In Search of King Solomon’s Mines

‘Our excitement was so intense, as we saw the way to Solomon’s treasure chamber at last thrown open, that I for one began to tremble and shake.’

Henry Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines

EARLY NEXT MORNING at the roadside bar, a group of six Tigrayan girls sat at the back, preening themselves and spreading their legs as widely as they could. They were improbably dressed in white coats, the kind which doctors wear in hospitals, and their feet were strapped into high heels. It was five o’clock but as far as they were concerned the night shift hadn’t ended. I glanced over at them as I sat waiting for Bahru to get the Emperor’s Jeep warmed up. The girls looked away, pretending to be coy, though they knew better than I that coyness was a quality incompatible with their trade.

I watched as a truck driver staggered over to one of them. His shirt-front was spattered with dried vomit and his waxy face was peppered with sores. The Tigrayan woman didn’t seem put off by her customer’s appearance. First he flirted and she bargained, and then he bargained and she flirted. Eventually they struck a deal. The client handed over his cash, bought a bottle of Coca Cola, and followed the girl into a back room. I asked Samson why a man with an obvious taste for stronger liquor would have wasted his money on Coke.

‘In the countryside,’ he said, ‘some people believe that if you wash your groin with Coca Cola you won’t get Aids. The prostitutes insist on it.’

The night before, the bedbugs had been ferocious. My face and shoulders were so badly bitten that I looked as if I had a chronic skin disease. Samson had been attacked by insects as well, but he didn’t complain. We needed hardening up, he said sternly, if we were ever to make it to Tullu Wallel and Frank Hayter’s mineshafts. As we spent more time together, Samson and I developed a curious relationship. Each of us saw it as his mission to force discomfort on the other. Rather like Inspector Clouseau’s manservant, Kato, Samson knew he was making me stronger by causing me pain. I never quite knew if he was doing it out of loyalty or cruelty. For my part I felt a deep sadistic urge come over me whenever I saw Samson flagging. I couldn’t help it. If he suggested we rest at seven, I insisted we continue until ten; and each morning I forced him to take a freezing cold shower before the day’s start. He had stopped complaining long ago, well aware that a sadist is empowered by the slightest hint of victory.

We left the white-coated whores to their business and drove out of the village. The sun would soon be rising, forcing the girls back into the shadows. It was good to be moving again. Bahru shifted the gears restlessly, coaxing the vehicle west towards Lalibela. As the Emperor’s Jeep ground its way around the potholes, I lay stretched out in the back watching the green landscape unfold. The road wound its way upwards, round one hairpin bend after another. Most of the hillsides were cultivated, their reddish-brown soil sprouting with thick crops of maize and wheat. The more I saw of Ethiopia’s rural areas, the more confused I became about the country’s image. In the West everyone thinks of Ethiopia as a place of starvation and famine, but although there are isolated pockets of desert, most of the country is lush.

We stopped at the town of Dilbe. Bahru was urgently in need of some qat. As he tottered off towards the market Samson and I got out of the Jeep to stretch our legs. Nearby stood a bar, little more than a lean-to, that served thimble-sized cups of coffee made with an Italian espresso machine. Mussolini’s invasion in 1935 had brought nothing but misery to Ethiopia, nothing that is, except for espresso machines. They can be found even in the smallest towns and they are the only pieces of machinery in the country which never break down.

As the qat began to take effect, Bahru’s foot grew heavier on the accelerator. Despite the terrible road surface we raced along at an impressive speed. Chewing furiously at the dark green leaves, his pupils dilating, Bahru bragged that the engine had been overhauled during the night. Samson said that Bahru hadn’t wanted to ask me for money so he’d paid for the overhaul himself. I checked my bags to see that they were all still there.

A pair of white girls were sitting by the side of the road. They were in their early twenties and their hair was matted and their skin grimed with dirt. They had spent the night in the open. At twilight the day before, the bus they were taking had swerved to miss another. Luck had been on their side—it was the oncoming bus, not theirs, that had gone over the cliff. When the Emperor’s Jeep rolled to a stop, one of the girls pointed to the wreckage in the ravine below.

