In Search of King Solomon’s Mines

‘There is little doubt that Abyssinia is the real emporium of Ophir.’

Frank Hayter,The Gold of Ethiopia

IN 1894, TWO engineers sought an audience with Emperor Menelik II, who had recently moved Ethiopia’s capital from Ankober to Addis Ababa. One was Swiss, the other French. They had realized that Menelik’s new capital would only expand if it were connected to the Red Sea coast; and so they proposed building a fabulous railway, linking Addis Ababa with the French port of Djibouti. The project would be a masterpiece of engineering skill. Never one to shun a modern idea, Menelik was intrigued by the scheme. But before he would agree to it, he set the two Europeans a task to test their expertise. They were confined to a room under armed guard, given some twine, an awl, a knife and a sheet of tanned leather, and ordered to make a pair of shoes before the sun rose at dawn. The engineers unpicked their own shoes and used them as patterns. They worked all night and, as the first rays of light swept across the capital, they presented the Emperor with a fine pair of leather shoes. Menelik pledged his support and three years later the railway was built.

In the century since its completion, the railway has gradually decayed. In Ethiopia, if something breaks it stays broken. Now the paint on the railway carriages is peeling and the floorboards have cracked. The light-fittings have been stolen, the clock dials have lost their hands and the bolts have lost their nuts. Even the stationmasters’ whistles no longer whistle. Packs of wild dogs feed on the rats which eat the cockroaches, which feast on the larvae which infest the wooden boards of the rolling stock.

Samson and I turned up at the station in time to watch the third-class passengers being whipped into line with batons. As far as the police were concerned, third class were fair game. When the railway police had finished beating their passengers into submission, they turned their attention to the beggars. Addis Ababa is awash with desperate supplicants, lured from the countryside by the dream of streets paved with gold.

I knew the journey to Harar was going to be bad when the train broke down three minutes after leaving Addis Ababa station. Samson, who had not been on a train before, pleaded with me to jump out into the sidings while we still had a chance to escape. Our cramped carriage was packed with a troop of riotous Somalis, and Samson was not happy. Understanding their language was, he said, a curse greater than any other imaginable. But the Somalis were nothing compared to the rain. The carriage leaked like a rusting sieve. In the summer such ventilation must be a boon, but during the heavy rains it soon drives you wild. Samson kept getting up to rearrange himself, frantic at the thought that the rain might drip on to his cherished Bible.

I had promised him a considerable wage if he would lead me to the gold mines. I suspected I’d kick myself later for hiring someone about whom I knew so little, but Samson had agreed willingly and he seemed amiable enough, if a little preoccupied with the Devil and biblical passages. Leaving his brother to look after the taxi, he packed a plastic carrier bag with a few old clothes and waved his girlfriend goodbye.

Before heading south to Samson’s ancestral home, we would make a detour. I wanted to visit the walled town of Harar in the east, for it is there that hyenas are said to guard King Solomon’s gold.

Three hours after breaking down, the train came alive, pulling out through the endless shantytowns that surround the capital. Corrugated iron shacks stretched to the horizon, slotted together like tinplate toys. A band of shoeless children were playing hide-and-seek in thickets of bamboo while their older sisters thrashed clothes on a rock in a stagnant pool. Five men were drinking beer from dark brown bottles beneath a eucalyptus tree. A blind man hobbled down to the tracks to relieve himself. As the train struggled to gather speed, the stench of raw sewage and methane became overpowering.

I found myself watching the Somalis in fascination. Quite different from the Ethiopians, who frown on boisterous behaviour, they spent the journey passing a demijohn of hard liquor around. When they were not drinking they sang, and when they were not singing, they chewed qat, the mildly narcotic leaf that is so popular in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia. Periodically Samson would look up from his Bible and mutter darkly. He said they would rob us in the night and might even throw us out of the train altogether. Somalis, he said, are in league with the Devil.

Just before dusk, the rain eased and allowed the dying sun to illuminate a mass of grey clouds on the horizon. Ten minutes later we were sitting in total darkness. The carriage’s lights had long ago burnt out. As the hours slipped by, our eyes adjusted to the darkness, and the Somalis’ unruliness reached new heights. One man stood up and urinated the length of the aisle. Then two others had a competition to see how far they could spit. The man sitting across from us, a soft-spoken engineer with a cross pinned to his lapel, informed me that they were not Christians. The depraved conduct of the Somalis was not their fault, he said, but that of their religion.

Samson had brought out a candle stub and was reading the Psalms by its flickering light. He promised to stay awake, to ensure that the Somalis kept their hands off our baggage and our throats. I drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming of the hyenas of Harar and their cache of treasure.

