In Search of King Solomon’s Mines

‘The trail led up a wild valley in which we were astonished to find hundreds of slaves at work riddling gold in the riverbed under brutish foremen armed with whips of hippopotamus hide.’

Count Byron de Prorok, In Quest of Lost Worlds

THE YELLOW AND white line which ran westward to Beni Shangul looked harmless enough. Michelin’s map-makers sitting in their cosy offices in Paris could have had no idea of the true condition of the road. I made a note in my journal to write to them as soon as I returned home. Then I reminded myself that it was the rainy season, a time when inoffensive tracks become surging rivers of mud. Bahru clenched his teeth and accelerated at full speed. The wheels span furiously, propelling the wretched Emperor’s Jeep through the slime. Neither he nor Samson said very much. I could feel them ganging up on me, bound by their common nationality and by their reluctance to continue the journey. Both men were eager to return to the capital, and they knew instinctively that the road was about to get even worse. A glance at the route into Beni Shangul confirmed it. The yellow and white streak would soon be replaced by a narrow pencil line, indicating an unmarked track. I ripped the legend off the map and stuffed it down behind the back seat.

Despite the dreadful driving conditions, Samson was feeling better. Since leaving Bahir Dar two days before, I had let him stop at any church we passed for a quick bout of prayer. Sometimes even the harshest employer has to veer towards lenience.

De Prorok’s book, Dead Men Do Tell Tales, had been written decades before, but it spoke of a wild, untamed people living in a hostile land. The countryside hadn’t changed since de Prorok’s time, but I hoped the indigenous tribes had grown more friendly. However, everyone I’d asked en route had said that only a madman would dare to make the journey to Beni Shangul, and eventually I’d stopped asking for people’s opinions because they didn’t do much for general morale.

The only comfort was that the Mad Sultan Ghogoli must surely be dead by now. De Prorok went into every chilling detail of the despotic ruler’s regime. Ghogoli governed Beni Shangul as a semi-independent kingdom, paying only lipservice to Haile Selassie, and he retained complete control over the gold mines in his territory. His rule was absolute. The lightest form of punishment was castration, in which he clearly delighted. If any of his slaves were found swallowing gold, they were buried up to their necks in ant hills with their noses and ears cut off, or they were hung from posts until they were dead. When Ghogoli was feeling benevolent he permitted a wrong-doer to be executed by his nearest male relative, with the rest of the family looking on. The walls of his palace were said to be festooned with the dried ‘body parts’ of his enemies. De Prorok was too polite to say it, but I knew he was talking about genitalia.

The Sultan’s favourite punishment was the so-called ‘human candle’. This was reserved for those who questioned his authority. I’d heard that Haile Selassie had frowned on the practice but had been powerless to stop it. One reason for its persistence was that it was popular with the locals. No one could see enough human candles, just as bull-fighting aficionados can’t get enough of their sport.

The punishment began with Ghogoli’s guards lighting a slow fire beneath a cauldron filled with tallow. The prisoner was then stripped naked and his hands were tied behind his back. Next the guards dipped thin cotton bandages in the tallow and wound them around the unfortunate victim. De Prorok likened the process to Egyptian mummification. When the prisoner had been completely swathed in lengths of cloth, from the chin down to the backs of his knees, a thicker strip of tallow-soaked cotton was woven through the layers across his back, and left to hang down like a wick.

On the Mad Sultan’s command, the wick was ignited. With the crowd cheering enthusiastically, the bandages smouldered, smoked, broke into flames and then blazed. As he burned, the victim ran about, screaming. If he tried to run away, the guards would lash him with their swords. De Prorok was intrigued by the punishment: ‘Gradually, the smell of burning flesh increases, but there is a limit to human endurance. The victim goes mad. In the intensity of the suffering, he does not know what he is doing. The pungent odour of roasting meat is unmistakable. At last his suffering is ended, from insanity he goes into unconsciousness and then into his death throes.’

I decided to keep all mention of the Mad Sultan to myself, for fear of inciting a mutiny. With every hour that slipped by, Samson and Bahru questioned the wisdom of our expedition. I, too, queried my line of work. Why, I asked myself, couldn’t I have a more normal career like most of my friends? But before I could give it any more thought, Samson pointed to the road. Ahead of us lay a stretch of water. Bahru eased the vehicle to a stop, like a rider pulling up his horse before an especially high fence.

