6

Breakfast with Idi Amin

‘In Africa think big.’

Cecil Rhodes

THE MORNING AFTER my talk, one of the miners came to Noah’s hut and presented me with a gift. His name was Solomon. I would have asked how he came by the livid scar that ran from his eye to the base of his neck but, reading my thoughts, Samson suggested in a whisper that it was none of my business. Solomon said he’d enjoyed my talk very much and that he knew the details would come in useful when he arrived in America. He had heard about a city where a ferocious wind blew, rarely ceasing for a moment. He couldn’t remember its name.

‘Chicago?’ I suggested. ‘It’s called the Windy City.’

He smiled broadly.

‘You really know a lot about America.’

‘There’s no need to give me anything,’ I said.

But Solomon insisted.

The gift was wrapped in fresh banana leaves, and there were flies swarming all over it. Dreading what I would find inside, I unfurled the leaves. There lay a pair of very bloody and very dead hares, their long bodies rigid with rigor mortis. The very sight of the creatures so early in the morning made me feel nauseous. I gagged at the stench, and asked Noah to dispose of them immediately. He thought I was mad. To him, their smell was like the scent of freshly cut flowers. He rambled on about how roasted hare was one of life’s true luxuries. One taste and, he assured me, I would become addicted to the meat.

He hurried off and gave the hares to one of the Tigrayan girls called Taitu, named after Menelik II’s consort. She said she’d stew them for us. Hares are a delicacy in Tigray. The Amhara, she said, had no idea how to cook them. Taitu was so beautiful that no one dared look her in the eye, not even Noah when he asked her to cook the hares. Her skin was the colour of burnished brass, rolled over a frame of bones of extraordinary delicacy, and her voice was as soft as a siren’s. Noah said she’d been married but had run away from Tigray after being found in another man’s bed. Unable to face her husband or her family, she had fled to the south and eventually ended up as a whore.

Taitu cooked the animals and brought them to me for lunch, served in a thick gravy. I invited her to join us and, as we ate, I asked her about her homeland of Tigray.

‘In the north,’ she said, ‘people are so proud that a father will kill his daughter if she brings shame on the family. Then if anyone asks him about his dead daughter he will pretend to forget her name.’

Taitu nibbled at a bone with her front teeth. Her eyes were bright, but I sensed great sadness.

‘We all have dreams,’ she went on. ‘Most of the men here dream of going to America. They don’t know what they will do once they’re there, or even why they want to go. But,’ she said, looking me squarely in the eye, ‘they all know that whatever America is like, it must be better than Bedakaysa.’

‘What are your dreams?’

She fiddled with her braids for a moment before answering.

‘I dream of going home,’ she said.

That night the first real rains of the monsoon fell. There is no smell in the world as intoxicating as African rain on the red sub-Saharan soil. All the miners’ children ran outside and danced in the downpour, laughing and shouting with glee. Samson and I pulled off our shirts, rolled up our trousers and splashed our way to the panning pool. Awed by the power of nature, Samson looked up at the sky, the rain cascading over his face and down his body.

‘This is my God talking to me!’ he cried.

For once I knew he was right.

By morning all the water had long since been absorbed into the earth. The footprints leading to the mine were a little deeper, the mud a little thicker, the panning pool a few inches higher.

Noah had been down the shaft for two hours by the time we got there. Rather than being exhilarated by the break in the weather, he looked worried.

‘Another death,’ he said.

‘A cave-in?’

‘No, another kind of accident.’

The body was lying a few yards from the shafts, covered by a thin white shawl with delicate embroidery around the border. It was the body of an adult miner, a man universally despised. According to Noah he was a well-known thief and was suspected of being one of the official’s spies. Unlike the death of the child, there was no display of emotion at this death. Most of the miners didn’t even bother to look at the corpse, which had been found early that morning.

Noah took me over and lifted the corner of the shawl. There was a hideous wound on one side of the man’s face—a gash from the left ear down to the base of the neck. The jugular was clearly severed.

‘A bad accident,’ said Noah.

‘What do you mean “accident”? The man’s obviously been murdered. That’s a clean cut made with a knife.’

Noah tapped me on the shoulder.