‘It was like a horror film,’ she said. ‘The other bus had no choice but to go off the road. When our driver realized he was still alive, he burst out laughing and honked the horn. He drove on, but we wanted to stay and help the injured and the dying. So he left us here.’

‘Dead bodies were strewn everywhere,’ added the other girl. ‘Some of the survivors were lying face down, praying to God. Dozens of them were screaming. One woman had lost all the fingers from her right hand and she couldn’t speak. She was in shock. We didn’t have any medical supplies, and even if we had had some there wasn’t much we could do. Still we did our best to comfort the injured, until help arrived.’ She paused and stared at the ground. ‘But no one ever came.’

Samson and I got out of the car and looked over the edge of the cliff. Fifty feet below, the mangled white shell of a bus lay in a ditch. There were seven or eight bodies scattered on the ground near the vehicle, and I could make out several survivors huddled together under a tree.

‘We have to get word to Lalibela,’ said the first girl. ‘Someone there will come and help.’

We told the girls to get in. Then Samson and I exchanged a worried glance. We both knew that the chance of anyone in Lalibela volunteering to help was remote, and that it wouldn’t be long before the local villagers descended to strip what they could from the wreckage.

The first thing we noticed in Lalibela were the flies. They swarmed over us like locusts, getting in our ears, up our nostrils and in our mouths. For once, I kept my mouth shut. Samson said he’d go and find an aid organization with medical supplies and he got out of the car. Within seconds, he disappeared in a cloud of flies. I told him to hurry. I was impatient to locate the Gold of Sheba.

Lalibela contains twelve churches hewn from the living rock. They may not be as grand as the monuments of the Nabateans at Petra, or on such a scale as the Pyramids, but they are equally mysterious and very beautiful. Were it not for its location, Lalibela would be swamped with tourists.

The story goes that in the twelfth century, during the rule of the Zagwe dynasty, a male child was born to the Queen. The King had died, and the boy’s elder brother ruled as regent. Soon after the birth of her second son, the Queen noticed that his cradle was infested with a swarm of bees. She recalled an ancient Ethiopian belief which says that the animal world can foretell the arrival of true nobility. In Ethiopia children are generally named some days after their birth, once their character has shown itself. The Queen thought that the bees were a sign, and so she named her second son Lalibela, ‘the man whose sovereignty is recognized by bees’.

Years passed, and Lalibela’s brother grew jealous. Fearing that his younger brother would usurp him, he had him poisoned. Lalibela drank the poison and fell into a deep sleep. As he slept, he dreamed that he was taken by angels to the first, second and third heavens. Then God spoke, telling Lalibela to return to earth and to build fabulous churches, the like of which the world had never seen before. When Lalibela awoke, his brother paid homage to him, declaring him to be the true king. Then Lalibela gathered together stonemasons and craftsmen, and ordered them to start carving the rock. During the day they worked with great speed, and during the night the work was carried on by angels.

The twelve churches that Lalibela created are laid out in two main clusters. Each building is unique and can only be appreciated by looking at the space around it. Where there is empty space there was once rock. All the churches were carved out of the surrounding red volcanic tuff.

After an hour of waiting for Samson to reappear, I decided to continue the search for the Gold of Sheba alone. Leaving Bahru to chew qat in the shade, I began to make my way to the northern cluster of churches. Within five strides of the Jeep, I was surrounded by a gaggle of boys. They spoke good English, which is rare in Ethiopia, and all of them wanted to be my guide. I said that I wanted to see the Gold of Sheba. I expected blank looks, but to my surprise they all nodded keenly. Then a boy of about eight with bloodied knees spoke for the rest:

‘The Gold of Sheba is kept in a big box, which King Lalibela himself made. It’s locked and guarded by the priest at Bet Giyorgis.’