It was impossible to tell how deep the water was, but it looked very muddy, and every so often a bubble of methane would rise to the surface and burst. Samson got out, took off his trousers and waded in. When the water was up to his waist he leaned out and dipped a long bamboo stave into the middle of the ooze. It disappeared without trace. All around the edges of the bog there were discarded rocks and splintered pieces of wood, indicating that other vehicles had got stuck here. Bahru wrung his hands together and bit his lip. Then a look of determination stole over his face.

‘He’s not seriously going to try and drive through it, is he?’ I asked Samson.

The driver got back into the Jeep and reversed about fifty feet. A second later he was charging at full speed towards the water. It was nothing short of suicide. Samson and I yelled for him to stop as we waved our arms. But it was too late. The vehicle was grounded in the middle of the bog, with Bahru slouched behind the wheel, a broken man.

For three hours, we struggled to free the Emperor’s Jeep. Bahru stripped off all his clothes—even his underpants—and swam down to wedge stones under the wheels. Samson and I cut bamboo and razor grass, and put them in place. But it was no good. Every attempt at escape failed and settled the vehicle still deeper in the bog. By the end the Jeep had sunk to its bonnet, our hands were lacerated and we were all covered from head to foot in thick, noisome mud.

Eventually I gave up and sat down by the edge of the quagmire in despair. A few minutes later we heard three children in the distance. They were chewing sticks and giggling. They sat down beside me and stared at the Jeep. Then some more children turned up, followed by a pair of women, and after them half a dozen men. Before we knew it an entire village had surrounded the bog. They were laughing and pointing, but none of them offered to help.

He rattled off a sentence in Amharic. The crowd jeered and gesticulated and shook their heads.

We tried to negotiate the price down but they were well aware that we had no other choice. When, eventually, we settled on a price only a little lower than the original demand, it became apparent that they were professionals. They worked together, each taking a job. The men found stones and the women cut down more bamboo poles, while their children opened a sluice to drain away the water. Twenty minutes later the road was clear.

We drove on through the twilight and then the darkness. The moon rose high above us, a vanilla disc of light. If the track was bad during the day, it was ten times worse at night. We still had no headlights, and the sides of the track were lined with impenetrable thickets of bamboo. In some places the potholes were as deep as plague pits. We begged Bahru to stop, declaring that we could camp in the Jeep for the night. But he refused. His pride had been dented.

A few minutes before midnight we reached a hamlet that was little more than a cluster of thatched huts. Samson went to find us somewhere to sleep. The villagers had been woken by the sound of our engine and soon they were crowding around the car. Samson got out and spoke to them.

‘They are miners,’ he said, ‘working a gold seam two miles to the north. They have invited us to stay the night here.’

We were welcomed by a lantern swinging in the cool nocturnal air. I could smell tobacco burning and see the whites of eyes illuminated in the pastel yellow light. When they saw my face, the miners ducked their heads and shook my hand vigorously. A pot of meaty stew with macaroni was prepared, and a short-wave radio was fished out of a box and switched on with the volume turned up. It sounded like Radio Moscow.

The leader of the miners, Lucas, sat beside me in his hut. The lantern was hung above his head, drawing moths to it. We flailed our arms to knock the insects away from the food, but Lucas and the others didn’t seem to care that a number of them had flapped into their stew. One of the men stirred the dish with a goat’s thighbone, and then everyone started to eat from the communal dish. Lucas urged me to take the best pieces of meat and then reached into the stew and selected a bone for me to chew, holding it to my lips.

I slept more deeply that night than I think I have ever slept before. The miners could easily have slit our throats, pilfered our equipment and run off into the hills. But they had a greater source of prosperity, gold.

Dawn was accompanied by the sound of chickens scratching and children playing, and was followed by another communal dish of macaroni, high on moths and low on meat. Lucas said he would take us to where they were mining gold.

We left the Jeep at the camp and set out into the undergrowth. Rain during the night had lowered the temperature but had brought out horseflies and mosquitoes. Lucas explained that the area close to the hamlet had already been mined out. So now the men were working a stretch across the river. The operation was quite different from the mine near Shakiso. For a start it was much smaller, involving no more than about twenty men and their families. Unlike Bedakaysa, the miners worked as a group, each man and each woman looking out for the next. An unknown visitor turning up at the Bedakaysa mine in the middle of the night would have been courting death.

Soon the bamboo thickets gave way to wild mango and thorn trees. I followed close behind Lucas, anxious not to fall down an old mine-shaft. There were dozens of them pitting the ground, each about three feet in diameter with passages that linked them to others.

Though he wore only a frayed tweed herringbone jacket with turned-up cuffs, Lucas was an impressive figure and stood well over six feet tall. As I struggled to keep up with him I asked if they were finding gold.