‘No, it’s an accident,’ he said firmly, ‘he slipped in the rain and cut his neck. The others are going to bury him right away.’

Two days later we heard the sound of the official’s vehicle skidding through the mud. Another spy had no doubt informed him of the murder. A second downpour had turned the track into a thick reddish-brown soup, but the rain was good for the miners. It softened the earth and made the panning easier. An adequate supply of water is always a problem for gold prospectors. In many parts of the country small-scale mine-shafts shut down in the dry season. Samson had said that the main dangers in the heavy rains were from cave-ins or flash-floods in the narrow tunnels where children and the bravest men worked.

As we watched the vehicle lurching up the trail, Noah told me to go to his hut and wait there, as I’d done before. Finding a foreigner in the village at such a time would only complicate matters. I did as he requested, but then peeped through a hole in the hut’s back wall. I had a good view of the official and his assistant as they got out of the car.

They were an odd couple. The assistant’s nose had been broken, and he had small ears that lay flat against his shaven head. He was dressed in a grubby beige jacket with oversized lapels; the garment’s right shoulder was torn, exposing the lining. His boss wore a chequered overcoat, purple trousers and a felt hat, but despite his eccentric outfit he looked formidable. His thick-framed glasses and cold efficient features hinted at a man who liked to get to the bottom of things. Both men’s shoes and ankles were caked in mud. They’d obviously had to push the vehicle en route. The official seemed very angry.

In any other part of the country a local administrator, however lowly, would command respect, but not here. The miners were brash and self-confident. They were used to danger, and though their daily work broke the law, they made ten times more than the officials from Shakiso.

No one bothered to meet the car, so the visitors tramped over to the mine itself. I waited in Noah’s thatched hut. A few minutes later I heard shouting and a high-pitched whistling. Samson hurried in and said there was trouble. He looked very worried and told me to pack up my stuff at once.

‘Is it about the murder?’

‘No, no,’ he replied, ‘they don’t even know about that, or they don’t care.’

‘Then what’s the problem?’

‘It’s you.’

I bundled up my sleeping-bag and stuffed it with odd bits of clothing into my kitbags while Samson laid his precious Bible flat in his tartan case. The case, I noticed, was already splitting at the seams.

‘What shall we do? They’ll see us if we leave.’

Before Samson could reply, the hut’s door swung open and the official and his assistant stood in the doorway. I could sense their delight at finding a foreigner. Noah was behind them, trying to get their attention. I knew from that moment that any efforts to talk our way out of the situation would be futile. The official asked for our papers. I pulled out a photocopy of my passport and handed it to him—I had learned years ago never to give original documents to anyone if I could help it. Samson fumbled in his case for his identity card and passed it to the official. Much conversation in Amharic followed.

As the debate grew more heated, I became worried. In the Indian subcontinent a few crumpled notes slipped surreptitiously into a sweaty palm would have effected our release. But in Africa bureaucrats are usually too proud to accept a bribe, something I admire when I’m not the one being arrested.

The murderer had got away with it, but Samson and I were bundled into the back of the official’s car and driven off. There had hardly been time to thank Noah and say farewell to the miners and the Tigrayan girls. Samson was generally talkative, but as we slip-slided through the soupy mud, he said nothing. The officials were also quiet, but I sensed an air of triumph.

We were driven to Shakiso and taken to the police station. Once inside we were told to stand in a corner. A notebook was taken down from a shelf, a pencil licked, and the interrogation began.

Neither the official nor his lackey spoke English, so Samson had to translate. I didn’t really know what to say but I decided to tell the truth, though I knew it wouldn’t be easy—the reasons behind my journeys are never straightforward. As we stood there, my hands sweating, Samson’s brow knotted with anxiety, I attempted to explain.

‘I have come from London to search for King Solomon’s gold mines,’ I said. ‘It is known that the Israelites, and before them the ancient Egyptians, mined gold in Ethiopia. That is why I am here. Unlike others before me, I see it as my duty to visit all kinds of mines—legal and informal.’

Samson struggled to translate my words into Amharic. The official didn’t look at me—his eyes were on the wide-spaced lines of his notebook—but he scribbled madly. When his pencil had stopped moving I started to talk again.

