr Mengesha.

‘Mengesha Gabre-Hiwot?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was brought up with him! We were classmates at Tafari Makonnen school. He helped me. He gave me money when I came out of prison in September 1982.’

‘That was a few weeks after I was here.’

The weaver bird was again tapping at the window— sparring with an aggressor that matched him blow for blow.

Teshome pursed his lips and let out a long, frustrated ’Dhaaaaa…’ for all the shattered years, the Derg’s brutalities, the squandered hopes of his own generation.

‘Do you know what happened to him, Teshome, why he was detained?’

‘Do I know?’ He looked at me blankly, then nodded. ‘They said he read and distributed some anti-Derg literature.’

‘Did he?’

‘Actually he did, yes. In fact he showed it to me and I was very nearly imprisoned again as a result. It was also a time that the TPLF was advancing—so of course Tigrayans were not that popular.’

The weaver bird was still attacking its glass opponent—tap-tap…tap-tap-tap…

‘What happened in the end?’

‘They tortured him. He got gangrene in his leg—they had to amputate it. The gangrene was also in the other leg, and they had to amputate that one too. In fact, he was given permission to go home. But someone apparently said: What will people say when they see him with no legs? Much easier to kill him. They took him to a place on the edge of Addis known as “Bermuda”—the Bermuda Triangle. When people went there they nevercame back. They killed him there.

‘Mengesha was one of the best, one of the most decent individuals you could ever imagine.’ Teshome pressed his fists hard on the desk. For a moment he looked overwhelmed by his own anger. ‘That was the worst of it. They took men like that and destroyed them. Those animals.’

I had kept an image in my mind all those years, an everyday Ethiopian image glanced from a bus window. It was of a farmer, bare-legged, his dula flexed across his shoulders, setting off on a narrow path across the plateau.

Ethiopia taught me many things. As a naïve twenty-one-year-old, with years of flunked schooling behind me, I was ready for the simplest of lessons. Instead I was presented with paradoxes. I learnt of the cruelty that could be perpetrated in the name of a good idea. I saw how a people hurtling towards catastrophe, hungry, with population growth out of control, could go on living day to day with such astonishing grace. I saw how those apparently ignored by divine goodness could still apply their greatest energy to worship. I learnt that the human spirit is more robust than life itself.

Ethiopia opened my eyes to the earth’s limitless range. I pictured the country’s startling scenes and stories multiplied across the globe, then factored up by the past. It made the notion of ‘a small world’, ‘a shrinking world’, look absurd, and it made me restless.

Ethiopia instilled in me the habit of a lifetime, the habit of travel. It revealed the rewards that can be had simply from being footloose among strangers, from taking remote and narrow paths with bare-legged farmers. It bred in me the conviction that if there is any purpose to our time on this earth, it is to understand it, to seek out its diversity, to celebrate its heroes and its wonders—in short, to witness it.

There is a saying in Ethiopia: ‘Kes be kes inculal bekuro yihedal‘ (’Step by step the egg starts walking’). My Amharic teacher would use it whenever I showed signs of frustration. I was a hopeless pupil; he used the expression very often. But now, after twenty-one years, the egg was hatching. I would go north into the roadless heart of the country, set off across the plateau. I would go to the places first conjured up by Teklu that afternoon in Mengistu’s stifled city, with the rain hammering on the tin roof. I would go to Lalibela, to the sacred city of Aksum, and I would walk between them.

‘Walk?’ spluttered an Ethiopian friend. ‘You can’t walk! Foreigners don’t walk.’

Walking was what villagers did. They walked and walked, to find grazing, to church, to market, to clinics. Until the nineteenth century wheels were unknown in the highlands. They still are in most places—no barrows, no carts; just legs and shoulders and mule-backs and the glimpse of a government or NGO’s 4×4 as it races by, leaving you coughing in its dust-wake.

I made plans. I began the Ethiopian game in which information, misinformation and pure fantasy are all cunningly dressed up as each other. With such distances, I asked, might it be better to ride? Yes, ride, ride—on a horse! No (there are no horses, not up to the terrain). Should I go alone? Yes, yes—all alone! No (suspicious villagers would march you straight into the first town). Is it safe? (Very safe, no bandits/you will need one unit of armed guards). Is there food? (No food/lots of food). The truth was that no one knew anything other than a couple of the towns on my route.

I found a tent, bought a kerosene stove and stocked up with packet soup and sardines. I tracked down a Tigrinya-speaking guide named Hiluf in Aksum; I asked him to take a bus and meet me in Lalibela. I prised a map from the appropriate government agency.

One morning, I climbed the hill to Giorgis cathedral. It was not yet eight. The crowds were flooding up past the equestrian statue of Emperor Menelik. We were pressed closer and closer together, swept forward on an unstoppable tide. The octagonal church rose from a mass of white gabbis. All around me people were in various states of rapture. Some men were dancing. Others bowed their heads. Women stood in tears. From the steps, a flop-haired hermit delivered a eulogy to the dual virginity of Mary: ‘There is nothing that equals her glory. She is higher than all creatures, men as well as angels! Her dress is the sun with the moon beneath her feet…‘ Amputees dragged themselves among the worshippers’ legs. A group of boys had climbed into the trees to watch. It could have been the fifteenth century, or any century.

Giorgis cathedral was the first place I ever saw the spectacle of Ethiopian worship. I had come here with Teklu on my second day in Addis. After a lifetime of sober grey churches and bloodless rite, I was astonished. Christianity to me was something dusty and ossified, but not here. Over the years, the Ethiopian Church came to distil for me all that was extraordinary and ageless about the country. After my first visit, I thought you only had to step out over the threshold of Europe to be faced with such a sight. Now I know that that is only partly true. There is nowhere else on earth quite like Ethiopia.

The next morning, with 130 pounds of equipment and food, I flew to Lalibela.

3

An hour before dawn and Lalibela’s rock-cut trenches are dark as oil. Their high sides rise to a narrow strip of stars. Underfoot the tufa is rough and pitted. I steady myself with a hand on the cold walls. The night air is sharp against my nostrils. Along the tunnel from the church of Debra Sina comes the nasal sound of chanting. Each phrase lasts a minute. Then—boooom!—the first beat of the kebbero. It is a sound like no other. It strikes you somewhere deep in the thorax. Another beat, and I quicken my pace.

Far below ground level, the base of the church rises from its own plinth of bedrock. Sandals are heaped by the door. Light glows from keel-arch windows. Inside is warmth, the smell of an all-night presence. Dozens of people are wrapped in white gabbis. Some are no more than shapes on the floor; others are standing heron-still around the central bay. On sturdy columns can be seen the chisel-cuts in the rock. The columns rise to shallow cupolas. Far beneath them two drummers squat beside their kebberos. Slowly, alternately, with the flat of their hands, they are beating the goatskin tympana.

The debtara are standing over them. They are elongated figures in white turbans and hanging white shawls. They are chanting. The drums beat, the debtara drop their wrists and their handheld sistra rattle like coins.

One of the drummers gives a quick, double bo-boom! The other follows. The tempo increases. One by one the shapes rise from the floor. In two lines the debtara shuffle towards each other. Their prayer sticks cluster above them. At the exact moment they begin the dance, a blind cantor steps to the front, his mouth open in song. He is wearing a pair of women’s dark glasses. The drummers are standing now. Each kebbero hangs from a shoulder-strap. They circle each other. They give two more double beats. Rhythmic clapping spreads through the church. One of the drummers leans to the right, the other to the left. Now they are spinning. They are crouching, rising. Their faces glow with abandon. The people press closer around them. The cupolas fill with ululations. The drummers’ eyes flash in the half-light. The debtara are swinging the prayer sticks now, surrounding the drummers in their ecstasy of beating. A young boy joins their line, his head level with the men’s hips. He is imitating their movements.