‘There’s plenty for all of us,’ he said, ‘but we find it hard to get a fair price. Addis Ababa is a long way away, so usually we sell it to dealers who take it across the border and up to Khartoum.’

‘It’s the best gold in Ethiopia,’ he said, ‘ninety-nine per cent best quality. Ever since men have lived here they have mined the gold.’

Half an hour later we came to a series of freshly dug tunnels. There must have been more than fifty of them, stretching over about an acre of ground. Lucas slipped off his jacket. Three or four of the tunnels were being worked, with young boys standing at ground level and catching the wicker baskets of earth as they were sent up. Another group of boys, younger than the first, ferried the soil down to the river where the women panned it. The operation was small in scale but efficient.

Lucas said the tunnels ran along a rich seam and that they always had a hole at each end so as to ensure an escape route if the roof caved in.

‘Often,’ he said, ‘especially in the rains when the ground is so wet. There’s nothing we can do except make sure we prop up the sides of the tunnels with wood. Last week one of the men was almost killed. We dug for many hours. But he was a strong man, thank God, and he survived.’

Samson stripped off his shirt, kicked off his shoes and jumped down the tunnel, disappearing like a ferret down a rabbit-hole. He clearly hadn’t forgotten his mining days. Lucas asked if I wanted to go down. I took a small torch from my camera bag and followed him into the shaft. It went straight down like a well shaft. For someone unused to the work, clambering down was an unnerving experience. Lucas made it look so easy. He glided down the thirty-foot hole without giving it another thought. Behind him, I was wheezing and struggling. Eventually the shaft levelled out and led to a passage, little more than three feet in height, that continued for fifty feet, before diving down again, this time in a steep slope. It reminded me of the cramped passage which leads to the heart of the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza. We crawled on our stomachs over soil that had been tamped down by innumerable bodies. The light from my torch was dim and in the end I switched it off. It was easier to shut my eyes and rely on the sense of touch.

After a great deal of crawling I heard voices. Samson had reached the mine face and was calling out.

‘This is the seam,’ said Lucas, pressing my hand to a jagged wall of soil. ‘There is much gold here. You can smell it, can’t you?’

I turned on my torch and then breathed in. All I could smell was red African earth and sweat. Lucas showed how the miners chipped away at the seam with a sharp iron pike. Most of them didn’t bother with lanterns or torches. Years of tunnelling had given them a sense of their surroundings. Like moles, they had no need to see.

Back on the surface, after a gruelling ascent, I followed the procession of children who shuttled the baskets and pans from the mine face to the river. The boys were apprentices. One day they would continue the work of their fathers, as their fathers had done before them. But first they had to scurry back and forth like rats through the tunnels. In our society we regard the idea of child labour as deplorable, but most of the world knows no other way. Children’s miniature frames and nimble movements make them the obvious choice for tunnelling.

Down at the river twenty-five women were sweeping the round wooden pans in the flow. They became uneasy when they spotted me but then relaxed when they saw Lucas by my side. A couple of girls were bathing on the rocks and rinsing their dresses. They shrieked for us to turn away until they’d slipped back into their clothes. Others were singing. Samson said it was a song of lost love. Each woman wore a miniature gourd, no bigger than the bowl of a pipe, strung around her neck. In it was kept the gold dust for which they worked so hard. Squatting on their haunches, the women swirled water around the great pans until all the soil was gone, leaving no more than a speck or two of gold. Vast quantities of dirt have to be sifted to produce even the smallest trace of gold dust. For every grain of it a gallon of sweat is lost.

During the rains the river is high, providing the water needed to pan the gold, but in spring and autumn the water level drops. Then the villagers work in the fields instead.

‘The officials are fearful of this place,’ said Lucas. ‘They think that we will cut their throats and kill them. And they know about the Devil in the mountain.’

Lucas pointed a finger to a double peak in the distance. It resembled the so-called Sheba’s Breasts in Rider Haggard’s novel.

‘The Devil is up there on Gorba,’ he said. ‘The peak on the right is male, and the one on the left is female. The Devil is on the female hill.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ he said, ‘and I don’t wish to. The people who have been there have all died. Sometimes they climb up and disappear. Even faranjis have gone up there and disappeared.’

Just as Ethiopian caves are frequently associated with gold and treasure, mountains are often linked to the Devil. I had read a description of another Devil mountain in the Simien range, written by Paul Hartlmaier, a German travelling in Ethiopia during the 1950s. He said the Devil supposedly dwelt near the village of Addi Arkai, on a mountain called Amba Hawasa. The locals believed that anyone stupid enough to venture up the mountain would be cast into the chasm below. Whatever the case, such tales are an effective method of keeping inquisitive visitors away.