‘The last thing I want,’ I said, ‘is to acquire any gold. You see, I’m interested in Ethiopian history.’

Samson paused and stared at me in alarm. Had I forgotten that the word ‘history’ was taboo?

The official put down his pencil and cracked his knuckles one by one. Then he looked at me, glanced at the photocopy of my passport and asked Samson a question.

‘He wants to know who you’re spying for,’ he said.

I sighed. Then Samson sighed.

The man spoke again.

‘He wants your film.’

Fortunately I’d learned a trick from the veteran cameraman and war photographer Mohamed Amin. Mo, as he was known, was the man who filmed the original television footage of Ethiopia’s famine in the mid-1980s. It was his powerful images that galvanized action which culminated in the Live Aid pop concert. When confronted by officials intent on confiscating his films, Mo would quickly wind in the tapers of unexposed rolls and pass them off as exposed films.

Before we’d left Noah’s hut I had hidden my exposed films in a pair of filthy hiking boots at the bottom of one kitbag. Now I whipped out a couple of blank films, slid in the tapers, and ranted on about how valuable they were.

The official looked delighted and demanded I hand them over. Theatrically I tossed them on to the desk. The official passed them to his assistant, who stamped on them. Then he barked a string of orders and we were taken away. Samson was still trying to negotiate us out of our predicament and had become desperately upset. I dared not tell him that I was rather enjoying the experience.

We were taken to a cell and locked inside, though ‘cell’ is a misnomer. The floor consisted of baked mud, and the walls were merely wooden planks with gaps between them. The roof was built of rusting corrugated iron which let in a draught and leaked when it rained. In the wide gap between the floor and the walls lay shards of broken glass, presumably intended to discourage inmates from sliding out on their stomachs. Five other men were already inside, three of them asleep, the other two playing cards.

Samson was miserable. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he was regretting ever having met me. I had become his tormentor and was dragging him further and further away from his objective of getting to America. I told him that I’d double his pay for every day we were incarcerated, but he didn’t respond. Instead he sat on his haunches and chewed his knuckles.

After an hour there was the sound of a key turning in the lock and the jailor arrived carrying a lunch of zill-zill tibs, shredded beef strips. He said that if we were still hungry afterwards we could have some more, and if there was anything else we needed we were to let him know. The jailor had been miscast by life. He was one of the most gentle and compassionate men I think I’ve ever met. Samson and I treated him with due courtesy, but the others took advantage of his kindness. They had him washing their clothes, fetching them water and darning their shirts.

I remarked on the jailor’s kindness to Samson.

‘Of course he’s kind,’ he said, ‘he’s an Amhara.’

The first few hours in the cell were quite stimulating. I’d never been in a prison cell before and was quite enjoying the experience. I urged Samson to introduce me to the other felons. Befriending them might lower our chances of getting our throats slit in the night. The two card-players turned out to be Amhara as well, which raised their standing in Samson’s estimation. One of them had small shifty eyes. He reported proudly that he’d beaten his wife with a stick for having run off with a neighbour. The second card-player said he was there because he’d stolen a chicken. He had no money to live anywhere better and so preferred to stay in the jail.

The other three convicts only woke up when it was getting dark and then they shouted at the jailor, ordering him to bring them some food. He did as he was told. One of the men, whom I discovered later was a miner accused of killing a prostitute, drew a line in the dirt with his thumb and then glared at me. If Samson or I crossed the line, he said, he’d break our necks.

The jailor declared that anyone wanting to go and pee could do so in the bushes outside the police station. The five men trooped out unsupervised. I was surprised that they didn’t break free and run off. When they came back a few minutes later they seemed to sense my surprise because they looked rather sheepish. Meanwhile the jailor told Samson that the official had gone home and that he wouldn’t be back until noon the next day.

That night I lay on my back and thought about earlier narrow escapes. A journey, I reflected, is of no merit unless it has tested you. You can stay at home and read of others’ experiences, but it’s not the same as getting out of trouble yourself. Whenever I’m in a tight spot, I think of Mohamed Amin. He was an expert in getting out of tight spots in Africa and, in particular, in Ethiopia.