By nine o’clock the next morning the Somalis had passed out, and the sun was burning high above a desert. I gazed through the window, still half asleep, and thanked God for the change in climate. Low thorn trees and cacti threw shadows across the panorama of sand. Rabbits scuttled about in search of food. We passed a huge herd of camels hobbled near the tracks, their clay-coloured hides reflecting the light. There were camel calves, too, tied together like convicts in a chain. When the carriage halted at a small station, herdsmen swarmed up to the windows, selling fresh camel milk and salted cheese. I bought some of the milk, which was passed up in an old tin can. It was still warm.

Twenty-six hours after leaving the capital, we pulled into the terminus at Dire Dawa. Given the state of the track and the train, it was a miracle that we had arrived at all.

As usual, I had far too much luggage with me. I had left most of my books in Addis Ababa, selecting only a few at random to read along the way. Even so, I was surrounded by military canvas sacks full of supplies. I like to be prepared for any eventuality. What I was not prepared for was a full luggage inspection. All alighting passengers were frisked before they could leave the station and every piece of luggage was searched by a team of officious female guards. They were looking for contraband. When I had heaved my belongings on to the inspection table, all the guards ran over to rifle through them. I might not have had any contraband, but I did have all manner of imported curiosities, including an electric razor and an inflatable camping chair. The chair was viewed with great suspicion and I was ordered to inflate it. Then, to my great annoyance, it was confiscated.

I was eager to press on to Harar, but Samson had fallen into conversation with a fruit-seller on the station platform. The man spoke of an immense cave on the outskirts of Dire Dawa, in which gold had once been mined. Deciding to investigate further we took rooms at the Hotel Ras and then made a beeline for breakfast. The hotel had seen better days. The telephones had lost their dials and the ceiling fans were missing their blades. The lavatories leaked, and the floor tiles were hideously chipped. We took seats at one end of the dining-room and ordered a large quantity of buttered toast. Samson seemed very happy and said that he always tried to stay in hotels when he had the chance. I asked which was his favourite hotel. Rubbing his eyes with his thumbs, he confessed that he had not stayed in one before.

I am not sure why, but caves and gold tend to go hand in hand. Throughout Africa, Arabia and the Indian subcontinent, I’ve come across snippets of folklore which link the two firmly together. Underground caverns are of course the perfect place to hide treasure, just as they’re a good starting-point for digging shafts to reach gold-bearing veins. Of all the stories I have heard on the subject of caves and gold, the strangest was related by my father in his first travel book, Destination Mecca.

Following Arab folklore, which says that Solomon took gold from the region north of Port Sudan, he prepared for an extensive search. Everyone he met on the Red Sea coast alerted him to the dangers he would face. Some warned of bandits. Others told him to beware of the Hadendowa tribe whom the British called ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzies’ during their occupation of Sudan. They were reputed to hack off the limbs of intruders for sport. Still others spoke of death through thirst or hunger, or at the hand of supernatural forces. Undeterred, my father journeyed up the Red Sea coast. He hoped to meet a lone Irishman who had supposedly spent the previous twenty years prospecting the area for gold. He never found the Irishman but, after a long search, he came across hundreds of immense slag heaps that reminded him of the piles of coal tailings in Yorkshire. He reckoned they were probably thousands of years old and that the ancient Egyptians and perhaps Solomon’s legions had mined gold in the area.

Not far from the slag heaps, he found a series of tunnels, many running more than three hundred feet into the ground. ‘Once inside the workings,’ he wrote, ‘there is something eerie about the silent maze of intersecting galleries, the abandoned piles of earthenware crucibles, the strange silence of the place.’

But more peculiar still was the absence of carbon on the walls. Lamps or burning torches would have been required to illuminate the long tunnels and shafts, and they would have left a residue of carbon. When my father asked local people about the mines, they all gave the same reply. Obviously there was no sign of carbon, they said, because these mines were worked night and day by Solomon’s army of jinn.

After breakfast Samson and I left the hotel, walked past the Coca Cola factory and made our way to the bazaar. On either side of it were hundreds of refugee tents but in the bazaar itself business was thriving. The stalls were piled high with dried ginger and spices, garlic and onions, rose-water, dried dates and limes, and on every table sticks of sandalwood incense were burning to ward off the flies.

Now and again Samson would stop to ask a stallholder about the legend of the cave filled with gold. Everyone he spoke to nodded vigorously. There was a legend, they said, and there was a cave filled with treasure. They were certain of that much. But when I enquired where the cave could be found, they swished at the flies and shook their heads.

We pressed deeper into the bazaar. The entire market was roofed with a patchwork of sacking, but it didn’t keep out the heat or the flies. Children were whipping their homemade hoops through the streets past yet more stalls. I took a close look at the merchandise. As well as spices and fruit and vegetables, there were sacks of flour and oil donated by US Aid. Thousands of empty tin cans were on sale as well, and rusting car parts, tattered clothing and a sea of broken telephones, bicycles, kettles and shoes.