The children were adamant that only one of them could be my guide. That was the rule. They could decide amongst themselves by fighting, one said, but it would take time and cause them pain. It was better that I choose my guide as quickly as I could. A small boy stood a little apart from the group, clearly afraid that he would be beaten by the others. Darker-skinned than the rest, he was also the weakest. I chose him, and the others scowled.

I asked the boy his name. He had a high-pitched voice and a cheeky smile. He said he was called Amaya, and that his mother and father were dead, so now he lived with his grandmother who was blind.

We set off down the narrow path which led through tall, lush elephant grass towards the northern churches. Amaya rambled on in English, telling me about life in Lalibela and skipping to keep up. He took me first to the biggest church, Bet Medhane Alem, ‘Saviour of the World’. The church stands in a great courtyard carved out of the volcanic rock, and the building itself is encircled by columns, with many more inside its carved interior.

In 1521, a Portuguese priest, Francisco Alvares, arrived in Lalibela and was astonished by what he saw. Yet when he came to write his journals, he was convinced that no one would believe his description. In A True Relation of the Lands of Prester John, he explains: ‘It wearied me to write more of these works, because it seemed to me that they will accuse me of untruth . . . there is much more than I have already written, and I have left it that they may not tax me with it being falsehood.’

A few minutes from Bet Medhane we came to the church of Bet Maryam. Each of the churches has its own sacred well. That at Bet Maryam is said to contain healing water which has the power to make barren women fertile. Inside, the arches are adorned with carvings and fabulous frescoes, some of which bear the Star of David. Elsewhere I saw ventilation holes carved in the shape of swastikas, evidence of ancient trade routes between Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

On the southern side of Bet Maryam a tunnel led us to more churches. Among them is the most sacred chapel of all, the Selassie Chapel, reputedly the resting-place of King Lalibela himself. Then Amaya led the way to Bet Giyorgis.

Lalibela’s Church of St George is one of the true wonders of the world. If it were in any other country, it would be surrounded by curio-sellers and hot-dog stalls. Guided tours would be conducted, and a five-star hotel erected to overlook it. Thankfully, it’s in the middle of nowhere and so has been left alone. Bet Giyorgis is carved in the shape of a Greek cross, and it stands on a three-tiered plinth. Legend has it that when King Lalibela had completed his churches St George galloped up on a magnificent white steed. He was furious with the king for not dedicating a church to him. And so King Lalibela ordered one more church to be built in honour of Ethiopia’s patron saint.

As he led me through a tunnel to the church’s entrance, Amaya tugged at my shirt sleeve.

We ascended a flight of broad steps, removed our shoes and called out for the priest. The ceiling of the church was about twenty feet high, its interior square chamber carved out from the rock, with a shrouded cube—the Holy of Holies—in the centre of the room. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, a man in deep purple robes stepped from the shadows. He had dark, sorrowful eyes and his beard was flecked with grey. I asked Amaya to translate, but the priest butted in, saying he understood English. There was no need for the boy, he said.

‘I have come on a long journey from America,’ I replied, as no one in Ethiopia ever seemed very impressed by a journey begun in England.

‘I’ve come to Lalibela to see a precious treasure. I’ve heard you have that treasure here.’

The priest turned and motioned to a dark wooden coffer, sealed with an unusual lock which seemed to be fastened with a system of wooden levers and bolts.

‘The Gold of Sheba is kept in there,’ he said. ‘The box was made by King Lalibela. It is sacred and cannot be seen by anyone.’

I had come a long way to see the Gold of Sheba and I was not going to be thwarted by religious bureaucracy. I looked down at Amaya and saw him rubbing his fingers together. I fumbled in my jacket pocket. The priest’s tongue probed the hairs around his mouth, like that of a snake testing the air.

A moment later, the priest was opening the lock. He began by loosening a pair of large wooden screws. I leant forward to get a better look, but he turned his back to me and blocked my view. Minutes later he stepped back. In his hand was an Ethiopian cross intricately worked in gold.