As well as filming news, Mo ran a small publishing company. In my early twenties, when no one else would give me work, Mo hired me to write books. By then he had already lost one arm, blown off in Addis Ababa, during the fall of Mengistu’s regime. During our travels together in many African and Asian countries, Mo passed on some of his knowledge. He taught me to take my own fuel into war zones, preferably high-octane aviation fuel—most petrol engines can run on it as long as their timing is altered. He also showed me how to hide a roll of 35-millimetre film in the heel of my shoe, and he taught me that when dealing with African bureaucracy you should remain respectful and calm.

Mo Amin died during the hijacking of an Ethiopian Airlines plane off the Comoros Islands in November 1996. I remember the day clearly because it was the same day that my father died. A week before his death I’d met Mo in Nairobi. He’d asked me to write the text for a book on Saudi Arabia. He knew I wanted to spend time there. But, as always, he drove a hard bargain.

‘I’ll give you a thousand pounds,’ he said.

Even for Mo this was a pitiful sum, but he was a shrewd negotiator, and was never one to start high.

‘That’s not enough,’ I said.

‘Well, double it.’

From past experience I knew to ask for payment in kind as well as in cash.

‘What about some transport?’

‘I’ll give you two club class tickets on Ethiopian, anywhere they go,’ he said. Mo had an inexhaustible supply of tickets on Ethiopian Airlines.

‘What else?’

He leant back in his chair and thought for a moment. His bionic artificial arm was laid out on the desk before him like a trophy, a reminder of his bravery.

‘I’ll give you a Somali passport,’ he said.

‘You’ve already given me one, for the last job.’

Mo bit his lip.

‘Make it a diplomatic Somali passport.’

‘Now we’re getting somewhere. What else?’

‘A holiday to the Seychelles.’

‘And . . .?’

Mo drew his hand down his greying goatee beard.

‘All right,’ he said coldly, ‘I’ll give you breakfast with Idi Amin.’

A week later Mo was killed, and with his untimely death went my chance of sharing a meal with the infamous Ugandan dictator.

The jailor woke me at dawn with a cup of freshly roasted coffee. He said that if he’d made it too sweet, I was to tell him and he’d try again. The other felons were asleep, all except for the one the others called Wossen. Samson said he had been drinking all night. The liquor had been smuggled in by the jailor as a reward for good behaviour. Wossen’s right eye was milky white and suppurating. Every so often a fly would land on it but Wossen had given up trying to brush it away. He was too old, too tired, too drunk.

The night had been uncomfortable but not unbearable. My bags were locked away in the office but the jailor had provided some hay for our heads. He had even offered to wash our clothes, though it would take three days to dry them now that the rains had come. I thanked him but said we hoped to be released long before then. The jailor responded, saying there was little hope of us being given an early release.

At about eleven o’clock the official ordered us to come to the office. He was dressed in the same purple trousers as the day before, but his shoes had been expertly cleaned and they now shone. To lighten the mood, I thanked him for having looked after us so well. The experience had been absorbing, I said, but now we were ready to leave.

The official slapped his hand down on the desk and ordered me to be quiet. He would ask the questions and we were to answer them. But before the interrogation could continue, he wanted to look through our bags. Samson was to show his first. The tartan Chinese case was placed on the table and unpacked. The parrot-green wellington boots were brought out, then the three-piece suit. The official frowned.

‘Now unlock your bags,’ he said, pointing at me.

Most Ethiopians travel with only the bare necessities. If they bring along any luxuries at all, they’re usually intended as gifts for relatives or friends. But, as every African checkpoint guard knows, foreigners carry with them all sorts of appealing objects, and I am no exception. Fearful of leaving a key piece of equipment or an important book behind, I travel with just about everything I own. Unlocking the kitbags’ padlocks, I began to remove an assortment of items. First came a plug of soggy, mud-ridden clothes, then a few books on Ethiopian history and on the business of gold. The official rifled through the mounting pile, searching for subversive material, and as he did so his face darkened. Clearly he thought I was a spy, and I began to get worried. At the bottom of one kitbag, I knew, there was something that would confirm his suspicions.

In London I had bought an expensive high-tech metal detector. So far I hadn’t even shown it to Samson. The detector—called a Gold Bug II—looked like the sort of thing James Bond would take along on a mission. I had planned to try it out at the mine, but I hadn’t had time.