Out of nowhere, a man leaps into the midst. His matted hair swings from side to side. He dips his cross-staff above his head. His movements are fluent and precise. A grin splits his skull-like face. The boy has stopped dancing. He is standing still, buffeted and jostled by those around him. He is staring at the man, and his eyes are wide with fear and amazement.

No force on earth could stop this. The man is revolving around the drummers. Sweat flicks from his hair. Deep below

the ground, the hollowed-out chapel is filled with drumming, filled with clapping, filled with ululating, and it all merges in a fever of sound and movement and devotion.

Then it is over. The drummers are lifting the kebberos over their heads. The debtaras‘ sistra tinkle as they set them down. Two priests are involved in a hissed argument, flicking through a psalter. The shapes on the floor are re-forming themselves. The man with matted locks has disappeared.

Outside again, dawn is a pale loom above the trench. It is still cold. From the distance comes the sound of a tirumba, the funereal horn—and a cry: ‘Citizens of Lalibela! Come out—come out! Come and help bury the body of Colonel Melaku. Citizens of Lalibela, come out, come out!‘

Lalibela is a town to die in. The tunnels that once linked the complex of churches are clogged with centuries of corpses. To make a pilgrimage to Lalibela eases your later passage to heaven—but to die here is much better. The soil itself is sacred, and those who take the journey are buried in shallow graves.

The site has never been conclusively dug by archaeologists. Scholars know by heart the handful of significant written references to it. It is easier to list what is not known about Lalibela than what is. It is not known precisely when the churches were carved, whether they were started during the thirteenth-century reign of King Lalibela or much earlier. Nor is it known where all the excavated rock was deposited, nor if any outside expertise was responsible. Nor why, deep in the mountains of Lasta, the Herculean task of chipping out these eleven churches and their labyrinth of link trenches was undertaken. Like Ethiopia itself, it is a timeless place, veiled by layer upon layer of mythologies.

The town’s earlier name of Roha is linked perhaps to al-Ruha, Arabic for the holy city of Edessa which was lost to the Christians just before the reign of King Lalibela. Then again it was the heir of the holy city of Aksum, believed by Ethiopians (never shy in their myth-making) to be Zion itself. So Lalibela took on something of the aura of Aksum and Zion, and thereby of the holiest of all earthly places, Jerusalem. King Lalibela himself was taken on a dream-tour of Jerusalem by the Angel Gabriel and was able to replicate its sites. Pilgrims therefore needed to go no further than Lalibela to earn God’s favour.

The yearning for Jerusalem has haunted generations of Ethiopians—a yearning amplified by its extreme risks. Wild animals, pirates and Muslims have combined in the imagination of Ethiopian Christians to create an über-threat for all those daring to leave the mountains. In the eighteenth century Queen Mentuab wailed to James Bruce that, after thirty years on the throne, she would give up everything if only she ‘could be conveyed to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and beg alms for my subsistence all my life after’. Jerusalem was where it all began for Ethiopian kingship, where the union of Solomon and Sheba took place and from where Menelik I acquired the Ark of the Covenant, dancing before it like King David.

So Lalibela became a Biblical Land in miniature. Here is Golgotha, Cana and Nazareth. Beneath Calvary is the Tomb of Adam. I had skirted the slopes of Mount Tabor, Mount Sinai, crossed the River Jordan and climbed the Mount of Olives. In the compound of Beta Maryam, I had bent to smell the single rosebush from the Garden of Eden. Beside the church of Beta Giorgis is a slope of un-dug rock which is Mount Ararat.

Lalibela carries with it a weighty cargo of symbolism—not a place for the literal-minded. It made me think of Robert Southey’s comment after once visiting William Blake: ‘Blake showed me a perfectly mad poem called Jerusalem,’ he reported. ‘Jerusalem is in Oxford street!’

It was a lovely morning. A few high clouds drifted in a clear blue sky. I passed the fresh grave of Colonel Melaku, where a mound of stones covered his body. An olive-wood cross rose at one end, and on it was nailed a crude plaque: Colonel Melaku Fetem born 1935 EC died at 61. The wreath of marigolds and mimosa was already wilting in the heat.

I was on my way to see a bahtawi. A churchman in Addis had given me the name of Abba Gabre-Meskal. ‘He may be there or—’ the churchman dropped his voice—‘he may have already vanished.’

I was in luck. I found him up a dusty alley, sitting outside his own lean-to. He was stitching a patch into his qamis, his anchorite’s shawl, dyed yellow (the Ethiopian monks use for this yellow the native plant Carthamus tinctorius, or ‘bastard saffron’). I sat on a stool opposite him and, as I tried to read the wrinkles of his cheek, asked if he knew anything about the dead colonel.

‘Colonel Melaku? He was my neighbour. Very religious man. He came to Lalibela for his death. He was a Derg colonel.’

‘But the Derg were against the Church?’

‘The Derg were devils! Some of the top ones, they just kept it hidden—they prayed in private.’

Abba Gabre-Meskal was pleased by the thought, and a smile spread across his weathered face. The smile became a chuckle, and the chuckle became a cough—and the cough bent him in two. During the last rains, pneumonia had forced him down from the mossy cave where he had lived for ten years. I offered him water. He drank it in short sips. I didn’t want him vanishing on me.

He was a tall man. He had deep-set eyes and skin like oxhide. His expression swung between comic innocence and holy rage. He raised the yellow qamis to his face to examine his stitching.

‘You a Christian?’

‘Of sorts,’ I said.

‘Protestant?’

I nodded.

‘Luther, Luther!’ He was sewing with quick, even stitches, even though he could hardly see. ‘Tourist?’

‘Yes. I’m going to Aksum. On foot,’ I added, for effect.

He wasn’t impressed. ‘Tell me, have you ever heard of a place called Jerusalem?’

I told him I had lived for a time in a monastery in the Old City.

Leaning down to gnaw through the thread, he looked at me properly for the first time. He folded the qamis and put it to one side. He laid his hands together in his lap, drew a big breath and, for an hour or more, captured me with a long and beautiful story about his own attempt to reach Jerusalem.

Abba Gabre-Meskal had begun his career at a religious school in the Gondar region. One day a fellow student died. The memhir called everyone together and said: ‘One of our brothers has died suddenly. Something is not right.’

They agreed that it was a punishment from God. It made them uneasy because they did not know what they had done wrong, and they couldn’t tell what would happen next.

‘We must make a pilgrimage,’ the memhir said. ‘Someone must go to Jerusalem, without shoes.’

A senior monk was chosen as leader and two others appointed to go with him. Young Abba Gabre-Meskal was one of them. They took with them the Psalms of David, a Book of Hours and gourds for water.

‘We set off with our faith. We put our trust in the will of God.’

They had no shoes.

In Tigray they came to the palace of Ras Seyoum. At the gates were many people—the sick, the poor and the needy. But the pilgrims’ leader was a well-known monk and Ras Seyoum himself came down to see him.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘We are going on a pilgrimage. One of our brothers died.’

The ras asked the monks to say a prayer for him at the church of the Holy Sepulchre. He gave them thirteen silver Maria Teresa thalers. The monks went on their way. They reached the border to the Sudan, and on the other side, the soldiers arrested them.

‘You are spies!’ they said.

‘We are not spies,’ explained the monks. ‘We are pilgrims on our way to Jerusalem. Look, we have no shoes.’