A boy in a bright red shirt said he knew the cave. It wasn’t far and he would take us if his friend could tag along as well. What about the treasure? The boys shook their heads. No one ever went down there, they said, on account of the bats.

Twenty minutes later, after rambling through a maze of backstreets and an enclosure filled with goats, we found ourselves looking down on a substantial crater that led to a wide-mouthed cave. From the smell it was evident that the crater and the front part of the cave were used as a public lavatory. Reluctantly, we climbed down.

One of the boys’ older brothers offered to take us deep into the cave if we bought an old rubber boot and a cup of petrol. He needed these for a fire, which would provide light and keep away the bats. I handed over funds, and someone was sent to fetch the required materials.

I was ready to endure hardship in my quest for Solomon’s mines but I’d not expected the first obstacle to be so unpleasant. The boy in the red shirt said it was the refugees who used the cave entrance as a lavatory. He didn’t know where exactly they’d come from, but he said they squatted night and day.

Eventually the wellington boot arrived, along with a cup of petrol and a metal tray. The oldest boy took charge. First he ripped the rubber boot into strips. Then he put the strips on the tray, poured the petrol over them, and struck a match. A few seconds later, the strips of boot were alight and belching black smoke. By now a crowd of children had joined us down in the hole. None of them seemed to mind sliding around in the faeces and choking in the smoke. They were determined not to miss the opportunity of watching a foreigner make a fool of himself.

The blazing boot was carried ceremoniously into the cavern. Samson and I kept close behind. Thousands of orange-yellow eyes shone from the walls like stars on a clear night, but as soon as the first fumes billowed into the chamber all hell broke loose. Suddenly we were attacked by screaming harpies, diving, swooping and flapping, their leathery wings bombarding us from every direction. Then the rubber boot, which had heated the tray to an industrial temperature, went out, plunging us into darkness. Provoked beyond all reason, the bats redoubled their attack. I stood stock-still, hands drawn over my face to protect my eyes, trying desperately not to panic.

Another boot was brought into the cave and ignited. I called out to Samson. Could he see any mine-shafts leading off or any sign of gold? Choking, he pointed to the far wall of the cavern. I peered through the mass of wings and dense smoke. In the lowest part of the wall there appeared to be a doorway which had long since been filled in with neatly cut blocks of stone. The boy in the red shirt said that a hermit used to live in the cave and that he drew paintings on the walls in bats’ blood. Behind the doorway there was a room, and in the room was the hermit’s skeleton. Local people had bricked up the doorway when the hermit died.

The children didn’t know whether the hermit had been secretly searching for gold. What about the refugees? Had they ever been found digging for gold? The boys didn’t know that either. The refugees were very poor, they replied, in fact so poor that they lived in tattered tents and had almost no food—which made me wonder how such an ill-fed people could produce such monstrous amounts of sewage.

After a cold shower back at the Hotel Ras, we took our places in the dining-room once again. The waiter watched me show Samson how a formal table is laid, with multiple pieces of cutlery. He leaned over and adjusted the fly-paper which hung above our table. His shirt had become discoloured over time and his bow tie was frayed and bleached from years of wear.

‘We used to lay the table like that,’ he said wistfully. ‘That was in the old days, in 1965, when the Hotel Ras was a jewel. Of course I was a young man then, a foolish young man. But I remember those times. The parties, the music, the fine foreign food.’

We ordered spaghetti and boiled potatoes, and the old waiter hurried off to serve a table of rowdy Russians on the other side of the room. I wondered what business had brought them to Dire Dawa. Gold, perhaps. They certainly had a great deal of money to spend, if the number of prostitutes at their table was anything to go by.

Samson tried to count the dead and dying flies cemented to the fly-paper. I looked over at him as he counted energetically, and I congratulated myself. I was pleased with the way he had stood up to the rigours of the cave. He’d hardly complained, even when he realized that, like me, his hair was matted with bat excrement. I suggested we take high-powered torches and return to prize the blocks of stone out of the doorway. A mine-shaft might lie behind the blocked-up entrance. Samson ate his spaghetti without looking up.

‘The cave’s secret is obvious,’ he said. ‘The Devil is waiting behind the doorway. He imprisoned the hermit and would do the same to us. As for the bats, they’re the Devil’s servants.’

Unable to muster support for a second assault on the cave, I told Samson that we’d return to the bats if the hyenas of Harar didn’t live up to expectations. We left our bags at the hotel and then hailed a minibus heading for Harar.