Holding the crucifix high above his head like a battle standard, the priest tilted it to catch the shaft of sun coming through the doorway. Amaya and I stumbled backwards as the bolt of light dazzled us. Although not as large as some other Ethiopian crosses, the Gold of Sheba was magnificent. The priest deciphered its complex design. An intricate cross lay at its centre, surrounded by twelve bosses that represented the Apostles of Christ. On the outer edge were a pair of birds that looked like hoopoes. The priest explained that they were doves from Noah’s Ark.

‘You are the first foreigner ever to set eyes on this sacred cross,’ said the priest untruthfully. ‘A man whose genius shines as brightly as yours, as brightly as the Gold of Sheba itself, is the kind of man who rewards true beauty when he sees it.’

‘No, no,’ said the priest, ‘long before Lalibela. The gold was brought from Judah. The gold in the cross came from the Great Temple in Judah.’

‘Yes, that is right,’ he replied, twisting the shaft of the cross in his fingers. ‘An Ethiopian went to Judah after Solomon’s death and brought back three of the gold treasures.’

I had listened to him with mounting suspicion. How tempting it was to believe his tale. The idea of Solomon’s gold returning from the land of the Israelites to Ethiopia was wonderful—a completed circle. But it was implausible, and I had found no mention of the legend elsewhere. I asked the priest where he thought the gold for the temple in Jerusalem had been mined. He shook his head.

‘What does it matter where the gold came from? More important is what happened to it when the Temple of Solomon was destroyed.’

Amaya tugged at my sleeve. There had been a terrible theft in Lalibela, he said. Then the priest took up the story. In 1997, an 800-year-old solid gold cross that was kept in the Church of Bet Medhane Alem went missing. It weighed more than fourteen pounds, and was one of the greatest Ethiopian treasures. When the theft was discovered, the small community was plunged into mourning. Lalibela’s people whipped themselves into a frenzy of grief, pleading with God to help them. Suspicion fell on the head priest, who was arrested and taken away. Some said he was tortured; everyone believed he was involved. Months went by and there was no word, no sight of the cross. The priest had not confessed. Then news came when it was least expected. The cross was discovered being smuggled into Belgium, where it had been sold to an unsuspecting purchaser. The Ethiopian government had to pay $25,000 to get it back.

Before we could leave the church, the priest fished out a collection tin from the folds of his robes and looked at me expectantly. I folded a fifty birr note and stuffed it through the slot in the lid of the tin. The priest smiled in gratitude and then he was gone.

A horde of beggars shuffled towards us as we walked out of the church. Like Lalibela’s flies, they longed for sustenance. At the back of the pack was a very old woman. She was stooped low, her spine twisted and bent, and her body was shrouded in rags. Around her neck there hung an enormous growth, the size and shape of a coconut.

‘The others say she’s a witch,’ said Amaya, ‘that she talks to the Devil at night.’

‘I think her back hurts,’ he said gently, ‘but I don’t think she’s a witch.’

The desk clerk of Lalibela’s Sheba Hotel cursed the government for driving the tourists away.

‘We used to get pretty women coming here,’ he said, staring into space. ‘They had nice pink lipstick and jewellery that rattled when they laughed. But our leaders don’t want the world to see the mess the country’s in. They’re greedy for the money the aid companies bring. The worse the situation sounds, the more money the United Nations sends. So of course they don’t want the place to be stable.’

For a man working as a desk clerk in a small hotel, he seemed unusually well-informed. I asked if he expected tourism to pick up again.

Amaya had recommended that we spend the night at the Sheba Hotel and I had sent him off to find Samson. When I asked the clerk for my room key, he toyed with it, unwilling to end our conversation.

‘She came here, from Texas,’ he said. ‘She has white skin, like the shell of a goose egg, and soft hair. When she came to Sheba Hotel we talked for hours. She said she wanted me to see America with my own eyes. She promised me that one day I would be a guest, and I promised to wait for her letter . . . the one with the ticket and the visa.’

