9

The Jinn of Suleiman

‘It is better to die than to live without killing.’

Danakil proverb

FIVE HOURS OUT of Lalibela we passed a terrible accident on what was surely the world’s roughest road. A truck had somehow toppled over on a flat stretch, and its cargo of ouzo had shattered. The driver was dead. So was his companion. The bodies had been pulled out of the cab and were lying on the side of the road. The fact that there was so little blood indicated that they’d probably died instantly. To my relief there was no sign of the two Dutch girls. They had been travelling west. This road led north.

A few miles further on Bahru sped through a village and hit a dog. He burst out laughing and clapped his hands. I turned round and through the rear window saw the poor creature writhing in its death throes. I shouted at Bahru, but he didn’t understand why I was so angry. As far as he was concerned stray animals on the road were fair game, something to enliven the tedium of the job.

By now, the deficiencies of the Emperor’s Jeep were becoming apparent. The worst problem was the tyres. On a good day we would have only a couple of punctures. On bad days the number would rise to seven or eight. The reason was blatantly clear. The tyres had gaping holes in them. At first I found myself yelling at Bahru. Why didn’t he get the tyres properly repaired? But eventually I came to see his point of view. In Addis Ababa I had insisted that Bahru be responsible for all punctures and breakdowns. As far as he was concerned, the less money he laid out on tyres, the more he had to spend on qat. If your life revolves around chewing an intoxicating leaf, it makes perfect sense.

Though Ethiopian villages have very little in the way of merchandise to offer, they do usually contain at least one shop selling a selection of worn and lacerated tyres at highly inflated prices. At Sekota, Bahru was finally persuaded to buy ten tyres. Though we all knew they probably wouldn’t get us through the day, I felt I’d achieved a minor victory.

While we were at the tyre stall I got chatting to a frail balding man who smelt strongly of sulphur. Every few minutes he’d pull up his shirt and apply a layer of Indian-made ointment to a suppurating wound on his chest. He was old and underfed, and it was clear that the injury wasn’t healing. I had a look at the instructions on the tube. The ointment was supposed to ease back pain.

‘Strong medicine,’ said the man.

‘Does it help?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘it’s imported medicine.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘I bought it at the market. It was expensive.’

‘But it says you must not put it on an open wound.’

The man looked confused but then he raised his shirt and massaged more ointment into the lesion. He grimaced with pain. In the Ethiopian highlands there’s an enduring trust in foreign-made goods. Local markets are flooded with cheap Indian medicines which are regarded as the height of sophistication. Imported drugs are seen as panaceas: a randomly selected cream, lotion or tablet is used to cure any illness.

Samson said that when he was a teenager his parents thought he had meningitis, so they went to the market to buy some medicine. The stallholder there weighed out a few handfuls of unlabelled tablets and prescribed them to be taken with chicken broth.

I asked Samson if he’d had seizures as a result.

‘No, no,’ he replied, ‘I got better with a little time, although my sweat turned brown.’

My geologist friend in London had looked at the map of Ethiopia and had said that he’d put money on Afar being the ancient Ophir. He had pointed to a ridge of low mountains that rise up along the Red Sea coast. They were the place he’d head for. I had scoured dozens of geological reports, but none of them mentioned there being any gold in Afar, though there were gold prospectors’ reports on just about every other corner of the country. Still, I knew I had to go and see for myself. And if Afar wasn’t Ophir, it had other attractions.

The north-eastern region of Afar is a desolate expanse of desert peopled by one of the most ferocious tribes imaginable—the Danakil.

I have always been fascinated by the curious habit of taking human body parts as trophies. Most cultures have at one time or another slain their foes, lopped off their heads and paraded around with them. But the Danakil developed a reputation for taking quite a different kind of trophy. Their predilection was for testicles. A warrior hadn’t proved himself as a man until he’d spilt his enemy’s blood and had the man’s genitals hanging round his neck. A search through Ethiopia for Solomon’s mines wouldn’t have been complete without a journey to Afar.

Once we were on the main road I told Bahru to start heading east rather than north. He continued to chew his qat and didn’t blink. I was pleased he hadn’t objected, so I added that we would be going to Afar in search of the Danakil. I watched Bahru’s face in the rear-view mirror as we bumped along. It contorted and then froze in paralysis, as if his qat-chewing jaw had at last seized up. Samson was equally horrified. He said that the Danakil were a brutal people who only had one thing on their minds.