The road up to the walled city had been recently constructed by the Chinese. A sea of crooked-horned cattle ran down the olive-black asphalt as we approached, parting only long enough to allow us through. Like the road on which it drove, the minibus was brand-new and we were the only passengers, which made me suspicious. In a country like Ethiopia no vehicle travels if it’s not laden to bursting. The driver, whose face was tormented by a severe nervous tic, said he had won the vehicle in a game of cards. When I quizzed him why he had no other passengers, he changed the subject, declaring that Harar was the Pearl of Ethiopia. Once I’d set eyes on it, he said, I would weep like a child whose mother had died.

I asked him if he’d ever heard the legend of the hyenas and the gold. He let out a shrill cackle of laughter.

‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘the hyenas—there are thousands of them. They come to the city walls each night, and they take children. Dozens of babies vanish every year. It’s a problem for our peace-loving town.’

He paused to feed the steering-wheel through his hands. ‘There’s little we can do. You see, if you kill a hyena, ten more are born.’

‘Yes, of course, since ancient times. Everyone knows that the hyenas were once men like you and me. They were all in love with the Emir’s most beautiful daughter. Each night they’d try to climb up to her bedroom in the palace. The Emir got so enraged that he turned all the suitors into wretched dogs.’

Most sub-Saharan towns have an air of torpor, brought on by the heat and a general eagerness to relax. But Harar has a distinctly Eastern bustle about it. Everyone was busy. Some were counting money. Others were running errands or making butter by shaking plastic bottles full of milk. Even the lines of lepers were hustling for handouts.

In the market, wide cane baskets brimmed with qat, okra, melons and lentils, mangoes and black-bellied fish. There were cupfuls of peanuts on sale too, and macaroni, blocks of grey salt and prickly pears. The range of fruit and vegetables was impressive, but nothing could compare with the range of contraband.

Shops in Ethiopia generally have only a few meagre goods on sale, little more than basic foods, Chinese cooking-pots, plastic buckets, rubber boots and scouring pads. But Harar’s proximity to Djibouti has made it a refuge for illicit merchandise. The shops were full of the latest widescreen TVs, videos, blue jeans, cartons of Marlboro and bottles of Scotch. Wherever I looked, bales of illegal stock were being off-loaded from trucks.

I tried to imagine what Harar was like when Richard Burton, the Victorian adventurer and linguist, reached the walled city in 1854. The British East India Company had commissioned him to explore the Somali coast and he came in disguise, uncertain whether he would be treated as a guest or as a prisoner. In fact he was the first European to visit the town and not be executed, and he later described his journey in First Footsteps in East Africa.

The backstreets of the old city were crowded. Old men sat playing draughts with upturned bottle caps, reclining on charpoys or sipping glasses of mint tea. Lines of women in traditional Harari pantaloons loitered outside the many mosques, hoping for alms. There were children too, tottering along with great bundles on their heads, savage dogs snapping at their heels. And everywhere there were donkeys and goats, tattered chickens and underfed dairy cows. Doorways led from the narrow streets into courtyards shaded by sprawling acacia trees. Barbers ran cut-throat razors over cheeks, then rubbed kerosene into the skin. Mothers washed clothes in tubs. The faithful prayed in silence, and in every doorway sat bearded men, their mouths stuffed with qat, their eyes glazed like those of the Lotus-Eaters. By early afternoon, most of Harar’s men were in a trance.

A shopkeeper had told us where to find the hyenas. Outside the city wall a crude whitewashed building stood in the shade of a tree. In its courtyard a shrine had been built, and on the shrine a beggar was sleeping. The ground outside the house was littered with hundreds of jaw-bones and sets of front teeth.

In the courtyard a young woman was squatting, picking nits out of her daughter’s hair. She chatted to Samson for a few minutes without looking him in the face. He told me that we had come to the right place: the woman’s husband was a hyena-man. The woman brought us glasses of sweet tea and said her husband Yusuf would return shortly.

Ten minutes later, a fiendish-looking man arrived at the house. Yusuf had thin lips, a greasy complexion and no eyebrows. He was leading a scrawny cow by a rope. I introduced myself and asked him what exactly a hyena-man’s duties involved. He motioned for me to sit and watch. Wasting no time, he sharpened a pair of long knives against each other and led the cow to a spot beneath the tree. He tied a rope around the neck of the animal and bound another around her front feet. A gentle push and the cow was forced to kneel like a convict before an executioner. She let out a mild bellow of protest but seemed resigned to her fate. Yusuf held one of the blades high above the jugular and recited the traditional prayer: ‘Bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim, In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful’. With that he carved the knife into the animal’s neck and a fountain of blood gushed out. The cow collapsed as blood continued to pump on to the ground beneath her. Then, just as I thought the grim event was over, her back legs struck out wildly in a last struggle for life.