Lalibela’s buildings are unlike those in any other part of Ethiopia. The houses are circular with two storeys and are built of loose-fitting stones. The town’s inhabitants eke out a living by keeping a few animals and tending their meagre crops of maize and teff. Around Petra or the Pyramids money from tourism trickles down into the local economy, and there’s a hustle and bustle in the air. But at Lalibela what little money there is from tourism goes straight into the priests’ pockets. The local people are ruinously poor and like all Christians in the country, they stand in awe of the priesthood.

Shortly before sunset, Samson turned up at the hotel. He’d spoken to some Danish aid workers about the bus crash and said they would go and have a look in the morning. I wondered how many more of the injured would have died by then, and cursed myself for not having ferried them to Lalibela myself.

‘There’s no hospital in Lalibela,’ said Samson, reading my thoughts. ‘And even if we did go and get them we’d run out of petrol. There’s none of that here either.’ He was right. Lalibela had a severe petrol shortage, and the town was littered with cars that had been abandoned when their tanks ran dry.

The Emperor’s Jeep had an engine with an insatiable thirst, made worse by the fact that we could never turn it off. Our expedition was on a tight budget, but our transport had been constructed for an emperor who had had access to plentiful funds. Bahru had promised that the more distance we put between us and the capital, the cheaper petrol would become. By the time we were on the Eritrean border, he said, we’d find fuel was virtually given away. As a result, he had refused to fill up at any of the petrol stations en route and now we were running dangerously low.

Early next morning I told Samson to go and find some petrol. If he couldn’t find any, he was to look for high-octane aviation fuel. He ambled away in the direction of the market with a one-gallon bottle under his arm. He hadn’t quite understood the extent of the Jeep’s thirst.

An aid worker in Addis Ababa had told me to be careful when buying fuel in rural Ethiopia. Much of the stuff on sale is diluted with kerosene or even with water. The best way to test its quality is to offer a little fuel to the person you are buying from. If he jumps at the idea you know he’s hawking the real thing.

The only man in town with petrol for sale looked surprisingly gloomy given that he had a monopoly on all the fuel.

‘That’s scandalous!’ I shouted. ‘But we’re desperate, so tell him that we’ll buy all the petrol he’s got—so long as he puts some in his own tank first.’

The petrol-seller’s face froze as Samson translated my words. Then he grew very angry and threatened to call the police. While he was shouting, Samson took a sniff at the fuel he was touting.

For the next two days we waited for a petrol tanker to arrive. The two girls we’d picked up had wisely decided to catch a lift westwards to Gondar on a truck piled high with crates of ouzo. Like the espresso machines, ouzo had been introduced by the Italians, and the Ethiopians had developed a taste for it. As a result, there was a distinct correlation between wrecked trucks and the contents that they were carrying at the time of the crash. Many of the vehicles we saw that had plunged into ravines seemed to have been carrying ouzo or beer or vodka, or in some cases all three.

The problem with having your own transport is that it limits your movements. All I could do was force Samson and Bahru to stand by the roadside and flag down vehicles to ask if we could buy any of their fuel. On the first day only one truck passed, and it ran on diesel. On the second day they were a little luckier: a government jeep rolled into Lalibela. Samson begged the driver to sell us some precious fuel, but the man jeered at him and drove off.

I was secretly pleased to have been marooned in Lalibela and spent the first two days exploring the town and its churches with Amaya. But then, having seen all there was to see, I grew impatient.

By the third day, Samson and Bahru had still had no luck and I retreated to the Sheba Hotel. The desk clerk was also tired of waiting, in his case for non-existent guests. He asked me if I’d man the front desk while he took the afternoon off. What if a tidal wave of tourists flooded in? His face lit up for a second and then fell.

So I sat behind the front desk and re-read Frank Hayter’s account of his discovery of the mine-shafts at Tullu Wallel:

It was not until I was within a few yards that I realized what the patches of darker stone were—the entrance to underground caves; and not natural entrances either, for the stone uprights and heavy lintels that squared the openings had been fashioned by the hand of man.