But the soldiers put them in the prison. They stayed there for a month and then the monks heard the soldiers say: ‘Perhaps these men are not spies. They have no shoes.’

So the monks were released. They carried on through the desert. It was a very difficult time. They found only salty water and the ground was hard and stony. One day a stranger came up to them and said: ‘Why do you walk without shoes?’

‘We are pilgrims. We are going to Jerusalem.’

‘Look,’ he said, pointing to the distance. ‘There is a train. I can ask it to stop and then you can travel easily to your destination.’

They looked at the train. They saw the long line of carriages and the white trail of smoke above it. They saw its round spinning feet and they realised the man beside them was Satan, sent to tempt them.

‘Go away!’ they shouted, and he disappeared.

Sometimes they followed the Nile and sometimes they were in the desert. They reached the border to Egypt and on the other side of the border the soldiers arrested them.

‘You are spies,’ they said.

‘We are not. We are holy men. We have no shoes.’

The soldiers saw that it was true. But then one of the soldiers said: ’Be careful—they may be extreme believers!’

So the soldiers put them in prison for being extreme believers. They spent months in that Egyptian prison. Abba Gabre-Meskal said the prison wasn’t too bad. It reminded him of the monastery. He did not mind being locked up, the poor food, the crowding. What he did not like were the rats. In the end the Egyptians released them and they carried on. They came to a famous place. It was, said Abba Gabre-Meskal, a great piece of water between Egypt and Lebanon. They stood by the water and they realised they could not cross it. They were very sad, but thought: It is not the will of God that we reach Jerusalem.

‘Our leader said he would stay. He would wait to try and cross the water. But we decided to go home. It was the end of the journey.’

Abba Gabre-Meskal rose to his feet. He fetched a bowl of kolo, roasted corn.

‘There is one more interesting thing.’ He stood high above me, the sun behind his head and one finger pointing at the sky.

On the way home, he said, the two of them reached a place where they’d been warned there was a great variety of wild animals. They decided they must sleep in the trees. They tied themselves to the trees so that they wouldn’t fall out, and in the night the wild animals came. First, he said, were the ones with horns, although in fact some of the ones with horns did not have horns. He and the other novice could see them down below in the moonlight. Suddenly the ones with horns began a great battle with the ones who did not have horns. There was such a noise and such fighting that the two young monks became afraid. But all at once the animals left—as if a lion or a tiger had come to the area. In fact, a lion had come to the area and beneath the tree there were suddenly many lions. Then there were also tigers. They had to beat metal objects together to stop the animals climbing the tree. Then the lions and the tigers started to fight and there was a terrifying noise as they fought.

But then they too ran away. ‘That was when we began to hear another noise. It was the biggest noise you can hear in the forest. The lions and the tigers stopped fighting and they were afraid. They ran away.’

‘What was the noise?’

‘A great big one!’

‘An elephant?’

‘Bigger than an elephant. I don’t know its name. We did not see it. We only heard its noise. Like a, like a…thing.’ He failed to find anything worthy of comparison. ‘Everyone knows it. It is a hundred devils in one!’

For the rest of the night they prayed and they heard the noise of the big thing moving among the trees. But as it became light, the noise stopped. Merchants came with camels and they came down out of the tree and the merchants gave them food. The two of them went on their way.

In Tigray they wanted to see Ras Seyoum to tell him they could not reach Jerusalem. They wanted to give him back his thalers. But their leader was not with them and they were just ordinary churchmen and so they waited, standing at the gates for a long time. Then they gave the money to a guard.

‘We returned to Gojjam after many difficulties. But we also met good people on the way.’

‘So, did you reach Jerusalem later?’

‘I went to Addis Ababa. I became known there. Did you hear the name of Empress Menen?’

‘The wife of Haile Selassie?’

‘She said she wanted me to go. She was going to arrange it. “Abba, you must go to Jerusalem!” But she died.’

He let out a long sigh. ‘I went to see the emperor’s daughter, Tenagne Worq. She asked her father. He said to me, Abba, where is your file? Where is my file? I didn’t have a file! But by God’s will they found my file. His Majesty held the file and said, You can go.

‘So I did go to Jerusalem. I went to the Holy Sepulchre, I went to Deir es Sultan, to Addis Alem monastery. I went to Bethlehem. But I was not as strong then as now. If I had gone now, I would have studied great books—they have books in Jerusalem that are as big as doors! But I was young then. I was not prepared.’

Hiluf was on a bus from Aksum. He would be in Lalibela in a few days. I meanwhile was staying at the Jerusalem Guest House, trying to prepare for the coming walk. Information was still patchy. Even the mysteries of the rock-cut churches were easier to pin down. There’ll be plenty of food in the markets…no food in the markets…you will need one mule…three mules…a car…no idea…militia…very hot…very cold…very steep…no food…

I had a problem with Ethiopian food. When I first arrived in 1982, I loved its spicy sauces, its spongy injera bread. But then on the second journey I picked up a stomach infection of such virulence that for a decade or more I lost a day or two each month to it. I assumed the years had sorted it out; but a meal in an Addis restaurant a week earlier had proved me wrong.

So I went to Lalibela’s weekly market. I found shallots and garlic and chilli peppers. I found rice and pulses and tomatoes. I bought screwtop containers. I bought biscuits and sugar and a block of sawn-up salt from the Danakil desert. I lined all the food up in my room. I had the tinned fish from Addis, and the sachets of soup. I packed it all very diligently into a canvas bag. I spread out the maps from Ethiopia’s Mapping Agency. I sliced off the unnecessary parts—the desert to the east, the Takazze lowlands to the west. I taped the folds. I sliced the Maudes’ translation of Anna Karenina into three pocket-sized sections and taped the spine (I kept the five-thousand-rouble note I had used as a bookmark when I’d first read it, ten years earlier, in Lithuania).

With the help of the Jerusalem’s proprietor, I settled on two mules and two muleteers—by the name of Bisrat and Makonnen. Bisrat was gentle and subservient, Makonnen canny and wiry. The mules looked healthy enough. They would come with us as far as the town of Sekota.

The days slipped by. I jostled with pilgrims and travellers at the sacred sites. I tried to ignore the immensity of the backdrop mountains, the heat that clambered up through the hours of each morning, my own breathlessness. In the evening, I sat on the terrace outside my room and read. A breeze would come up from the south and a thousand eucalyptus leaves brush together with a long watery shhhh. I was filled with expectation. Each morning I lay in bed and watched daylight leak into the eastern sky. Each morning I heard a blast of the tirumba: ’Citizens of Lalibela—come out, come out! Come out for the burial…come out, come out!‘

One evening I returned to the guest house and there was Hiluf sitting on a wall. A small bag lay beside him, a water bottle and three tied-together batons of sugarcane. He had the thick-lashed eyes and easy smile of the Tigrayans. He jumped down and we embraced. I liked him at once.

In my room, I showed him the neatly-packed bag of supplies. At once he set about repacking it, with the reverence for food of those who have lived with real hunger. We looked at the maps. I ran my fingers up across the dense contours of Wag and Lasta, into Tigray, Tembien and Gheralta.

‘Do you know any of this?’

He shook his head.

I glanced at his feet. ‘Hiluf, your shoes!’

He bent down and poked his finger through the sole. ‘It’s all right—they are quite good shoes.’

He looked up at me. He began to laugh, and I couldn’t help laughing with him.

‘We’ll have to get you new ones.’

Hiluf bent down and took a needle and thread from his bag.