Yusuf started to dismember the carcass. He drained the remaining blood into buckets, hacked away the head, carved off the limbs, gouged out the lungs and the offal, and emptied the stomachs of their half-digested grass. Then he chopped the carcass up into small, bite-size chunks.

‘Every night I feed the hyenas,’ he said, ‘just as my father did and his father did before him. My eldest son Abbas will do the same. It is a tradition in our family, a responsibility we pass through the generations.’

‘No!’ he shouted. ‘We only feed them the very best cows, and we kill them in a halal way, bleeding them to death.’

‘If we do not feed them,’ he said, ‘they’ll descend on Harar and carry away all the children.’

‘So many times,’ the hyena-man replied, as his bloody fingers stuffed his mouth with qat. ‘But better I am bitten than our children eaten.’

‘At one time there were so many—a dozen or more. The town was very safe because the hyenas were happy. But now the young don’t want to carry on the duty. They don’t realize the terrible price they will pay. If no one feeds the hyenas, the animals will become enraged and will run wild!’

‘That’s a big worry,’ he replied uneasily. ‘Some people with young children donate money, but it’s not usually enough. You see how we live, like beggars. I spend all my extra money to make sure the hyenas get the very best meat.’

‘These creatures are not mortal,’ Yusuf replied. ‘That’s certain. They are ghosts or jinn. It’s true, they protect Solomon’s golden treasure and keep it from Satan.’

‘Only a lunatic would risk his life to follow the hyenas to their lair,’ Yusuf replied. ‘Any man who has dared to climb down into their burrows has been torn limb from limb.’

Muttering to himself, Yusuf wandered away. Each night, before he feeds a bullock or a cow to the hyenas, he goes off to wash, to collect his thoughts, to pray and to chew a great deal of qat. He asks God to make sure he’s not bitten badly, to keep the hyenas happy, and to protect the city’s children until dawn.

By nine o’clock the moon was high above Harar, casting ivory light over the whitewashed walls of the house. Yusuf had chewed qat since early afternoon, and his eyes were dilated to capacity. The mild amphetamine gave him the strength he needed to face the hyenas.

Before the feeding began, he hurled the buckets of cow’s blood as far as he could over the baked earth outside his house. The hyenas’ sharp sense of smell would quickly alert them to the killing. Then, sitting on an upturned pail, he started to call the animals by name.

At that moment the first hyena appeared. Cowering and snarling, its head hung low, it darted over to where the blood had been thrown and began to lick the ground feverishly; its mottled fur reflecting in the beam of light from my torch, its eyes glistening like shards of crystal. Yusuf spoke to it in a language I did not understand. Then he tossed over a hunk of offal. When I looked again I saw others, many now, their shadowy forms moving through the darkness like phantoms. Whistling, calling names and chanting mysterious words, the hyena-man lured the animals towards him.

As Yusuf skewered a chunk of roughly cut beef on a stick and held it in his teeth, I stepped back from the buckets of meat. Lurching, snapping, the hair on their spines bristling, the hyenas crept forward. More were joining the pack. Before I knew it there were too many to count accurately, at least sixty, perhaps more. One by one they seized the meat from the stick. Then gradually they forgot their fear and seethed around their master, filling the air with the sound of crazed laughter. From time to time greed would get the better of them, and they would turn on each other. For an hour or more Yusuf continued to feed them, until the entire carcass had been devoured.

Before driving back down to Dire Dawa, Samson and I stopped for some food at a small café. All the tables were occupied by men who were smoking, laughing and chewing piles of fresh qat. We asked three or four of them about Yusuf and the hyenas. To my surprise they all said the same thing. They agreed that without fresh meat, the wild dogs would descend on Harar and butcher the town’s infants. They were convinced that the hyenas guard a treasure more fabulous than any other known to man. Sometimes, they said, a hyena is shot and in its ear is found a gold earring. Lastly, they explained that at night, after he has fed them, Yusuf transforms himself into a hyena and runs off with the pack. Until dawn the next day he reigns as the hyena king.

On hearing this we rushed out of the café and down through the narrow streets to the gate in the old city’s wall. Jumping across a ditch we made our way to Yusuf’s house. The smell of offal and blood still lingered beneath the tree where the hyenas had fed. Samson declared that he’d prove that the tales of superstition were a load of nonsense, and so we scoured Yusuf’s home, the courtyard and the surrounding area. But the hyena-man wasn’t there.

Travel in Africa is generally something to be endured rather than enjoyed. The bus-ride back to Addis Ababa was the kind of experience that makes you question the purpose of even the most well-intentioned journey and long for the luxury of home. Shunning the train, I had insisted that we race back to the capital on the local bus. After numerous false starts, the vehicle rolled out of Dire Dawa at walking pace. It was the middle of the night. Very soon it became clear that the bus had severe mechanical problems. The gearbox was badly in need of repair and the bus had no brake pads.