‘What’s that, then?’

‘Testicles!’

‘But we’re driving in the Emperor’s Jeep,’ I exclaimed, ‘no one’s going to mess with us.’

Bahru’s jaw suddenly loosened in a torrent of Amharic. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘Bahru says he’s not going to drive to Afar. If you want to go there you’ll have to go on foot.’

I tried everything I could think of, but Bahru wouldn’t budge. He was a man with no fear, he explained, but he was more attached to his testicles than he could say. Wild horses wouldn’t drag him into the Danakil Desert. Bahru’s own tribe, the Somalis, have a formidable reputation for courage in battle, so I was surprised by his refusal to continue. Maybe going to Afar was too dangerous.

‘Samson, what do you think?’

The indefatigable fixer wiped his face with his hand.

‘They’re heathens,’ he said.

‘Then look on our journey as a missionary expedition to preach the Word of the Lord.’

At that Samson seemed to perk up and I caught the glint of missionary zeal in his eye. He fished out a newly acquired Bible from his disintegrating tartan case. It was much smaller than the one he had lost in the fire, but the Word of the Lord takes many forms.

‘We will go to Afar,’ he said boldly, ‘and we will spread the Word.’

After a great deal of coaxing, Bahru agreed to take us as far as Didigsala on the edge of the Danakil Desert. He would leave us there and beat a hasty retreat, meeting us later at Mekele, the capital of Tigray. I’d heard that in Didigsala we could join one of the salt caravans that make their way through the desert to the market at Mekele.

On my recent journey up the Amazon to the Shuar people, my companions and I had been terrified that we might have our heads chopped off and dramatically reduced in size. The very thought had had a dire effect on the morale of the expedition. But modern times have brought change, and missionaries have now replaced Shuar blowpipes with tambourines. The destruction of ancient customs in a matter of years angers me, but I suspected that the testicle-lopping days of the Danakil had probably come to an end. I informed Samson that Alabama missionaries had probably beaten us to the Danakil. He smiled widely. He looked forward to talking to them about Jesus.

Wilfred Thesiger is one of the few to have written about the proud traditions of the Danakil. He was born at the British Legation in Addis Ababa in 1910. The capital was then still young, and until Thesiger was sent to boarding school in England at the age of eight, he’d never seen a car. His father, a high-ranking diplomat, was instrumental in helping Ras Tafari accede to the Ethiopian throne, but before the prince could be crowned as Emperor, Thesiger’s father died quite suddenly of a heart attack. Wishing to acknowledge his gratitude to the family, the Emperor extended a personal invitation to Wilfred Thesiger to attend his coronation in his father’s place.

In November 1930, when the festivities came to an end, Thesiger embarked on his first true expedition. He had heard that the land of the Danakil had good hunting, so he set off for the desert, writing later that ‘The whole course of my life was to be permanently affected by that month.’

Thesiger has often told me of that, his earliest, African expedition and he recounts the tale with characteristic animation. He was aware that the Danakil were ferocious, but he had little idea quite how dangerous. The more officials pleaded with him not to go, the more determined he became. Almost every foreign expedition that had headed into the Danakil Desert in the past had been wiped out, the testicles of every participant seized as trophies. When, therefore, Thesiger returned in one piece, he became something of a hero. He was just twenty years old.

At virtually the same time that the young Wilfred Thesiger was rounding up pack animals for his journey, another European was returning from the Danakil Depression. L. M. Nesbitt was a prospector and the foreman of a gold mine in western Ethiopia. He believed he might find gold in Afar, though in his book Desert and Forest, he hardly mentions the subject—serious prospectors always keep their cards close to the chest. Still, the fact that Nesbitt, a seasoned prospector, made such a perilous journey was encouraging. There might well be gold in Afar after all.

I rallied Samson and Bahru, telling them that Nesbitt’s expedition proved there was the possibility of finding gold, or even ancient mines, in the Danakil region. I decided not to relate the details of Nesbitt’s trip or tell them exactly how many of his men lost their genitalia.