In the morning Bisrat and Makonnen were at the gate. They held a mule each. The sun was a pale glow behind Mount Eshetan. We loaded the mules and set off. It was a feast day at Beta Giorgis. I let the others go on and went down to join the ring of worshippers on the edge of the pit. Another crowd filled the shadowy space below. The fat cruciform block of the

church rose high above their heads. The debtara were dancing. The beat of a kebbero sounded from among them.

The sun reached me with a warning flash in the corner of my eye; in a few hours it would be hot. I turned to leave and wound up through the gathering crowds. I stopped a woman with a flat-pan basket on her head and bought six bananas. They were stumpy and very sweet. The woman had a burn-mark covering one cheek. ‘Pay me what you like,’ she said.

As I caught up with the others, there was a distant cry: ‘Citizens of Lalibela! Come out! Help bury Girma Gabre-Selassie! Citizens of Lalibela, come out, come out!‘

4

The path north from Lalibela cut down the mountainside in short zigzags. Pilgrim heads bobbed up it. They were blowing horns. They were shaded by umbrellas. They were leading sheep. They were carrying rust-coloured cockerels suspended from sticks. They were all heading for the feast of Giorgis.

I stood aside to let them pass and looked down beyond them to the valley floor and the grey riverbed. On the opposite side the path began to rise. I followed its course with my gaze, through a series of fields bordered by rocky outcrops, up to where the rise steepened to cliffs. There the path reverted to zigzags before reaching the flat ridge-line of the plateau. It left a hollow feeling in my stomach.

It was mid-morning by the time we started to climb. Hiluf and the mules went ahead. Their pace was easy, untroubled. I felt the hot sun on my back. For months I had been preparing for this. But now, in the first hours, I was fading. The path steepened. I gulped at the thin air. Flies buzzed into my panting mouth. Each step became a mountain in itself. Stumbling the last few yards, I cleared the ridge and joined the others under a lone olive tree. It was a false summit. The path continued up.

A man sauntered down it. ‘Peace be on you!’

‘And on you…’

He put a foot up on a rock and looked at me flopped on the ground. The sun was behind his head; as he moved it flickered on and off. He wore a bath-cap of yellow towelling.

‘Has the farenj‘s car broken?’ he laughed.

By mid-afternoon we were following a broad shelf around the northern slopes of Abune Jozef. The concentric lines of terraces bordered the fields. There were homesteads and small villages and stock grazing. The path was flat. The walking was easy. Then the terraces stopped. They gave way to a pair of gate-like rocks. The ground dropped at our feet. The sight ahead was so vast, so overwhelming that we all stopped.

‘Whweeeee!‘ hissed Makonnen.

Between the rocks, row upon row of ridges stretched out into the distance. Their grey flanks were dappled with cloud shadows. The horizon was a graph of hazy peaks and saddles. The line of our path followed the mountainside, shrunk to a thread by the vastness all around it. I could see beyond it to the next spine of rock rising from a hidden valley, and beyond that another and another. I forgot the morning’s labour and felt a sudden surge of exhilaration. It was the reckless confidence that comes at the beginning of a journey, and I longed to be in each one of those valleys, each little smear of a village, each hut.

Makonnen grinned at me. In a wave-like motion he raised and lowered his hand over imaginary hills. He was looking forward to watching the farenj deal with it all.

‘Which way is Sekota?’ I asked.

With his dula, he pointed north. The sides of a large mountain shouldered the sky.

‘Behind, behind! That road we call “the breaker of knees”.’

But we were not going to Sekota, not directly anyway. I wanted to try to reach the rebel town of Amda Worq.

‘And Amda Worq?’

He swung his dula to the west. Partly in shadow, the ridgeline was more distant. Makonnen raised his voice to an excited falsetto. ‘Way, waa-ay over!’

‘And what is that road like?’

He shook his head. He had never been there. ‘They say it’s the devil’s own.’

We carried on. The path continued as a narrow ledge. When the mules stumbled, rocks slid out from under their feet and rolled down the scrub, gathering pace until they were bouncing off the mountain and plunging into the emptiness.

We dropped into a small juniper forest. The boughs of the juniper were hung with lichen. It was late afternoon. Makonnen put his dula across his shoulders and began to sing: ‘Aya alemayehu igray derso! May my foot reach the place I want!’

That evening we put up our tent in a village above the monastery of Yimrehanna Krestos. I cooked a meal over the kerosene stove. Hiluf and I sat outside the tent spooning up rice from plastic bowls. I felt a little life flowing back into my limbs. The stars above were pinpricks in the darkening blue.

Hiluf was twenty-six. He had been born in the mountains of south-eastern Tigray, a region famous for its frequent rebellions. His father was a priest and his mother was just thirteen when he was born. Hiluf was her third child.

In 1984 the great famine came, and Hiluf ‘s father left for the west of Tigray to try to find farm work. The clay vats of grain ran down. The cattle grew weaker. Their neighbours left the land to look for food. His mother said: ‘We will stay, your father will soon be back.’ But in the end they too were forced to leave. They walked two days north to a feeding camp.

Hiluf wrapped his hands round a mug of tea. ‘My mother left behind my brother to look after my little sister and the animals. All the time she was just sobbing.’

One day Hiluf was in the camp, on his way to collect their ration of flour and milk powder. Suddenly he saw his father.

‘At once he started crying,’ said Hiluf, ‘ “Why did you leave our land?” ‘

Hiluf explained and his father embraced him. He had money from the west; now he could take them home!

So the two of them went to the distribution point. They sat and waited with hundreds of others. But before they could collect the food a man came with a long stick. He was tapping people on the shoulder with his stick.

‘Stand up, you…and you…’

He picked Hiluf ‘s father. They took him to a lorry. Hiluf ran to fetch his mother and sisters and they managed to get on the lorry too. They were taken to a place near Makelle airport. Thousands of people were there, in the open. Hiluf ‘s father put his head in his hands and wailed: ’Wai-amlaki, wai-wai-wai…‘ He knew what was coming.

Resettlement was the Derg’s chosen solution to the famine. Shift tens of thousands to the fertile prairies of the south and there would be no more hunger (and no more rebels). The family were separated. Hiluf and his father were flown to Addis Ababa in the hold of an Antonov. By bus they continued south. They were left in the forest. Local villagers brought them food. Every morning and every evening, Hiluf ‘s father would stand outside and pray to find his family. One day, Hiluf ‘s uncle came. He had been looking for them for months. He took them to his village, and there were Hiluf ‘s mother and all his brothers and sisters. ‘Oh—what a happy moment!’

For many years they lived in the south of Ethiopia.

‘But it wasn’t a good place,’ said Hiluf. ‘It was a very bad place they sent us to.’

It was the lowlands. To the Amhara and the Tigrayan highlanders nothing is as intrinsically bad as qola, the lowlands. It is the place of insects and diseases, big animals, dangerous Muslims and budas.

‘In the day the monkeys took the maize, at night the fox, porcupine, wild cat and wild pigs. We children became ill. A buda came to my sister and my brother. The buda was talking and shouting through them. They fell on the floor. They would have died but someone went into the forest and collected the right roots and ground them up and burned them. The budas screamed, they shouted—but the smoke drove them away.’

Those who were caught trying to return to the north were killed by the Derg. In 1991, Hiluf ‘s family heard that Mengistu had fled the country and the EPRDF were in power. They made their way back to Tigray. Their house was destroyed, but his father kissed the soil and soon they had built another.

‘All my brothers and sisters are still there, on the land,’ he said, with a hint of sadness.

‘How is it that you’re not a farmer, Hiluf?’

‘I was always too lazy to do farm work! I said I wanted to go to school instead. I liked to learn. I would always get more than 90 per cent. So I went to university.’