We discussed the hyenas. Samson was convinced that there was no gold mine or hoard of treasure waiting to be found at Harar. To my irritation he declared that the expedition so far had been a waste of time.

‘Gold drives men mad with greed,’ he said. ‘You can see it in their eyes. If there was a treasure,’ he went on, ‘Yusuf would be the first man to kill the hyenas and take it all.’

The man sitting in the row behind us was dressed in a patched boiler-suit with a canary-yellow scarf wound around his throat. He was clearly deranged. For fourteen hours he pretended he was a radio announcer, chattering manically into his thumb. Someone whispered that he’d been a soldier during Mengistu’s regime and that he had been tortured. As the hours passed my sympathy wore thin. The other passengers grew sick of his noise as well. They held an impromptu vote, and then threw him off the moving bus.

We broke down more times than I can remember. At each breakdown the occupants trooped off with all their belongings and sat at the side of the road. At the regular checkpoints the vehicle was searched and searched again. Each time, the passengers would struggle to conceal their contraband—cartons of imported cigarettes, pink Lycra shell-suits, fake Ray Bans and tubs of French margarine.

By local standards the journey was not unusual, but in a dusty village called Hirna something happened which confounded me.

The bus was undergoing repairs at a blacksmith’s stall. Samson had gone off to find some food. I wandered about the village aimlessly and a group of children followed in my wake, taunting me with the usual chorus of ‘Faranji, faranji!’ I hardly looked up, but then I noticed that away from the gaggle of children a boy of about ten was standing all alone. He was barefoot, covered in dirt and dressed in rags like the others. But the strange thing about him was his complexion—he was white. In African countries you often see albinos, but I was sure this boy wasn’t one of them and his appearance brought to mind a newspaper story that I’d once read.

In the 1970s a man and a woman turned up at the US Embassy in Addis Ababa, claiming to be American citizens. They explained in Amharic—they spoke no English—that they were brother and sister and that they had been abandoned by their parents twenty years earlier. The woman was called Tegest Gadessa, and her brother was named Mariam. In the intervening years both had been badly treated and Tegest had been raped on several occasions.

The details of the tale are sketchy, but it seems that their parents were driving alone through the Ethiopian highlands when their vehicle broke down. Some people said they were missionaries, others that their father had a contract to search for oil. The mother and her two children stayed with the vehicle, while the father took to the road in search of help. He was never seen again, probably killed for his wallet and his shoes a few miles on. When the car was attacked by shiftas, bandits, the mother died. The boy and girl were taken to a remote village, sold into slavery and given Ethiopian names.

The loss of awareness of one’s identity, a condition called fugue, is very rare and I might not have given the white boy at Hirna further thought had I not remembered the Gadessas’ story. I called the boy over and gave him some bread. He didn’t speak English or Amharic, only Oromo. The other children said he was sleeping in the open and that he’d arrived in the village six months before. Samson confirmed that his speech was slurred and his knowledge of Oromo only mediocre.

Where were his parents? With the other boys taunting him, he replied with growing apprehension. He didn’t know where his family were, he said. He had been left to fend for himself. I asked him to lift up his tattered shirt. His chest and back, although very grimy, were undeniably white.

The more questions we asked, the more frightened the boy became. I slipped him a wad of birr notes and gave him some more food. Then, bursting into tears, he ran away.

Three toots of the horn warned us the bus was about to leave. There was no time to search for the boy, but I decided to report the incident to the British Embassy when we reached Addis Ababa.

For two more days that accursed brakeless bus inched its way towards the capital. At night we stopped at roadside dens where music blared, warm beer flowed freely and prostitutes caroused with clients. Diesel was heavy on the air, and oily mud thick on our shoes. Outside the dens truck drivers slept beneath their vehicles, wrapped in no more than a shamma, a white cotton shawl.

On the second night we stopped at a particularly vile bar and decided to sit outside instead. A meal of injera, Ethiopian bread, and doro wot, spicy chicken stew, was brought out and set before us. As we ate, Samson talked of his home town of Kebra Mengist, of his family and his beloved girlfriend. Did he plan to marry her? He looked sombre at the question.

‘If God wills it, we will marry,’ he said gloomily, ‘but weddings are expensive. When I mined gold I was rich, but the Devil was inside me. Now that I have returned to God I am penniless.’

After the meal he opened the great Bible at random and started to read. As far as Samson was concerned, a man who didn’t read the Bible had no hope of succeeding at all. He never said so, but I knew he regarded me as an especially wretched case. While he ploughed through the Book of Revelation, I started the life story of an Englishman called Frank Hayter. The book was entitled The Gold of Ethiopia, and it had been published in 1936. With such a title it had seemed an obvious book to buy.