The road to Didigsala was the greatest challenge that the Emperor’s Jeep had faced so far. The dilapidated vehicle rattled at every joint, as if it shared its driver’s fear of Danakil bandits. Thorn trees and eucalyptus gave way to low rocky hills and patchy scrub. We saw camels grazing, the odd shepherd with his flock of goats, and a smattering of huts nestling in the shadows between the hills. Samson took out his Bible and started selecting appropriate passages with which to convert.

Before veering off the main road towards Didigsala, Bahru swapped the car’s jack for a bale of qat at a small hamlet. I would have stopped the unwise trade but we didn’t have a spare tyre left, and there was little hope of getting one now. Bahru chewed so feverishly that his mouth foamed, and his eyes seemed to start from his head like those of a man being electrocuted. Four hours later, I spotted a cluster of low huts. We had reached the outskirts of Didigsala.

Samson got down and asked the first man he saw when the next salt caravan would be leaving for Mekele. I watched as, ever polite and respectful of others, he posed the question only after lengthy salutations. The local man waved his hands frantically, motioned sideways and pointed at the sky. Then he bent down and put his palms on the ground, did five press-ups, jumped up again, pulled down his shorts and waved his genitalia about. Samson looked back at me despondently.

‘He’s a lunatic,’ he said.

Most small Ethiopian towns seemed to have a token madman, and in rural areas people seemed to delight in throwing stones at them. Samson passed a crust of bread to our madman, who whimpered with satisfaction. He was very thin, and the lines of his ribs showed through his shirt. As he choked down the bread, a middle-aged man dressed in a brilliant white shamma swept out of his house. He picked up a large stone, and flung it at the maniac, hitting him on the backside with considerable force. At that, the madman fled.

A minute later a crowd had gathered round the Jeep. Thirty or forty old men clutching grey blankets had stumbled over and now they were peering in through the windows of the vehicle. Clearly visitors were rare.

One of our new companions placed a hand on the Jeep’s bonnet and closed his eyes.

‘You have come far,’ he said.

I nodded.

‘We have come to meet the salt caravan which goes to Mekele.’

‘Ah, Mekele, very far.’

‘How far?’

‘Ah, very very far.’

Samson translated and winced with worry.

‘When will the next salt caravan come from Afar?’

The old man pulled his blanket more tightly around him and then, lifting up his walking cane, he swung it in an arc toward the horizon.

‘There they are now,’ he said.

We shaded our eyes to follow the line of the stick. I could see nothing.

‘He is right,’ said Samson. ‘I can make out people and camels. Dots. Many dots.’

‘They will not reach here until morning,’ said the man. ‘You will stay the night with me.’

He led the way to his hut. Bahru needed no cue to unload our belongings. They were piled up on the sand before I’d said a word. Then he leapt back into the Jeep and said he’d meet us in Mekele.

‘When? When will you get there?’

Bahru spat on his hands and revved the engine.

‘The question is when will you get there,’ he replied.

Then he was gone in a swirl of dust.

‘He is a coward,’ said Samson. ‘Bahru is a disgrace to his tribe.’ The man with the stick called the others to leave us alone and lashed out at them with his cane. We were his property. As he led the way to his hut he said his name was Adugna. His wife was dead, he explained, and so he lived with his son’s family. They were poor, but they were honoured to accept us into their home. I inquired about the camel train to Mekele.

‘You will need strong legs,’ he said. ‘It is very far.’

‘A week’s walk?’

Adugna blinked his frosted eyes.

‘Many days.’

Samson, who was brimming over with unexpected enthusiasm, comforted me.

‘We are in God’s hands,’ he said. ‘We are the Israelites in the desert. The only thing we should fear is the Devil.’

Adugna led the way through a ring of thorns that encircled his son’s home. A hunting dog sprang at us from the shadow of the hut, but Adugna lunged at it with his stick. In the dark, smoky atmosphere of the one-room hut, a dozen eyes widened as we entered. I couldn’t make out the features of faces at first, just eyes, all winking like owls in the trees. Adugna swung his cane to make space for us, then clapped his hands and barked orders. His family members hurried out into the sunshine and sought refuge behind the hut.

‘You will stay with me for a month!’ said Adugna. ‘This is your home. We are brothers.’

‘But we want to go to Mekele with the caravan,’ I said.

The old man laughed a deep and sinister laugh.