I mumbled that there was nothing left in the first bag and started to take out the contents of the other. The bureaucrat knew that I was lying. He plunged his hand in and triumphantly pulled out various bits of the detector. Then he laid the pieces on the table and told me to assemble the device. As I did so, I tried to explain why I needed it, but the official wasn’t listening. He had found a foreign spy and he was clearly already thinking about the likelihood of promotion. Samson glared at me, furious that I’d kept all knowledge of the device from him.

The official picked up the telephone and barked into the receiver for a minute or two. I couldn’t understand the conversation, but I could guess its drift. A pair of spies had been found, he was telling his boss. One of them’s a sly foreigner caught red-handed with illegal equipment. The other’s a local, an Amhara found in possession of a suspicious three-piece suit.

After the call, the official smoothed a hand down his shirt-front, pressed his fingertips together, and said something in Amharic. Samson was led away. Sweating profusely, his hands trembling, he was unable to look me in the eye. Then I was marched back to the cell. Samson wasn’t there. I sat against the far wall, away from the others. The thrill of incarceration was beginning to wear thin. The jailor motioned with his hands and mouth, asking if I’d like some lunch. I shook my head. Now, I said in English, wasn’t the time for eating.

Again I found myself wondering how to get away. We probably could have escaped, but they had Samson’s identity card and would have hunted him down. The thought of Samson being hunted by anyone seemed unfair. Mo Amin had always told me to remain calm in a tight spot. Calmness, he used to say, buys you time. He was a great believer in allowing events to take their course. Solutions, he’d say, present themselves if you give them time. But sitting in a small-town cell was a waste of time. I had things to do. I had Solomon’s mines to find.

Then I remembered the advice of another friend. When you’re in a scrape, she said, the best thing to do is the unexpected. A seasoned opponent of Apartheid in South Africa, she’d once found herself in the midst of a riot in Johannesburg. A vigilante mob had surrounded her car and was rocking it from side to side. She was running out of time. Another minute and she’d be dead. So, instead of screaming or showing fear, she blew the vigilantes kisses. They looked horrified and ran away.

Samson was brought back to the cell a few hours later by a man I’d not seen before. He introduced himself as the commander of the region, and asked some basic questions in English. What was I doing in Ethiopia? Why did I need such a high-tech piece of equipment? What had I seen at the mines? Was I a spy?

As before I answered truthfully. Samson and I, I said, were searching for King Solomon’s gold mines. We were not interested in buying gold but rather in its cultural and historical importance. The man rubbed his eyes and then he smiled.

‘Are you from America?’ he asked.

‘No, from England.’

‘I want to go to America,’ he said. ‘Can you give me some advice?’

At first I was wary, suspecting some kind of ploy to get information out of me, but then I realized the man’s enquiry was genuine. So I scribbled out some suggestions on a sheet of paper. He thanked me and asked if there was anything he could do to help. I pointed at the cell door.

‘You could open that,’ I said.

Without a second thought he snapped his fingers. The door swung open from behind. The official, who was pacing up and down in the hallway, scowled as we strode past him. Samson was given back his identity card and our possessions were loaded into the commander’s car. He had insisted that his driver take us to Kebra Mengist.

There seemed little hope of gaining entry to the legal gold mine at the nearby Lega Dembi plant, but Samson urged me to follow up my letter with a phone call. To my great surprise, my call was put straight through and I found myself talking to the managing director of Midroc operations. By the end of the conversation I had been invited to tour the legal gold mine, and even to stay at Midroc’s headquarters, a few miles from Kebra Mengist.

At the gatehouse, our identity papers were inspected. One of the armed guards spat our names into a walkie-talkie and listened to the crackling reply. Then the barrier slowly lifted and, as it did so, the guards stood to attention and saluted. In the pickup truck that had brought us from Kebra Mengist we rolled ahead into a vast compound. Only hours before Samson and I had been locked up in a cell with convicts. Now our luck had miraculously changed.