Every few minutes Samson would pause, glance up at the starlit sky, and thank God for walking beside him. Then he’d return to the text, his lips trembling as he mouthed each word. Across the table I had a revelation of my own.

The frontispiece showed a moustachioed Hayter in a pith helmet, a safari shirt and khaki shorts, with a long cigarette-holder between his lips. He was standing against a backdrop of a giant leopard skin. I started to read, and by the end of the first chapter I was hooked.

Frank Hayter was born in 1902, into a farming family on the Welsh borders. From his earliest youth he dreamt of becoming a great white hunter and of travelling to the Dark Continent. The first step towards his goal came when he got a job at the London Zoo as a taxidermist. He took pride in his work and was thrilled when he was selected for a special African expedition. He was to travel to the Abyssinian highlands to collect a hundred baboons for the zoo.

In 1924 Hayter took the boat-train to Marseilles, and then a steamer on to Djibouti. There he caught the train to Dire Dawa, where he made his base. In those days the now quiet railway town was full of shady characters. Greek and Armenian merchants ran every type of scam, and Danakil warriors would meander in from the desert, shields held tight across their chests, testicles dangling round their necks. Hayter even came across the resplendent entourage of the socialite and traveller Rosita Forbes, camped out on the outskirts of Harar.

After buying guns and supplies, and hiring guides and camels, Hayter and his small caravan set out across the desert towards Afar. By day the party was ravaged by heat. At nightfall the jackals arrived. Eventually they reached marshland. ‘For three hideous days, and three even more hideous nights,’ Hayter wrote, ‘we were in those reeking, fever-stricken swamps, moving not mile by mile, but foot by foot.’

While trapped in the marshes, the caravan was ambushed by Danakils, who were eager to add fresh trophies to their necks. Undaunted, Hayter forced his men to charge through the warriors’ lines. Several were slain and most of the supplies were lost. Remarkably, Hayter managed to complete his mission, rounding up a hundred Abyssinian baboons. But as they were carried away, a monk put a curse on Hayter for stealing sacred animals. Thinking nothing of it, Hayter loaded the baboons on to a ship bound for London. The animals’ crates were lashed to the deck but one night a storm blew up. The waves that broke over the ship split many of the crates, so freeing the baboons which ran wild. The curse had begun to take effect.

In the years that followed, Hayter returned time and again to Ethiopia. He was bewitched by the country. Travelling to the most distant outposts, he struggled to earn a living. He worked as a rat-catcher, as a rare butterfly hunter, as a muleteer and as a debt-collector, but it was as a gold prospector that he made his name.

The 1920s were buoyant times in Ethiopia. Although Menelik II had sought to open up his kingdom to the outside world and to modernize it, the economy was still largely feudal. A handful of Europeans took advantage of the country’s lack of sophistication and introduced luxuries for the few who could afford them, while others leased mining concessions from the government and prospected for gold.

Frank Hayter spent years panning rivers and digging alone in the untamed reaches of western Ethiopia. The locals nicknamed him Abba Kuta, ‘The Father of Madness’. They’d never come across a man so set on searching for gold. Hayter was certain that the precious metal had been mined in Ethiopia for millennia and that ancient Egyptians must have worked the region even before the time of Solomon. For Hayter, Ethiopia was the ‘Land of Sheba’, whose queen travelled to Jerusalem to shower the wise king with gold.

Somewhere lost in the Simien Mountains Hayter believed there lay a network of shafts from which fabulous quantities of gold had once been mined. He had heard of monasteries built over cave entrances where the monks refused to let foreigners enter the gold-filled caverns: they were waiting for the ‘Great White Queen’ to return.

Hayter never relinquished his search for what he called ‘the Queen of Sheba’s mines’, but gradually the curse began to exact its terrible revenge. Each day, he grew a little weaker. A once athletic young man was slowly becoming a physical wreck. Then, after years of solitary prospecting, he stumbled across a series of cave entrances which led to mine-shafts. The doorways, faced with carved stone, stood high on the ledge of a remote mountain called Tullu Wallel.

Cautiously, Hayter entered one of the portals, fearful of disturbing a wild animal in its lair. Deep in one of the shafts, he said, there lay a fabulous treasure. But before he could cart away the gold and other riches, the curse of the baboons struck for the last time. A river which flowed through the cavern suddenly swelled to a torrent and Hayter was forced to escape. By the time he had returned with fresh supplies, the entrance to the caves had been mysteriously sealed. However hard he tried, he could not break in.