‘They will kill you and take your money,’ he replied. ‘They are bad men. The salt traders are greedy. Not like us. We have no money. We have no use for it. Money is the Devil’s currency.’

The old man’s son returned, stooping respectfully, and asked what we would like to drink. Without thinking, I said that tea would be very welcome. He stooped again, clasped my hand in his, thanked me, and left.

An hour passed. Samson asked Adugna about life in the desert.

‘It’s very hard, very hot, very dusty,’ said our host. ‘I was born at Lake Afrera in Afar. It’s even hotter there.’

‘How old are you?’

Adugna scrunched up his face and wiped it with the corner of his shawl.

‘Oh, I must be very old,’ he said. ‘Maybe seventy by now, or eighty. Maybe even older. I remember the days when the Italians were here. I was a young man then. There were other faranji as well. They were looking for gold.’

‘Gold? Did they find any?’

‘There is no gold here anymore,’ he replied.

‘Did there used to be gold, though?’

‘Oh, yes, there used to be. Afar was richer in gold than any other place on earth. There was so much gold that our people were rich like kings. Gold was the only metal we had.’

‘When was that? When was there gold?’

‘A long time ago.’

‘How long—a hundred years, a thousand years?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Adugna. ‘That long.’

‘Which? A thousand years?’

‘Yes, a long time ago.’

‘What happened to the gold? Was it mined out?’

‘No, it was not all mined,’ said our host. ‘There was too much ever to be mined. There was so much, I tell you, so much gold!’

‘So it’s still here, still in the ground?’

Again Adugna wiped his face with his shawl.

‘It is here, but at the same time it is not here,’ he said.

‘How can that be?’

‘Well, I will tell you. God got very angry with our people. He told them they were greedy, that they thought of nothing but themselves. So he punished them. He waved his cloak over the desert and turned all the gold into salt. But one day,’ Adugna continued, ‘when our people are no longer greedy, he will pull his cloak away and reveal the gold. That is why we stay here. We are waiting.’

Adugna called out to his daughter-in-law, telling her to bring the tea, which still hadn’t arrived.

‘Stay here with me,’ he said. ‘Be my guest and stay here. We will sit together and wait for God to pull away his cloak, to show us the fields of gold.’

Night had fallen by the time the tea finally arrived. Adugna’s son and daughter-in-law slipped into the hut with a pair of steaming cups. They presented one to me and the other to Samson. We breathed in the steam and thanked them for their hospitality. The family clustered around and watched us. I took a sip of the boiling liquid. It tasted earthy and weak. I assumed it was some blend of local tea.

‘Have another sip,’ said Adugna’s son anxiously.

So I did.

‘Delicious.’

‘Is it?’ he asked earnestly. ‘Are you sure it is delicious?’

‘Yes, yes, quite delicious,’ said Samson and I at the same time. The air of anxiety seemed to lift.

‘Can I tell you something?’ asked Adugna’s son.

‘Of course.’

He touched his hand to his heart.

‘Well, we did not have any tea,’ he said. ‘But it is our custom to give an honoured guest whatever he asks for. You asked us for tea. We did not know what to do. None of our neighbours had any tea either. Then someone found an old sack which had once had some tea in it. So we boiled up the sack. And we made tea from it.’

As I stretched out in the tukul waiting for sleep that night, I thought of Adugna’s story of the gold. Throughout Ethiopia, gold and folklore seemed to be closely connected. Where you found one, you found the other. Many people knew of the legend of God punishing the Danakil for being greedy—I was to hear the tale a dozen times in different parts of the country. When other tribes recounted it, they did so with scorn, doubtless because the Danakil are feared and disliked. The Danakil themselves sincerely believed the legend: one day, God will transform the salt back into gold.

Adugna was an old man, but possibly not old enough to remember Nesbitt’s expedition, though he must have heard of others with the same ambition. Before the Second World War, Ethiopia was a magnet for those wishing to seek their fame and fortune. Nesbitt himself described the European population of Addis Ababa in the late 1920s as ‘always a mob of disillusioned, broken-down vagrants, meddlers, spies, sharpers—adventurers all. All are adept at something: some of them have academic titles, probably self-conferred . . . they are stayers-behind, dressed in ill-fitting threadbare clothes with untrimmed hair.’