I wondered if Frank Hayter or Count de Prorok had ever explored the mountain of Gorba. After all, de Prorok had searched the area before the Mad Sultan’s army chased him away. He had found a river called Werk Warka, literally the ‘River of Gold’, at which hundreds of Ghogoli’s child slaves were toiling. De Prorok said the slaves were in a pitiful condition and that anyone who ran away and was caught was flayed alive by the guards’ hippopotamus-hide whips. Near the river the Count found chambers full of graves. When his team excavated them they discovered ancient human bones, embalmed skeletons, a number of amphorae, and necklaces similar to those found in ancient Egyptian tombs.

The Ethiopian porters were so terrified of opening the graves that de Prorok and the other Europeans had to leave the camp during the night and exhume the bodies alone. The Count thought the bones might have belonged to Egyptian gold miners working the area even before the time of Solomon, and he claimed to have come across what looked like an obelisk, made from porphyry. As if that wasn’t enough, de Prorok also said he’d found an ancient emerald mine at Beni Shangul.

The Mad Sultan’s forces hounded the expedition out of the area before the obelisk and their other discoveries could be removed. I asked Lucas and his fellow villagers if they knew of Werk Warka, and if they had heard of ancient graves and an obelisk. They all laughed at the question.

‘Take my advice,’ Lucas said as we walked back to the hamlet, ‘don’t waste your time with these things. Go back to your country and forget about the gold and the emeralds.’ he stopped and turned to face the twin peaks of Gorba.

Christmas swayed across the yard, brushing a chicken away with her broom, each stride starting at the hips, buttocks moving legs. Her feet were bare, calloused like the hull of a ship which has been at sea for many months. She fluttered her eyelashes at Samson and sighed deeply. He said the woman wasn’t his type, and in any case he was faithful to his girlfriend. But the bar owner’s wife had fallen head over heels in love.

Samson and I had shared a room at the back of the bar, in a village called Mengay, two days on from the mining hamlet. The road had deteriorated even further and I dreaded the journey ahead.

The room at the bar had cracked mud walls, a high tin roof and a pair of rope beds. During the day, light would stream in through a glassless window. There were bats roosting in the darkened corners where the tin roof met the walls. At night they would flutter out of the window to hunt for insects above the trees. There was also a gap of ten inches below the door, under which chickens would scramble in their perpetual search for grain.

That night I was so tired that I fell into a deep sleep. In the early hours a live creature armed with many claws plunged the thirteen feet from the tin roof on to my chest. I sat up screaming and gasping for air. It was the bar’s cat stalking bats.

As I probed for puncture marks on my neck, she served Samson an immense bowl of spaghetti topped with chicken livers. It was on the house, she said, massaging her fingertips flirtatiously into his shoulders.

The village was near Asosa, virtually on the border with Sudan, and it was flooded with refugees, some of them maimed and missing limbs. Although the Ethiopian population were sensitive to the plight of their Sudanese cousins, there was tension between them. The refugees were eligible for handouts from aid organizations, whereas the local Ethiopians were given nothing.

In the West we have little concept of poverty. But on Ethiopia’s border with Sudan, its full meaning is all too apparent. These people are stranded in limbo, from one generation to the next. They have barely enough food to survive, and never enough to escape. They cannot afford to buy rags to clothe themselves, to send their children to school or to buy medicine if they fall sick.

‘Now you can understand why gold is so alluring to these people,’ said Samson. ‘They have nothing else to hope for.’

In the afternoon a blind woman was led up to the bar’s veranda where we were sitting. The child leading her took her hand and placed it on my shoulder. Her arms were emaciated, her face haggard, her mouth empty of its teeth. The dress she was wearing was ripped down the sides and the back. She spoke in a voice so loud that we assumed she was deaf.

‘She’s saying that she’s heard there is a faranji here,’ said Samson. ‘She has something to sell for the right price.’

The woman untied a pouch tucked into her dress and handed it to me. Somehow I knew what was in the pouch even before I opened it. There were twenty of them—large silver coins, all bearing the same date, 1780. I had bought a bag of identical coins years before while living in Kenya as a student. They are known as Maria Theresa dollars or thalers (the word from which ‘dollar’ is derived) because they were first minted during the reign of the Austrian Empress, between 1740 and 1780. For decades the coins were the currency of Ethiopia, where the image of the Empress was believed to be that of the Virgin Mary. What was strange, however, was the fact that though the coins were minted in many different years, Ethiopians only trusted the ones stamped with the date 1780 and considered all the rest to be fakes. So all later versions were marked with the same date. The Austrian mint has recently started to produce the coins again. They are still dated 1780.