Lega Dembi was laid out on a grand scale. From the gatehouse to the actual mine was a distance of about two miles. The plant’s perimeter fence was festooned with razor-wire and punctuated at intervals by sentry posts, each manned by soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs. We heard later that there was also a special paramilitary squad that roamed the grounds, searching for intruders.

The road snaked down into a valley, before climbing steeply. We passed a series of enormous pools, where tailings were being processed and then, as the route ascended, we caught our first glimpse of the plant. There were storage depots and power-generation units, mills and foundries, warehouses and rows of geological laboratories. And everywhere there were tracks leading in all directions on which towering Caterpillar crushers and tippers drove at speed.

A well-built man dressed in khaki and wearing thick wire-rimmed glasses strode out of his office to greet us. His name was Wayne and he was Australian. He said he couldn’t remember the last time a visitor had come to Lega Dembi. I told him about my search for Solomon’s mines and then I asked him about the gold.

‘You’ve come to the right place for gold,’ he said, ‘but we don’t mine it like Solomon’s slaves would have done. We use ammonium nitrate.’ He paused. ‘I don’t think Solomon had any of that.’

As Wayne drove us to the mine, he admitted that in the gold business you can’t like gold too much. If you do, he said, you get greedy, and if you get greedy, you make mistakes.

Five minutes later we stood on a ridge above the lip of a vast crater. Below us lay an enormous mine, so big that it made me shiver. A dozen trucks were being loaded with rocks. When they were full they’d hurry away through deep mud to the crushing plant. I was surprised to see that some of the biggest trucks were being driven by women. Midroc was an equal opportunities employer.

On one side of the crater a group of men in yellow hard hats were busily unloading boxes guarded by a man with an AK-47.

‘That’s the ammonium nitrate,’ said Wayne. ‘It can blow a mountain into dust, but actually it’s just fertilizer.’

‘What about the bullion?’

‘I’ll show you.’

Wayne took us to the gold room where the molten metal was about to be poured. Once through the rigorous security system, we were locked into what was really a large workshop. The walls were whitewashed breeze blocks, the floor was bare cement, and the ceiling was made from reinforced glass. A pair of security cameras watched our movements. At the far end of the room a technician was checking over the electric furnace. I could clearly see through his mask the beads of sweat joining up on his brow. He looked worried, but tried to maintain an air of professionalism. From twenty feet away I felt the heat. An extractor fan on the back wall seemed to be blowing the hot air towards us. It felt like the parched wind which rips across the Sahara in June. Wayne said things would get much hotter; and then they did. We dressed up in protective silver outfits, like astronauts, donning masks and gloves. Then we crowded round and winced as our bodies were washed in boiling sweat beneath the silver suits. The furnace was the shape of a very large barrel. It was tipped by a system of hand cranks. Gradually a steady semi-molten flow poured out that reminded me of lava spewing from a volcano. Then the flow changed to a stream of liquid gold. Wayne said that the slag ran off first, followed closely by the molten gold.

Five minutes later the ingots were thrown on to the concrete floor, and the bullion was knocked out like loaves of bread from their baking tins. Lega Dembi is considered a medium-sized plant, and it produces about three hundred and fifty gold bars a year. A single bar of the bullion weighs about 20lbs and is worth approximately $80,000. Given the extent of its reserves, Ethiopia could yield much more if international investors came forward. I found myself thinking about the gold and whether it might be the key to reviving Ethiopia’s economy. As I pondered the question, the rough blackened ingots were whacked with a hammer. The surrounding crust of slag fell away, and for the first time I saw the glint of pure gold.

The next morning Samson and I huddled in a doorway out of the rain, waiting for the bus to Addis Ababa. An elderly man was crouched on a stool opposite. His trousers were too tight, and they were ripped at the knees, and his shirt was split. Every so often, his body trembled and his limbs twitched. Samson said he was called ‘Old One’ because he’d been an old man even in his youth. He had a penchant for whipping small boys with a long leather switch, and children would creep up from behind, baiting him. But now his eyesight was fading and his aim was less accurate than it had once been. Like an aged bulldog that’s lost its teeth, Old One was a pathetic sight.

After four hours the bus arrived and we clambered on board. As we pulled out of town, I noticed a tall athletic man running alongside the bus. He was calling out a woman’s name, and he had taken off his shoes so he could run faster.