But Nesbitt was different. He was educated and well-organized, and he knew the dangers of travelling among the Danakil. Three Italian expeditions in the 1880s had ended with the entire party being butchered in Afar. The focus of life for any young Danakil man was to kill. A man who had not slain another would never be accepted as a husband and would be called a woman by his peers.

The Danakil passion for killing is from another time, when slaying one’s enemies brought honour and respect. My own ancestors in the Hindu Kush thrived on a culture where killing was respectable. They would dress their womenfolk up in red clothing so they wouldn’t be killed in the crossfire.

That night Adugna slept outside the hut with his family, leaving Samson and me alone. I began to imagine a midnight assassination, but Samson seemed untroubled.

‘Adugna’s parents were wild people,’ he said, ‘but he and the others have kindness in their eyes.’

He was right. While we slept, the old man’s daughter-in-law took our clothes and washed them. Her husband cleaned my shoes, and their children sprinkled the petals of fragrant flowers over us. I was grateful for their hospitality but saddened at the same time. It seemed as if the Danakil had been called into line, like the Shuar and so many other once proud tribes.

Next morning, before the first light of dawn cut across the horizon, the salt caravan arrived. Forty camels and ten men walked briskly into the settlement. The camels were laden with what seemed to be large grey slabs of stone. Like every camel on earth, they resented being enslaved by man, but they were energetic, for their day had just begun. Their leader gave the order for the beasts to be given water and he checked the bindings of their loads. Then he came over to where we were standing.

Adugna introduced us. Kefla Mohammed was a slender man with skinny legs, calloused hands and an occasional squint. He walked with a limp, plunging his long stick into the sand as he went, like a gondolier. He must have been the same age as me, but he looked much older, his skin roughened by decades of desert sun.

When Adugna had introduced us, Kefla pressed his shoulders to mine in greeting.

‘We will be friends for a thousand years,’ he said.

‘We wish to journey to Mekele.’

The leader stood tall, pushing himself up on his stick.

‘You will walk with us and share our food,’ he replied, ‘for we are brothers.’

I thanked him.

‘How many days’ trek is it?’

Kefla took a step back.

‘Far,’ he said. ‘It is very far.’

‘Two days?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘More than that?’

Again he stepped back. Then he glanced at the fine sand which covered his feet.

‘Perhaps.’

Two hours later our bags and our water-bottles were strapped on the strongest of the she-camels, and we took our positions at the rear of the caravan. Adugna and his family stood to attention and wished us good fortune. Other villagers came to bid us farewell too, but Adugna fought them away with his stick. This was his moment. I promised to return when I had visited Mekele, when I had found the gold of Solomon.

‘I have told you,’ he called as we left, ‘come and stay here with me and we shall wait together for God’s cloak to lift.’

Setting out on a journey of uncertain length in an unknown land is a thrilling prospect. I asked Samson if Kefla and his troop seemed trustworthy. He hugged his Bible close to his chest and hinted that they were good people but that they needed his Christian counsel. Only then, he said, would God raise his veil and restore the fortunes of the Danakil.

‘Do you really believe the legend?’ I asked.

Samson looked up at the sun blazing overhead.

‘The Lord is wonderful and mysterious,’ he said.

We trekked over parched ground, heading north-west. There was no tree cover and only a smattering of cacti and scrub. Whenever the camels spotted any vegetation, they would stop and graze. They were roped together like mountaineers and didn’t seem in the least affected by the great weight of their loads.

The salt they carried had been carved from the dry bed of Lake Karum and from the salt flats around it in Afar. Long wooden poles are used to prize the blocks loose, and then the blocks are sawn into smaller pieces of a uniform size.

Kefla called us to the front and offered us some cooked meat and water from his bottle. He was eager to tell us about his life. Fortunately, like Adugna, he spoke some Amharic, and so Samson could translate.

‘I have walked this route a thousand times,’ he said, ‘since I was a child. Before me, my father walked with the camels, as his own father did before him.’

‘What of the dangers, the fear of shiftas?’

‘These days there’s no danger,’ he said, ‘except from scorpions and snakes. Our people used to enjoy killing foreigners but now we have come to trust them.’

Kefla glanced over at me as we walked. I knew what he was thinking. He was wondering if I’d heard of the Danakil’s preoccupation with testicles.