It was late. The moon had broken free of the ridge-line and was roaming the open country above. Bisrat and Makonnen were asleep, their heads propped on the packsaddles. The priests and monks were making their way down to church, a row of ghostly figures moving through the trees.

‘Shall we join them?’ asked Hiluf.

‘Let’s sleep.’ I rolled out my sleeping bag. I was exhausted. ‘We can go to the church in the morning.’

I’d been waiting for years to see the church of Yimrehanna Krestos. My hankering for the forbidden north of Ethiopia had been offset in part by frequent thumbing of Georg Gerster’s illustrated Churches in Rock. Gerster had travelled in the north during the last years of the emperor. It was largely his work that revealed Lalibela to the world. But for me his pictures of Yimrehanna Krestos were somehow more striking. Whereas Lalibela’s churches were a feat, dug out of the rock, King Yimrehanna Krestos had in the twelfth century built this edifice inside an existing natural feature. The juxtaposition was a stroke of genius. With its neat striped walls pinched between rough floor and rough ceiling, it spoke of man’s frailty in the natural world. But it was also faintly comic—a piece of confectionery popped into the cave-mouth.

At dawn, we stumbled down through the trees. Prayer hummed from the cave entrance. Straw covered the bare rock floor and one or two carpets lay over it. From under one of the carpets wriggled a priest.

‘You! You!’ he shouted. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

‘We want to look at the church.’

His aggression dissolved as he woke. He yawned and picked the straw from his hair. Then he put on his turban. He led us into the treasury where the other priests and debtara sat dazed after the night’s worship. The church itself, a cave within a cave, was crusted with centuries of devotion. The walls were dark and tallow-stained. Its trussed wooden roof suggested an upturned boat and generations of hopeful souls sheltering beneath it. Geometric inlay covered much of the walls and ceilings. Set into it was a mysterious cast of heraldic beasts—peacocks, double-headed eagles, men with wings, men with scorpions, vulture-headed men and a large number of elephants.

Beside the church was the tomb of Yimrehanna Krestos himself, a dwarf cottage hung with drapes. Two women circled it with rocks on their shoulders. From time to time they would lean over, press their hands on the drapes and kiss them. They were muttering, as if purging some deep-held trauma. When I looked more closely one of their rocks turned out to be a baby.

The priest was also watching them. He was still picking pieces of straw from his beard. He had been earnest in the treasury, earnest in the church, and was very earnest here at the royal tomb. But at the back of the cave his mood lightened: ‘Look—dead people!’

The light of my torch lit up a sea of bodies. They stretched far back into the darkness. In places a thigh bone or forearm raised itself from waves of skeletons and tattered cloth. At my feet was a dug-out coffin and a body squeezed into it. There was skin still on the cheek.

‘The followers of Yimrehanna Krestos. They came from Jerusalem.’

There was a squeaking from the back of the cave and a stream of bats whistled out over our heads. I ducked. The priest ignored them.

With a grand sweep of his hand he took in the entire range of the bodies. ‘Five thousand seven hundred and forty! The king told them when they finished work, Go back to your own country. But they said, No, your majesty, we want to stay here. With you! Think of that—they could have lived out their days in the holy city, but they chose to stay here.’

Just as Ethiopians have idealised far-off Jerusalem, so their own isolation has created in their name a glorious gallery of mythical figures. The most potent of all emerged at about the time of Yimrehanna Krestos. It was then that news reached the rest of Christendom of a powerful ruler beyond the Islamic cordon. Originally he was believed to reign over both Asia and Ethiopia, but as Asia opened up and there was no sign of him, so Ethiopia became the only possible site for his kingdom. Prester John changed the shape of the known world and haunted the European imagination for centuries to come.

Around the year 1165 a letter was sent, addressed to the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus I:

I, Prester John, by the Grace of God and the strength of our Lord Jesus Christ, king of kings and lord of lords, to his friend Manuel, Governor of the Byzantines, greetings, wishing him health and the continued enjoyment of the divine blessing…I have determined to visit the sepulchre of our Lord with a very large army, in accordance with the glory of our majesty to humble and chastise the enemies of the cross of Christ and to exalt his blessed name.

The Christian rulers were in desperate need of strong, unifying allies. Torn apart by their own feuds, they were also losing ground in the east. The fall of Edessa in 1144 was followed fifty years later by the Crusaders’ loss of Jerusalem. But Prester John’s letter brought with it the breath of salvation and, in describing his realm, conjured up the bliss that was possible on this earth for good, victorious Christians.

When he went to war, Prester John explained, fourteen crosses were carried before him. The crosses were made of gold. They were studded with jewels. Behind each cross was a corps of ten thousand cavalry and behind them one hundred thousand footsoldiers. In Prester John’s provinces were no venomous snakes, no scorpions and no loud frogs. The riverbeds were covered in emeralds and sapphires, topaz and onyx. One river only flowed for three days in the week, allowing it to be crossed on the remaining four. Into another river, which rose in Paradise, plunged great flying dragons with carbuncles in their foreheads; after seventy days the people could go and pluck out the jewels. There was also a great plain, and a stone in the middle, and in the stone a cavity in which water collected that could cure every known ailment (as long as the patient was a sincere follower of Christ). Prester John’s robes were spun from gold by salamanders that lived on a mountain of fire. In his lands, all strangers and travellers were welcome. There were no poor and no thieves. Adultery and greed were unknown. Liars were ostracised. There was no flattery.

Seventy vassals paid Prester John tribute. Yet he also knew humility. He was waited on by kings, but he himself took the title merely of ’Prester’, or priest. When he rode out, a page carried before him a plain wooden cross to represent Christ’s Passion and a vase of soil to remind of his own mortality. His palace was roofed in ebony with windows of crystal. Each day, thirty thousand people sat to eat at tables of gold. The tables were supported on amethyst columns which could prevent drunkenness. In front of his palace was suspended a vast mirror in which the great and magnanimous ruler was able to see at once all that was happening in his kingdom.

Copies of Prester John’s letter were soon circulating the courts of Europe. Scores of translations were made. Manuscripts exist in Anglo-Norman, French, Serbian and Hebrew; five versions have been found in High German. A Welsh translation survives, one in Scots dialect and two different versions in Irish. The Russian translation stirred the thoughts of many a steppe adventurer, and the letter has left echoes in the bylina or folk ballad, Diuk Stepanovich. Prester John enters the Grail myth: as priest-king he was equated with the guardian of the Grail. Sir John Mandeville lifted details of his kingdom for the fictitious account of his own travels. The letter’s images of faith, power and wealth fill the verses of the Renaissance poet Ludovico Ariosto—he describes a mythical flight beyond the Muslim world to the glittering palace of Prester John. With the development of printing, the letter found an even wider public. In France it was in such demand that it went to fourteen editions.

For hundreds of years, Prester John and his kingdom occupied that now-vanished region where the known world recedes and the imaginary one begins. Early mappers like Cosmas Indicopleustes dealt with such places by imposing a satisfying symmetry: the fringes of his map are full of straight lines and right-angles. But in medieval Europe they knew better. The questing spirit of the age placed wonders beyond the horizon—utopias, lost countries, strange creatures, sacred mountains, paradisial kingdoms.

The letter of Prester John is a glorious fake. It is the work, in all likelihood, of a German monk. Like James Macpherson’s Ossian, it achieved popularity by fleshing out a collective fantasy—proof that literature is as adept at wishful thinking as it is at truth. Even as late as the sixteenth century, maps show the area of Ethiopia as the land of Prester John. Once placed in those imaginary regions, it is hard to return to earth.