Samson had never heard of Tullu Wallel; nor had anyone else I asked. But he did agree that Ethiopian curses are something to be taken very seriously. He’d seen with his own eyes a cursed man die a slow and painful death. The spell had been cast by a high-ranking priest on a shopkeeper whose only crime was to enter a church wearing shoes.

By the time we reached Addis Ababa I was determined to find out more about Frank Hayter and Tullu Wallel, and I knew there was only one man who might be able to help. Dr. Richard Pankhurst has spent most of his life in Ethiopia. His grandmother, Emmeline Pankhurst, was the founder of the suffragette movement, and his mother was equally spirited, moving to Ethiopia in the 1930s in order to help support the resistance against the invading Italians. Dr. Pankhurst has written extensively on Ethiopian society and history, and is regarded as the foremost expert on all matters Ethiopian.

Tracking down the distinguished scholar was far easier than I had expected. He lives with his wife and their dogs in a cottage on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. An hour after speaking on the telephone, he pulled the front door wide open and ushered me in for tea.

We sat in a conservatory at the back of the house, drinking mint tea and nibbling at slices of toast spread with home-made jam. Despite this veneer of Englishness I very soon realized that my host had an unusual sensitivity towards the African continent and, in particular, Ethiopia.

Dr. Pankhurst has spent most of his life travelling in the country’s remote areas and he speaks faultless Amharic. I was worried that he might regard my search for Solomon’s gold as frivolous. I did not know much about Ethiopian culture and so far I’d only been as far as Harar. So when I was invited to talk about my project, I gave the details uneasily.

‘Ethiopia has a great history of gold,’ he said at last. ‘Herodotus, Cosmos, Agathachides, Barradas—they all spoke of it.’

‘Tullu Wallel is not far from Beni Shangul, as I recall,’ he said. ‘Historically the area was renowned for the quality of its gold. Menelik seized the province in 1886 to exploit its rich mineral resources. The most valuable licence was granted to a prospector called Ilg. He found what he believed was an ancient Egyptian gold mine at Nejo. As for Frank Hayter,’ he continued, ‘yes, I know the name. He wrote some letters to my mother. Like her, he was against the Italian Fascist invasion of Ethiopia.’

‘Even so, as a credible point of reference, I’d have to say that Hayter is rather unreliable.’

Later that day I thumbed through my books, searching for the references that Pankhurst had mentioned. Agathachides, a Greek geographer writing in about 140 BC, told how prisoners-of-war were used to mine gold. ‘Vast numbers of them are bound in fetters,’ he wrote, ‘and compelled to work night and day without pause, with no hope of escape. For they are under savage soldiers who speak a foreign tongue.’

Cosmos, a Greek-speaking merchant—writing seven centuries after Agathachides—said that ‘a land of frankincense and gold lies at the farthest end of Ethiopia’. Arriving at the Axumite port of Adulis in about AD 524, he heard that gold was mined by the Agau people in the west and bartered through a system known by anthropologists as ‘dumb commerce’. Every other year, the king of the Axumites sent forth his agents to trade with the Agau. The agents arrived with a great entourage, bringing oxen, iron, salt and other merchandise to exchange for gold. They would set up camp, and surround it with thorny fences. Oxen would be slaughtered and the meat hung on the thorns along with other goods. During the night the Agau would take what they wanted and leave nuggets of gold in their place.

A thousand years after Cosmos, the Portuguese explorer and patriarch Juan de Bermudez travelled west along the Nile. Bermudez, nicknamed ‘the Lord of Wealth’, had become famous for discovering the Caribbean island of Bermuda which is named after him. (He actually found the island by chance, when he was shipwrecked on a voyage from Virginia.) In his chronicles of Ethiopia, he wrote that the land was barren but that the soil was red, for it was two parts gold and one part earth. The precious metal was more common than iron, and was fashioned into wondrous objects by the locals.

From the earliest times explorers have been fascinated by Ethiopia and particularly by its western regions and the barbarous tribes who once inhabited them. Famed for their strange rituals and their expertise in mining gold, the tribes of Wollega and Beni Shangul are the stuff of legend. It is no surprise that for people like Frank Hayter—who was inspired by Rider Haggard’s novel—western Ethiopia was an obvious place to search for King Solomon’s mines.

Though Pankhurst had dismissed Hayter as unreliable, I was gripped with an overwhelming desire to follow in his footsteps. I knew that my chances of success were slim, but the idea of seeking out the mountain seemed important. I searched for Hayter in my other books but only one mentioned him. In the Land of Sheba, written by Captain E. J. Bartleet, Hayter’s contemporary and friend, tells the story of Tullu Wallel. Opposite the text, there is a black-and-white photograph of a cave and a shaft entrance. Beneath it, the caption reads: The entrance to the Queen of Sheba’s caves.