‘I have read of the proud traditions of the Danakil,’ I said. ‘It is sad that they have disappeared.’

‘We are still proud,’ he replied. ‘We are Danakil. But we no longer kill every man whose face is unknown to us. That was the old way. It was a good way, but now it has passed.’

Most of the men in the party were related to Kefla, brothers or sons, nephews or cousins. They formed a strong unit, he said, each man trusting the others with his life. The salt caravan was no place for women. Kefla’s wife, his third, was with the clan in the Danakil desert. They had been married the previous year, after his second wife had died in childbirth.

‘What about your first wife?’

The leader thrust his stick in the sand, his gaze fixed on the ground.

‘She died as well,’ he said, ‘of malaria.’

I changed the subject and asked about the legend of the gold.

‘Ah, yes, the gold,’ he said, almost as if he had anticipated my question. ‘It has been turned into salt by God.’

‘Do you think He will ever turn it back into gold again?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Kefla, ‘and that would be good, as you can sell gold for a lot at Mekele. But I get angry when I hear my friends and clansmen cursing that the gold has gone. You see, God changed a useless metal into salt—and no man or camel can live without salt, but we can all live without gold.’

Nesbitt had warned of the danger of trekking with camels. He had written of the constant worry that they would catch a foot in a crack in the ground. Kefla and the others were alert for such clefts and, if there was any doubt, they would halt the caravan and probe the earth with their sticks before carrying on. Another problem was the stifling heat. I found myself drinking water incessantly. Kefla told me to be careful. Too much water, he said, was as bad as none at all. I doused a shirt in water and wrapped it around my head like a turban, and Samson did the same.

From time to time a block of salt was unstrapped from one of the camels and given to them to lick. At other times, Kefla would feel the sand with his hand. If it were too hot, the camels’ feet would burn. Nothing was as important as the well-being of the camels.

Nesbitt wrote that he preferred to travel with human porters rather than with pack animals. Humans, he said, can take short cuts, negotiate precipitous slopes and cross torrents by jumping from rock to rock. More to the point, fresh porters can be hired when necessary. But then again, no man could heave blocks of salt such a great distance.

In the late afternoon, camp was pitched near a thicket of thorn trees. Samson had been keen to spread the Word of God to the Danakil, most of whom were Muslims. But now that he had a captive audience, he hadn’t the strength. We sat in a heap on the ground: I was too exhausted to write my journal, and he was too tired to preach. Around us, the camels were being unloaded and watered, a fire was built and some scraps of meat were roasted. I asked Samson to find out how much further we had to go.

‘Please do not make me ask that question,’ he said. ‘I cannot bear to hear the answer.’

So we lay there, waiting for the night, and I thought longingly of the Emperor’s Jeep. I even began to think of Bahru with some affection.

Kefla told his eldest son to keep guard. He was a boy of about twelve.

‘He’s as wise as Suleiman,’ he said, ‘like his grandfather. Many girls already want to marry him. But there is time for that.’

‘You know of Suleiman?’

‘Of course,’ responded the leader, ‘all Danakil know how he came here himself searching for ivory and gold.’

‘Did he find them?’

‘Yes, yes, he did. I told you, there used to be gold here. There was much gold in the time of Suleiman.’

‘Did he mine it?’

Kefla stoked the fire with his stick.

‘His men cut the gold from the ground in slabs,’ he said. ‘Then it was loaded on to ships and taken back to the land of Suleiman.’

‘How did they carry the gold to the ships?’

‘Suleiman’s army of jinn carried it, of course.’

The camels had been fed and were now sitting, chewing the cud. The sky was lit by a crescent moon and speckled with stars, and the air was cool, chilled by a light breeze from the east. Kefla’s eldest son was called Yehia. He patrolled the camp with a Lee Enfield .303. He was close to puberty, the time when his forebears would have started to prepare for their first kill. The boy’s finger never left the trigger; he was clearly itching to pull back the curved sliver of steel. But he had been born too late. Deaths are still a frequent occurrence among the Danakil, but now they are put down to self-defence rather than cold-blooded murder. These days when they kill, the Danakil don’t bother to rip off testicles. Although Kefla and the others didn’t say so, it was quite clear that they thought killing wasn’t the same if you couldn’t hack off your enemy’s private parts.