Switching on my torch I stepped between the massive uprights. Ahead loomed a narrow passage which at some remote age had been hewn through the rock. I glanced at the walls and saw that they had been roughly chiselled. Here and there various-sized bosses of darker stone had been left protruding from the wall’s surface, giving the impression that the workmen had found the task of cutting through them an impossible one. Advancing step by step I penetrated some forty feet and was wondering how much farther I could go before the passage ended, when the torch-light illuminated the far wall of a huge cave.

After reading Hayter’s words, I took another look at the photograph of the mine opening in Captain Bartleet’s book. The dressed stone doorway near the rough cave entrance looked convincing, but I knew that the only way to solve the matter was to make for the mountain myself.

When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth. They are towering figures who persevered through the most brutal circumstances imaginable, often in disguise, though today their methods seem rather savage. If any of Stanley’s team gave him trouble, he had them put in chains.

Of them all my favourite is Samuel White Baker. He travelled throughout Abyssinia, as Ethiopia was then known, and he was instrumental in locating the source of the Nile. Baker was a man of overwhelming ambition who thrived on adversity. When the chips are down and I’m wondering how best to proceed, I turn to him.

Samuel Baker was the only Victorian ennobled directly as a result of his explorations. He was also the only adventurer of his era who travelled with his wife, Florence. Baker had purchased her at a Bulgarian slave market, and they became inseparable. The journey on which they met was typical of a time which, sadly, no longer exists.

Baker had agreed to take a young Indian Maharaja, Duleep Singh, on a bear-hunting trip to Transylvania. Duleep Singh divided his time between Claridges Hotel in London and a Scottish castle in the Highlands, where he pursued his passion for hunting. On the journey to Transylvania he travelled under the pseudonym of Captain Robert Melville. He also insisted on bringing his three English servants with him, including his butler. Most of his voluminous luggage seemed to consist of crates of vintage champagne. The party reached Budapest by train, and then Baker bundled the Maharaja and his entourage aboard a corn barge which was heading down the Danube.

While sailing downriver, the corn barge collided with an ice-floe near the Ottoman-controlled town of Widdin, in what is now Bulgaria, and the Maharaja and his retinue were forced ashore. Widdin was as sordid a place as one could imagine, its only business the sale of black, white and Chinese slaves. While waiting for the corn barge to be repaired Baker and the Maharaja went to look at the slave market, It was there that Baker first set eyes on Florence, with whom he fell in love instantly. He haggled furiously for her, but he never disclosed how much he had paid.

Four days after our arrival at Lalibela, Samson flagged down a jeep. In the back there were seven jerry-cans that belonged to a local businessman. Even before I saw the driver’s face, I knew the negotiations would be hard. I stood out of the way, for the appearance of a foreigner tends to quadruple the going price. Samson put on his most courteous voice and smiled so much that his eyes disappeared in creases. He motioned a finger to the cans. The driver nodded. Samson smiled again. I could tell money was being discussed. The driver kept nodding. The bargaining continued for about half an hour, with the driver nodding and Samson smiling. By the end of it Samson was no longer smiling, he was chewing his upper lip.

‘We’re going to need more than this,’ said Samson nervously, ‘we’re going to need the money in your shoe as well.’

Before we left Lalibela I gave Amaya a selection of old clothes. He’d asked if I had a dress in his size. He’d always wanted a dress, he said. I was confused and rather concerned that a small boy wanted to dress up as a girl. I asked Samson to have a chat with him and explain that dresses are for little girls, not little boys. Amaya started to grin and then burst out laughing. Then Samson started to laugh.

Ten minutes later we were on the road again with Bahru crunching the gears and jerking the wheel as usual, an enormous quid of qat stuck in his cheek. The scenes we passed were now familiar: children with huge piles of sticks on their backs, goats being herded along the road, people trudging to distant destinations, solemn funeral processions of elders wrapped in white, making their way down mountain trails, walking in silence towards a burial ground. I asked Samson why so many people were dying.