The lure of Prester John was partly responsible for one of Europe’s most ambitious enterprises. When Henry the Navigator sent his fidalgos down the coast of Africa, he was hoping for an alliance with the great ruler. The Portuguese popular imagination had already been fed by the chapbook Libro del Infante Pedro de Portugal, which included a mythical visit to Prester John by the brother of Henry the Navigator.

The Portuguese weren’t the only ones hunting for Prester

John. A merchant from Ragusa or Dubrovnik, Vincenzo Matteo, was reported to be on his trail. The Dutch thought the Zambezi a possible route to the kingdom, and called it Prester John’s river. But it was the Portuguese who were the most dogged. In 1487 King John II despatched an envoy from Lisbon overland to find Prester John. He reached the Ethiopian court, the first recorded European to do so, but he never returned.

It is another Portuguese, Francisco Alvares, who gives us the earliest report of Prester John. In 1520 he and his party arrived in Ethiopia from Goa. After months of travelling they came to the king’s camp. They had to wait days for an audience. At last the summons came. They were shown in behind a set of curtains. Beyond these curtains were others, made of even finer cloth. Behind them was a room laid with beautiful carpets and a dais which was concealed behind a further set of curtains. When these were drawn back, there he was—King Lebna Dengel. On his head was a great crown of gold and silver, and in his hand was a silver cross. A veil of blue taffeta covered his mouth and beard, and his robes were of gold brocade.

Even so, Lebna Dengel and his mountain kingdom were something of a disappointment. The Ethiopians were clearly in no position to launch a crusade; they themselves were too busy trying to keep the khanates of the plains from invading. This Prester John was certainly Christian, but he was no saviour, and his people were frankly pretty poor.

The world lost a little of its colour. In Portugal, millennial enthusiasts transferred their hopes to Sebastianism, the cult of the conquering ascetic, the martyr-king Sebastian I who succeeded in returning from the dead on four separate occasions.

Not for the first time, nor the last, Ethiopia had helped give solid form to rumour. The Ethiopians themselves were as baffled then by this ’Prester John’ as they have been more recently by the Rastafarians’ elevation of Haile Selassie. In 1441, an Ethiopian delegation to Rome became quite irritated with their interviewers: ‘We are from Ethiopia. Our king is Zara Yaqob. Why do you call him Prester John?’

Before leaving the monastery of Yimrehanna Krestos we called in on Abba Gobeze—‘herbalist, wise teacher, old man’, according to the priest.

His hut was dark and hot. He was lying on his bed. He was gazing up into the corrugated iron roof. From a crossbeam of eucalyptus hung his clothes. He was in a good mood. His brother had come to see him from Lalibela and brought news and some medicine. His brother was not a monk but a priest, and he sat on a stool by his bed.

First on one elbow, then another, Abba Gobeze raised himself up. He glanced at me; he had wonderfully hooded eyes which, once seen, made you want to hear his every word. He stretched up his hand and from the beam above drew down a shirt.

‘Yimrehanna Krestos, he is a saint and a king, and also a priest.’ He spoke faintly. ‘Ethiopia is always the representative of God…Foreigners are now coming to Lalibela to learn…the whole world will learn from Ethiopia…’

He paused to arrange the shirt on his lap, and laughed at himself: ‘We monks, we are dead people. We have no physical life.’

His brother nodded proudly as if to say: He is a monk, you understand, a hero of the war between world and spirit.

Abba Gobeze put his hand-cross on the blanket. ‘Yes, we just hold our lives in our hand. Death is always close beside us.’

Death certainly did not seem far away for old Abba Gobeze. His body had little flesh on it. After doing up each button he paused to catch his breath. His shoulders rose with the effort. Once the shirt was on, he took down another. This one went on more quickly. He swung his legs down. They didn’t quite reach the floor, and he spent a moment looking at his toes.

‘Our bodies are nothing!’

Then he pulled down a jersey. He pulled down a pair of trousers and a belt. With each layer his strength increased. He ran his hand playfully through the remaining clothes. Most were rags, strips of torn green serge, corners of brown homespun. He took another pair of trousers and pulled them on over the first. He began to sing. ‘Yejamarish inje yecharesech…dum-da-yesh…da-yesh…er…’

His brother said, in a stage whisper: ‘He has been very unwell.’

Abba Gobeze couldn’t remember the rest of the song. ‘My brothers taught it to me. They went to the coronation of His Imperial Majesty. It was in Addis. I was too young to go.’

‘We were both too young to go,’ echoed his brother. ‘In fact, I wasn’t born.’

‘Are your family from this region?’ I asked.

‘Always from here!’ boomed Abba Gobeze. ‘Father was a priest, grandfather was a priest. All priests—’

‘They were all priests. Always priests!’

Abba Gobeze scowled at his brother. ‘My children are not priests. Not one.’

‘Children, Abba?’ I asked. ‘But you’re a monk?’

‘I became a monk when my wife died. My children are in Addis now. They are teachers, lawyers, people like that.’

‘One of them’s a doctor!’ beamed his brother.

‘Would you rather they had been priests?’

‘Yes, of course,’ the Abba’s brother nodded.

‘No,’ countered Abba Gobeze. ‘Look at us—we’re just ignorant. When we were young we were only looking after cattle and sheep. But they are educated.’

He looked up. From the cross-beam he took down the final piece of his dress—a cotton scarf of such age that it had reverted to the colour of the earth itself. Bandaging it around his head, he began again to sing.

He was still singing when we left. His brother saw us to the door and out into the midday sun. He pointed out the road ahead and we followed it down into the valley, rising and falling with it over a series of rounded hills.

5

It was late in the afternoon when we reached the rock-hewn church of Bilbala Giorgis.

‘Very holy place!’ With his dula, Makonnen pointed to the traffic of bees around a blind window. ‘Their honey—you must take it for illness of legs, for illness of the stomach, and—’ he tapped his temple ‘- illness of the head.’

A man sat alone in front of the church. He was pestling the red tufa to granules.

‘What is that used for?’ I asked him.

He looked at our mules and our baggage. ‘Men take this one to prevent journey-accident.’

‘Usshi, usshi,‘ I conceded, smiling.

I bought a cup of the powder and put it in water. I stirred it with a pencil, drank it and passed the cup to Hiluf. It tasted of, well, ground-up rock.

‘Do you think that will see us to Aksum?’

‘Aksum?’ The man frowned and shook his head. ‘You’ll need more.’ He watched me fill a film canister with the dust. ’The people who took it to fight the Italians or the rebels—those who took the soil always came back. Always.’

Below the church was Bilbala itself. It was a brown and dusty town. The buildings were brown and dusty, the road that split the buildings was brown and dusty, and the children who played in it were brown and dusty. The only colour was the orange and green of plastic bottles hanging outside a store.

We pitched our tent in the grounds of the town’s clinic. A sign outside, in Amharic and English, urged RESPONSIBLE REPRODUCTIVE BEHAVIOUR.

Darkness fell upon Bilbala with a series of shouts, ox-bellows and baby-wails. We sat with the clinic guard. He was an elderly man and had fought for the rebels.

‘We killed many Derg soldiers, many,’ he recalled. ‘Some of them were even my neighbours.’ He had a warm and friendly face.

I spread out the maps on the clinic’s concrete verandah. The light from my head-lamp picked out Bilbala and Amda Worq, and between them several inches of alarming gradients. Tigray and Aksum were a whole yard away in the darkness—and Lalibela just a thumbnail south of Bilbala. For all the aches and sweat, we’d done nothing. Folding away the map, I let the word ‘bus’ seep into my forward planning.