‘Who’s he?’

Samson asked one of the other passengers.

‘His wife is running away with another man,’ he said.

The bus driver had a severe bladder disorder which forced him to stop and pee in the bushes every few minutes. His affliction, coupled with the low speed of the bus, made the vehicle the worst means of escape imaginable. The adulterous woman must have been cursing herself for ever having climbed aboard. At the third pee-stop her husband caught up with the bus and dragged her off by her hair.

That evening back in Addis Ababa, we went to the Sheraton to celebrate. The hotel was yet another of Mr. Amoudi’s investments and rumour had it that he’d paid $100 million to build the place. Now it was full of foreign aid workers, all on expense accounts and all earning magnificent tax-free salaries. They appeared especially keen on the French restaurant where they could dine on lobster thermidor, Scottish smoked salmon and foie gras imported from Fauchon in Paris. Ethiopians in the restaurants or bars were few and far between, but young courting couples liked to stroll along the hotel’s palatial corridors and walk hand in hand in the gardens.

At the buffet Samson piled a spectacular amount of food on to a soup bowl. It was the first time he’d been in the Sheraton but, despite eating his body weight in cooked meat, he said the food wasn’t anything special. In fact he had said very little since our incarceration in jail, though he thought our release was due to God answering his prayers. We were friends and would remain so, but I sensed he had lost faith in me.

Now that I’d seen an illegal mine in operation, I had some inkling of how gold must have been mined in Solomon’s time. But I was captivated by the idea of Frank Hayter’s lost mine-shafts on the remote mountain of Tullu Wallel in western Ethiopia. And besides, I still had to investigate the five spots on the map where I’d laid my pebbles—places which might yet yield answers to the riddle of Solomon’s mines.

Over dessert I introduced the subject of continuing the search. Samson put down his spoon, covered his eyes with his hands, and sighed.

‘We have been to the illegal gold mines,’ he said.

‘They’re like Solomon’s mines would have been, but they are working a new seam,’ I explained. ‘Ophir must have been further to the west.’

‘How do you know?’

‘We’ve still got five other places to visit,’ I said, sidestepping the question. ‘How can we stop now? We haven’t even been to Frank Hayter’s mine yet.’

Samson peeped through his fingers.

‘We?’ he asked.

The only way I could talk Samson into coming with me was by promising that I’d hire a vehicle for the rest of the trip. Local buses, said Samson, were hard on the buttocks and far too slow. My budget was limited, and I’d heard that renting a 44 in Ethiopia was fiendishly expensive, but Samson insisted that with his contacts we’d get a great deal. The next morning he set off to find a car while I went to meet a gold merchant in the Mercato area of town. The man who cleaned the lavatories in the Hotel Ghion had put the business card of the goldsmith on my bed. His name was Abdul Majeed, which means ‘the Servant of the Glorious’ in Arabic, and his shop was called ‘Solomon’s Gold’.

When I reached the goldsmith’s street I found it was lined with dozens of small jewellery shops. In the gutters outside, men squatted over primitive stoves on which crucibles rested. The sight reminded me of the ghamelawallas in India who pay goldsmiths for the dust they sweep from their workshop floors. In Calcutta alone there are more than a hundred thousand men, women and children who work as ghamelawallas, all retrieving minuscule particles of gold from the dirt.

When I entered his shop, Abdul Majeed stood up, blew on his palm, and extended it for me to shake. His teeth were capped and his nostrils were flared, and he wore a skull-cap embroidered with tarnished gold thread. When he spoke, he leant forward until his mouth was no more than an inch from mine. Abdul Majeed had extremely bad breath.

Making it clear from the start that I hadn’t come to buy, I asked what he knew about Solomon’s mines. He invited me to sit, before sliding over a glass of weak tea.

‘First the refreshment,’ he said, ‘and afterwards the chatter.’