‘Life in the country is hard,’ he replied. ‘If you fall sick you get sicker and then you die. People with a little money use it to buy food, not medicine.’

The contrast between village life and a small town in Ethiopia is astonishing. Small Ethiopian towns are vibrant places, full of bustle. Cluttered shops sell a colourful display of goods imported from China. Boys play table tennis on the pavements. The bars are alive with deafening music, the flow of warm bottled beer and the lascivious solicitations of whores. And all the while, there is a constant flow of people arriving from the villages to barter and to buy basic necessities. In a remote village or hamlet, days from the nearest road, there are no paraffin lamps or electricity, only candles; no running water either, or shops, or the noise of an ill-tuned transistor radio. I am not new to Africa or to lands where good, innocent people are struggling to survive. Even so I found myself reeling at the extraordinary level of hardship that rural Ethiopians endure.

Ask me to list all the things which I own and I wouldn’t know where to start. I have rooms filled with possessions I never use. Our attic is packed to bursting with objects I’ve collected and forgotten about. But ask a villager in the Ethiopian highlands what he has in his tukul and the list will be precise and short. Everything is functional and has ten uses. There’s a knife, perhaps an axe, a candle or two, or a lamp made from the bottom of a tin can, a blanket and hides, a bucket, a pot, a sheet of polythene, a few old clothes, some flour and a pile of sticks. That is all.

In his youth Samson worked as a gold miner in southern Ethiopia’s illegal mines.

Harar’s hyena-man, Yusuf, slaughters a cow outside his family home, in preparation

Each night Yusuf feeds the pack of wild hyenas which come out of the darkness, lured by the smell of fresh blood. Like all Harar’s people Yusuf believes that if he stops feeding the animals, they will descend on the town and eat all the children.

Travelling by local bus in Ethiopia is a very slow business. No one seems fazed when, every few miles, the bus breaks down.

The illegal gold mine at Bedakaysa was like something out of the pages of the Old Testament: hundreds of men, women and children digging the ground with their hands.

Around each miner’s neck hangs a pouch for storing the precious gold dust. In this case it is made from a miniature gourd with an amulet attached to the same string.

Molten gold cascades from the furnace into ingots at Lega Dembi, Ethiopia’s only licensed gold mine, which produces about 350 gold bars a year.

The author straining under the weight of three newly made bars of pure Ethiopian gold.

A priest sits in the doorway of one of Lalibela’s fabulous churches, all twelve of which were carved from a volcanic plateau in the twelfth century.

At Bet Giyorgis, the Church of St George, a priest holds up two ancient Ethiopian crosses. The one on the left is known as ‘The Gold of Sheba.’

Kefla Mohammed, leader of the salt caravan, poses with a pair of his camels on the road to Mekele. Both animals are laden with blocks of salt.

A typical Ethiopian depiction of religious events, including Christ teaching and being crucified. The image in the bottom left-hand corner shows Abba Aregawi being pulled up the Debra Damo mountain by a serpent.

The flat-topped mountain of Debra Damo is home to the oldest monastery in Ethiopia. No women or female animals of any kind are permitted to ascend the sheer cliff face to visit the monastery.

The apprentice priest, Eyba, standing outside the main monastery building at Debra Damo.

A priest at Debra Damo shows the Kebra Negast, an ancient Ethiopian text that tells the tale of Solomon and Sheba.

Beside the shrine in Axum where the Ark of the Covenant is supposedly housed, a priest shows off a collection of Ethiopian crowns and crosses, some of which are said to be more than 1,600 years old.

Berehane with a picture of his Italian-born grandfather, Antillio Zappa, who was a friend of Frank Hayter and mined gold near Nejo during the 1920s.

The indomitable English adventurer Frank Hayter, who claimed to have discovered a treasure cave on the mysterious mountain of Tullu Wallel in western Ethiopia. He was convinced that the gold and precious gems he found were part of Solomon’s treasure.