At dawn two sets of headlights raked across the scrub beyond Bilbala and bumped away to the south. In single file we climbed the low embankment and crunched across the gravel of the main road. The mules slid down the other side, and trotted ahead with a jangle of cooking pots. The air was crisp. Behind us, the fingers of the sun stretched high above the ridge of Abune Josef. We headed north-west into the hills. The path was a shadow of a path. It followed a series of gentle valleys. Sometimes it disappeared altogether.

Bisrat hummed quietly as he walked. He was taller than Makonnen and had a very gentle manner. He walked with soft slow steps but covered the ground at a great pace.

Soon after midday we reached a shallow gorge. It was too hot to carry on; in the shade of some ironwood trees I called a halt.

Makonnen unloaded the mules. He fell asleep against the bags. I lay back and enjoyed one of walking’s simple rewards: gazing up at the sky. It glowed deep blue between the leaves. A bird was going puk-puk-puk…puk-puk-puk…It took a while before I spotted its blood-red throat: double-toothed barbet, according to my Birds of Eastern Africa. I dozed off.

Bisrat was busy prodding at the ground with a stick when I woke. He had an expression of childlike innocence. I found myself hoping that everything was OK for him. As I watched, a faint smile spread across his face.

‘What are you thinking, Bisrat?’

‘It’s all right. I’m not thinking anything.’

He carried on with his prodding.

‘Were you born in Lalibela?’

‘I was born there, yes.’

‘Do you have family?’

‘I have five children. Three brothers, two girls. My wife is dead.’

‘What land do you have?’

‘Three timat. But it’s not good land. It’s stony.’

‘What can you grow?’

‘Only barley and teff.’

‘Is it steep?’

‘It’s half steep and half flat.’

‘Enough for consumption?’

He shook his head. ‘I collect relief food for two months.’

‘And is this mule yours?’

‘No.’

Bisrat had no livestock at all. Until recently he had had no land either. He had always worked for others. But when the Derg fell he was given land—three timat of land that no one else wanted.

He gave me a look of genuine gratitude. ‘My life is better now, thanks to God.’

Some way further on, we spotted the round roof of a church. Its compound was bordered by euphorbia—not the candelabra euphorbia but the k’inch’ib tree - Euphorbia tirucallii—known as ‘finger cactus’ for its fat succulent leaves.

A couple of priests were reclining in its shade; they were an elderly priest and a young priest. Two laymen reclined with them, and one of the laymen, it turned out, was having a little trouble with his daughter.

‘I have found someone for her. He comes from Tara. But she will not have him.’

‘Why not?’

‘She wants to go to Bilbala to work.’

‘She is throwing her life away!’ said the young priest; he was very interested in two pebbles by his feet.

‘I told her, I told her.’

‘That is good.’

The men were all agreed that the girl needed correcting, and in their agreement they lapsed into a satisfied silence.

‘What is happening? In the old days girls were afraid.’

‘They won’t do grinding now.’

‘The government tells us a girl cannot marry until she is eighteen.’

‘You cannot expect a girl to keep her virginity until then.’

‘Now if you show her your back for one minute,’ said the old priest, ’a girl will throw away her virginity.’

‘It is better if they marry young.’

‘Eleven is the best age.’

They lapsed into another satisfied silence. Across the valley, a man was driving two oxen to plough.

I asked the men: ‘Do foreigners ever come here?’

‘Foreigners?’

‘Foreigners have never been here.’

‘I saw foreigners once,’ said the elderly priest. ‘In Lalibela. They looked very worried.’

‘They were probably ill,’ concluded the man with the troublesome daughter.

The young priest nodded. ‘Ill,’ he muttered. He showed no interest at all in his first foreigner. He was trying to arrange the pebbles on a flat stone, but they kept slipping off.

The way to Amda Worq took us to the edge of another gorge, much deeper than the first. The path narrowed and we were dropping down through rock-chutes, then along the cliff in a steep diagonal. We could see the same line in the path on the opposite side. Far below was a corridor of pale shingle. Loose stones chinked like broken china at our feet. The rock was cut back in places where the water cascaded down the cliff. But there was no water now. We jumped the last few feet onto pebbles and the mules were pressing their nostrils to the green trickle which was all that remained of the river.

We had a problem climbing out of the gorge. The mules reached a slope of bare rock. Their hooves splayed when they tried it. They slid back. Bisrat and Makonnen freed them of their loads. I looked at the angle of the rock face and thought: this is impossible. Hiluf shook his head. So what now? This was the only path. There were no bridges—the Sekota road was a day’s walk in the wrong direction. In the rains the entire area was cut off.

The first mule tried again—and slipped back. Bisrat put a rope around her halter and tugged. Makonnen pushed from below. Three, four steps up. She sidestepped, away from Makonnen. Then they were both sliding. Below them was a gully which dropped sheer to the river below. Makonnen cried out. Bisrat yanked. The mule stretched her chin but her legs were floundering. Makonnen was on his knees, on the very edge of the gully. Bisrat pulled again. ‘Ayzore! Ayzore!’ One of her sliding feet gained purchase. Then the others. The second mule followed more easily.

Makonnen was grinning as he reloaded. Relief drove a monologue, delivered in an intermittent falsetto. ‘Oh be praised, Mother of God…keep us safe from danger and bless this road which is so steep…which is so difficult…oh Lord, this terrible road, it is too steep.’ His hands were shaking.

Above the cliff, the path levelled out. It crossed an area of terraced plots; we were joined by a man with a mattock over his shoulder. He saw the sweat covering my face and neck.

‘We were born to suffer on these roads. But why the farenj?’

His village was a speckle of brown huts high above us. Twenty or thirty people gathered as we stepped between brush fences. A young woman served us tella from a cool earthenware jug. She had a certain way of holding the jug and half-hiding her face. Makonnen held out his mug to refill; he was still animated from earlier, and he gave her a conquering smile.

It was already evening when we cleared the ridge. A cold wind swept up to meet us. A whole new world opened at our feet—grey cliffs and islands of yellowy fields wherever the ground was level enough. To the west, cloud hid the late sun. The strip of sky beneath was a fierce liquid orange.

‘Hard land,’ mused Bisrat, letting out a low whistle. ‘Hard land.’

Just below was a lone pair of huts. Above the wind, I said: ‘What about there, Hiluf?’

‘We’ll send the others ahead.’

‘They might object to me?’

‘Also me!’

Bisrat and Makonnen came back flanking a wiry old man called Teshome. It was all fine. We led the mules through a gap in the fence. We bought feed from Teshome and put up the tent.

I sat and loosened my boots. This was a lot tougher than I’d expected. The relentless up and down: up, when each step was an effort; and down, when your knees were constantly flexed and you had to watch every footfall on the bare rock, or on the loose sliding stones.

I took a long swig of water. Today’s intake: three and a half litres. And to eat: a few biscuits at midday; in the morning, half a bowl of last night’s spaghetti; now some packet soup and a tin of sardines. I could feel the dizziness from too much sun. I unpacked the stove and again the subversive thought came: buses—rattling boneshakers, rolling kilns on wheels, happily pushing back the miles towards Aksum!

Later, after the sun and the temperature had dropped, we sat with Teshome in the moonlight. Two families lived up here—two old men, two elderly women, two young women and a very large number of children. The young men, said Teshome, had taken the livestock to the lowlands.

In 1984, when the BBC first aired footage of the Korem feeding camp, many of those staring faces came from this area. The Derg had lost the entire region to the rebels. But the rebels could not cope with the famine. I asked Teshome about that time. In the Ethiopian calendar it was 1977.