When he passed me, Yehia clenched his jaw and swung the rifle to his shoulder in a practised movement. As a foreigner my kind had been fair game since the beginning of time. Only now had the rules changed, and the young warrior felt cheated. I smiled at him, but his mask of rage didn’t break. His uncle Abdullah invited us to sit with him on a coarse goat-hair mat. He was taller than the others, with a slim neck, and he wore a pair of bandoliers strapped across his chest. He cut a piece of dried meat from a carcass in his lap and held it to my lips.

I was about to ask how much further we had to travel, but I knew Samson would be reluctant to translate the question. Instead I asked Abdullah about Mekele.

He frowned so hard that his brow rippled like corrugated iron. ‘It is a very big city,’ he said. ‘Too many men, too many cars, too much noise!’

‘So you don’t like it?’

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Walk in the city and you see the worst side of man. People forget where they have come from when they reach such a place. They grow lazy and drink beer, and they waste their money. That is not the real world.’

‘Then what is the real world?’

Abdullah loosened the bandoliers and then slapped his hands together and held them out like scales.

‘This is the real world,’ he said. ‘Look at it! Smell it! Taste it! Listen to it!’

Kefla came over to where we were sitting and crouched on the ground. It was dark, but I could see he was tired. He said that Yehia would protect us in the night. If there was any trouble the camels would be sure to sound the alarm. They could smell a thief from a great distance.

‘I hope we are left alone,’ I said feebly.

Kefla smiled, and leant back on his heels.

‘You may be wishing that,’ he said, ‘but Yehia is praying that we will be disturbed. He is ready to pull the trigger, to prove himself a man.’

All of the next day we marched, one foot ahead of the next, as the sun rose from a faint pink glimmer of light to a raging ball of fire above the desert. I found the going hard. By early afternoon it was so hot that my spit sizzled on a rock. My mind kept flashing back to the jungle. The desert was bad, but nothing could compare with the horrors of a tropical rain forest. As I staggered on, I thanked God that we were far from the jungle. We had seen no insects or reptiles, and we could walk freely, unhindered by low vines, fallen tree trunks and the press of undergrowth. Samson had never been in the jungle, so he didn’t know how lucky he was. He started moaning about missing Addis Ababa, saying that his girlfriend would be longing for him, and that he had to get back to urgent commitments. His misery gave me new strength. I found myself sympathizing with Henry Stanley and his habit of throwing men in irons at the slightest whisper of dissent.

The camels were unloaded every three hours and their bindings were constantly checked. Rubbing would lead to sores. The only journey I had ever made with camels was in India’s Thar Desert years before. On that trip we had actually ridden the camels, rather than walking alongside. But I’d soon come to appreciate the unique relationship between man and camel. The animals look at their masters with loathing. But the men in a caravan regard the camels with silent wonder. They would never admit it, but you can see that they value the beasts as highly as their closest friends. This was never more apparent than when one of Kefla’s camels went lame.

It was the late afternoon of the third day and Kefla was leading the caravan through a series of low barren hills. We were all exhausted. The camels were about to rest and be watered. We had grown used to being blinded by light so dazzling that it scorched our retinal nerves and made our eyes stream with tears. Somehow, the Danakil coped with the brightness and remained alert to the camels’ every move. They needed to: a single misplaced step could spell disaster. Then, suddenly, one of the smaller she-camels plunged to the ground and let out a truly terrible bellow of pain.

Without wasting a second, Kefla took a knife from beneath his shawl and sliced away the straps which held the slabs of salt. The animal thrashed in agony and her bellows turned to a high-pitched shriek. With the others struggling to keep her still, Kefla made a quick inspection. It was obvious that her right foreleg had shattered. Then the caravan’s leader picked up his knife and pressed it against the camel’s neck. ‘Bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim, In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful,’ he cried.

With a whack of the blade, the animal’s jugular was severed. Blood gushed out of the wound as the camel kicked in a last frenzied gallop, her eyes rolling, her mouth wide open. A few moments later she was dead.

Kefla stood over the carcass, his knife still wet with blood. There were tears in his eyes. He covered his face with his hand and then wiped it with the edge of his shawl. I was not surprised that a Danakil was weeping. His friend was dead. While the other men unloaded the rest of the camels, Kefla walked away into the distance to be alone.