We sat for a few minutes in silent contemplation, sipping our milky tea. I glanced around the small shop. A series of well-built mahogany display cases covered the back wall. Their shelves were lined with green velvet that had been faded by years of sunlight. Against an adjacent wall stood an elegant grandfather clock, made in Hamburg. Opposite that hung a calendar, illustrated with a picture of the Empire State Building and opened at the page for April 1993. When it comes to time, Ethiopia has its own rules which place it in a sort of parallel universe. Instead of following the Gregorian system, as we do in the West, Ethiopians use the Julian calendar, a system seven years and eight months behind us. In Ethiopia there are twelve months, each of thirty days, and a thirteenth month of just five days. Every year thousands of unsold Western calendars are shipped to Addis Ababa, stored for seven years, and then sold to people like Abdul Majeed.

The shopkeeper served me a second cup of tea and we continued to sit in silence. Then, the refreshment over, he began to speak.

‘Gold,’ he said pensively, ‘I could talk on the subject for a lifetime and would still not have begun.’

‘Do you have any advice for a seeker of Solomon’s mines?’

‘If you want an answer,’ said Abdul Majeed, leaning towards me, ‘you have to consider much more than Solomon. You have to think about the ancient trade routes, the politics, and the reasons why Solomon needed gold.’

‘The great temple,’ I said, leaning back in a hurry, ‘I’ve been to Mount Moriah, where it supposedly stood.’

‘That’s a start, but what do you know of God’s Land?’

I didn’t know what he meant.

‘I am talking about the ancient Egyptian Land of Punt,’ he said. Then he licked his finger and held it in the air.

‘To understand the puzzle of Solomon’s mines,’ he said, ‘you have to understand the riddle of Punt—the place from which Egypt once got its gold.’

‘Do you think Ophir and Punt were the same place?’

The shopkeeper ignored my question.

‘The Israelites’ kingdom was destroyed after Solomon,’ he said, ‘and their records were lost with them. You will find no clues from Solomon’s time, or from the centuries which followed. You have to go backwards, not forwards . . . back to the Egyptians.’

He got up to serve a customer and then returned to resume the conversation.

‘What do you know about Queen Hatshepsut?’

I shrugged.

‘There is a temple on the western side of Thebes called Deir el-Bahri. On its southern wall are hieroglyphs which I have seen with my own eyes! They show Queen Hatshepsut’s fleet returning from Punt. The journey wasn’t long before Solomon’s reign!’

He thrust his face forward into mine, his eyes glittering with excitement. I tried not to flinch.

‘Most people say that Punt was in Somalia. But now the scientists have changed their minds. Now they say Punt may have been here in Ethiopia.’

‘When exactly did the Egyptians start going to Punt?’

The shopkeeper gazed into my eyes. I sensed that he had waited years for a customer to turn up with an interest in Punt. Now such a man had arrived he was eager to demonstrate his knowledge.

‘The earliest record was in the Fifth Dynasty,’ he said, ‘when Pharaoh Sahure sent a fleet of ships down the Red Sea. They returned in triumph, the boats piled high with Puntian myrrh, ivory, ebony, electrum and gold.’

‘Were Punt and Ophir connected in some way?’

‘They may have been the same,’ whispered Abdul Majeed. ‘After all, the Israelites learned their skills of metal-working directly from the Egyptians. You must remember that until they arrived in the Promised Land, they’d been enslaved in Egypt.’

‘So you think that Solomon’s gold mines were really the mines of the pharaohs?’

‘Imagine that you were Solomon,’ he said. ‘You wanted a huge amount of gold, and you knew that your neighbours obtained it from mines not so far away. Surely you’d send ships to that place rather than begin an entirely new and dangerous search of your own.’

The shopkeeper’s theory certainly made sense. But before I could give it much thought, he stepped over to one of the display cases and pulled out a set of earrings. They were circular convex shields made of eighteen-carat gold, each about an inch and a half wide. I expected the sales patter to begin but he wasn’t selling the jewellery.

‘Look at these,’ he said. ‘They’re worn all over Ethiopia, but you can’t find them anywhere else in the world, except in Egypt. You can find identical jewellery in the Cairo Museum.’

Abdul Majeed, the Servant of the Glorious, blew on his palm and held it out for me to shake once again. He’d enjoyed talking to me about the past, he said, as he hardly dared to think about history these days.

‘It’s not like the old days,’ he said, leaning forward for the last time. ‘Ethiopians used to be proud of their traditions. They walked tall and had self-respect. Now all they care about is getting to America.’