‘Sabat-sabat?’ He stared at me without expression. ‘You must not even talk of it.’

‘How was last year’s harvest?’

‘The crop was destroyed by hail.’

He looked away. In the pale light, his profile was impassive. ‘My God,’ he hissed, ‘save us, have mercy upon us.’

The next morning we left early. Teshome walked with us. The descent continued in a series of giant steps. A troupe of gelada baboons was feeding below. Teshome picked up a handful of rocks and we all joined him, pitching the rocks and shouting. The baboons loped off across the stubble.

We said goodbye to Teshome.

‘You will reach Arzilo tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Amda Worq is not half a day from there.’

We dropped to the next layer of terraces. When I looked up Teshome was still there above the cliff, watching us go. The baboons were waiting in the trees.

We were resting at the top of a pass. The mules were nosing the dust for food when we heard whistling from below. It was a man with a goat. Over his back was a masenqo, a single-stringed fiddle and bow.

He joined us in the shade and, placing the masenqo between his knees, looked at each one of us. Then he started to play.

‘People travelled far like the clouds but could not find the way back to their home. Wherever we may wander Please God make sure we find our way home So that we may not perish in the desert.’

He was an azmari, one of a caste of wandering musicians. He had been playing at a three-day wedding; the goat was his payment. Now he was on his way to another wedding near Bilbala.

‘The best sorghum can be found in the region of Yejju. A man with a good baby will forever be remembered by that child.’

He gave an ambiguous grin. Ambiguity is the azmaris‘ stock in trade, the basis of their verses. It is also what makes the azmaris the most revealing aspect of all Ethiopian secular culture. Some of their verses are traditional, some direct, some spontaneous compositions about those present. But the most popular carry in them a heavy load of meanings, puns and allusions—and the heavier the better. ‘Weighty verses,’ goes the Amharic saying, ‘warm the insides like warm clothing.’

This style of figurative song has its own figurative name—samenna worq (’wax and gold’). To sculpt a gold figure, a clay cast is formed around a wax representation. The cast is heated, the wax pours out and the gold is poured in; once cooled, the cast is broken and the gold figure uncovered. Likewise azmaris compose verses that have an initial ‘wax’ meaning, and a more hidden ‘gold’ meaning. (For those who find ‘wax and gold’ too simple, there is an even trickier form known as wasta wayra—‘inside the olive tree’, olive bark being a very different colour to the wood.)

The anthropologist Donald Levine named his classic Amhara ethnography simply Wax and Gold. Working in prerevolutionary Ethiopia, he saw the verses as central to an appreciation of an entire way of thinking. ‘Wax and gold represents more than a principle of poetic composition and a method of spiritual gymnastics…Samenna worq colours the entire fabric of traditional Amhara life’.

He quotes an example:

‘Etsa balas balto addam kanfareshe Madhene alam lebe tasaqala-leshe.’ (Since Adam—your lip did eat of that tree The Saviour—my heart has been hung up for thee.)

This is pure wax and gold, in which the two meanings sit one above the other—Adam/lip and Saviour/heart. The wax meaning is: Because Adam ate of the Tree of Knowledge/The Saviour of the World has been crucified for you. The gold meaning shimmers beneath. It depends on the verb tasaqala being a synonym for ‘was crucified’ and ‘is anxious to be near’. So listeners would smirk when behind this piety they heard: ‘Because of your [tempting] lips/My heart is anxious to be near you.’

While celebrating its complexity, Levine saw qene and samenna worq as an obstacle to progress in Ethiopia: ‘nothing could be more at odds with the ethos of modernisation than a cult of ambiguity…modern Western culture rests on a commitment to unambiguous communication’. At the time of his work, in the 1960s, ethnography was relying more and more on linguistics. And the most unambiguous language of all was about to come into its own: binary, the language of computers. In Ethiopia, the revolution was only a decade away.

The azmari pressed his ear to the sound box. He retuned the horsehair string.

‘The home of the beauty of Rayanz is at the banks of the Abbay river

His chest burns like the cooking-pan…’

The next verse was a little more direct:

‘Death is a horse always riding towards us Let’s eat and drink and keep that horse away.’

So we ate—I produced bread and biscuits, and water. I also fished out some money.

‘Whisky refreshes—beer cleans the blood It’s very good to play to Father Farenj! May God bless this green place where I met Father Farenj!’

The azmari untied the goat, put the masenqo over his back and set off southwards. We had walked on some way before Makonnen let out a sudden squeal of pleasure.

‘Father Farenj! Father Farenj!’ he mocked. ‘You—Father Farenj! With your pocket full of money!’

We dropped down into a third gorge. As we crossed the river and climbed up the first steep section we came across a boy half-sitting and half-lying beneath a bush. It was very hot. The sweat glistened on his cheek. Two flies were angled at the caruncle of one eye. He had malaria.

‘Leave me.’

‘You can’t stay down here,’ urged Hiluf. ‘Night is coming.’

‘Leave me…’

His chin dropped to his chest. We gave him water. We took him by the arms. Once on his feet he was able to walk.

‘Eat.’ Hiluf pressed biscuits on him. ‘You don’t feel hungry but you must eat.’ He was in no doubt that the boy would die if left in the gorge.

He was young—in his late teens—and his story was this. He and a few others had been taking grain to the mill. It was a good half-day walk. They were on their way back when the fever set in. He had dropped behind. Those with him wanted to get out of the gorge before dark. They drove on the donkeys and were soon out of sight.

He was now delirious. It was dusk by the time we reached his village. We saw him off to his hut and arranged to stay the night in another compound. It turned out to belong to one of those who had gone to the mill.

‘Why didn’t you go back for him?’ I asked. ‘He had no water, no food.’

‘It’s all right. We spoke to his relations. They were about to go back and collect him.’

In the morning we went to see him. He was still feverish. He was shy and grateful. But it turned out he was a hired hand. His own family, with not enough land to support him, lived two days’ walk away. There were no relations to go back. He was simply abandoned.

The next day we reached the bottom of the deepest gorge. Bisrat and Makonnen watered the mules and I lay on a slab of flood-smoothed granite. We were in shadow. High above me I could see sunlight catching tufts of clifftop grass.

The air was still. Heat pressed down into the narrow space between the cliffs. It was a heavy heat, not the familiar thin heat of the highlands. These chasms were like another element. Beneath them is a region known as maq where the bodies of sinners fall after burial (in Ge’ez, the Hebrew equivalent ‘Sheol’ is also used). Down there too is weqniyanos, the vast primal ocean into which flow all the rivers of the world. There was a time, according to the Ethiopians, when the earth itself was entirely smooth—but then came the flood, and in its wake it left the broken terrain that man struggles to live in now.

Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth puts forward a similar notion. I had stumbled on this wonderful piece of seventeenth-century literature years earlier in the British Library. I was chasing a reference to something called ‘the Abyssinian Philosophy’—which turned out not to be a piece of forgotten Ethiopian wisdom but a description of Burnet’s theory, turning as it did on the role of the ’abyss’.

Several things convinced me to carry on with Burnet. Could a notion of the ‘abyss’ have crept into the perception and spelling of Abyssinia, the name used for Ethiopia for many centuries? Was this another instance of Ethiopia representing an idea as much as a place? I was also hooked by Burnet’s extravagant imagery, his prose, and a sense of that heady freedom of thought possible in the early years of the Enlightenment when the world was still waiting to reveal its secrets.

In 1711 Joseph Addison discovered Burnet’s writings, and he too was ecstatic. In the Spectator

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