Bahru needed to get the Jeep’s chassis welded, so we were forced to spend a second night in Mengay. When we told Christmas, she quivered with delight.

Evenings in remote Ethiopian villages tend to be quiet. No one has much money to spend on carousing, although Bahru always managed to find a card game in which to use his special deck. I never stopped him, for if I condemned what was his only source of revenue, he’d have turned to me for funds.

Samson and I went for a walk. He was desperate to get away from Christmas, who was busily preparing him yet another vast meal. We passed a row of run-down shops—a baker’s, a tailor’s and a kiosk selling soap and wire wool, mosquito coils and matches—and then a bar, marked in the usual way by an upturned cup on a stick. A little further on, towards the end of the village street, we saw a crowd gathering. Samson asked what was going on.

The villagers lined up in an arc, waiting for the miracle man to begin, the atmosphere electric with anticipation. ‘He’s from Sudan,’ said one man. ‘He can do miracles,’ said another.

I’ve been interested in illusion for a long time but I’d never heard of any miracle workers plying their trade south of the Sahara, so I persuaded Samson to stay and watch.

The magician lit a pair of paraffin lamps dangling from the lowest branches of a tree and then laid out a striped blanket, removed his shoes and welcomed the crowd. As he stepped into the pool of light cast by the lamps I got a better view of his face. Very dark and softened with age, it was friendly and trustworthy. Samson said the man, whose name was Petros, didn’t speak very good Oromo. His native tongue was Arabic.

Petros said he would perform four miracles. First he would throw ordinary water on to the ground to make a fire. He poured a cup of clear liquid on to a patch of soil near one corner of the blanket. A stream of smoke spiralled up, and then the ground burst into flames. The crowd cheered and clapped and Samson nudged me in the ribs.

Next Petros declared that he would stop his own pulse. A woman from the front row put her fingers on the miracle man’s wrist and announced that his pulse had faded and then disappeared altogether. Again the audience went wild, slapping their hands on their thighs and laughing out loud.

For the third miracle Petros said he would eat glass. He broke a clear light-bulb with his shoe, placed a shard of glass on his tongue and then crunched it up and swallowed it. Samson slapped me on the back.

‘Isn’t this incredible?!’ he shouted, as all around us the villagers clamoured for more.

Petros said that he would do one last miracle. The pièce de résistance would be to turn a rod into a snake. Samson’s eyes lit up. He knew the miracle well. It was first performed by Aaron at the court of the Pharaohs. The miracle man turned his back for a moment and drew a rod from a cloth bag. It was about three feet long and the colour of black olives. He asked the crowd what they saw.

The magician tossed the stick on to the blanket. At first nothing happened. But then, slowly, it began to move and eventually it slithered away. I can hardly begin to describe the effect this had on the crowd. Men, women and children leapt up and ran about in awe, unable to believe what they had seen.

I made the mistake of bragging that I knew how the tricks were done. Samson thought I was demeaning the miracle man.

‘Well, I think you’ll find he sprinkled some potassium permanganate on the ground and poured glycerine on to it.’

‘You put a walnut or something small and hard in your armpit and squeeze. It stops the blood’s circulation in your arm.’

‘If you eat a banana first and then grind up the glass with your back teeth, it gets embedded in the banana and passes through the intestines harmlessly.’

We had come to the last trick. I knew this would be sensitive because Aaron’s miracle had been recorded in the Bible, and Samson took the Bible very seriously indeed.

‘Turning a rod into a snake,’ I said, ‘is sometimes regarded as the oldest piece of conjuring in existence.’

‘Aaron did it himself,’ said Samson, ‘it’s recounted in Exodus,’ and he gave me chapter and verse.

‘It’s easier than it looks,’ I said. ‘The trick is that there is no rod, just a snake. If you stretch the snake out and press down hard on its pituitary gland, the poor thing thinks that an enormous predator is standing on top of it. So it goes into shock. But when you let it go, it comes to and wriggles away.’

Feroze, the conjurer who taught me magical illusion, advised me always to carry a few simple tricks on my travels. He said they would alleviate boredom and might help get me out of a sticky situation. In the West we tend to underestimate the effect of magic tricks. We all know they’re just that—tricks. But transplant the same illusions into a small village off the beaten track and you can drive people wild.

In the early years of the last century an indefatigable Englishman called John Boyes set out for East Africa. An old friend of Frank Hayter, he had been inspired by Rider Haggard’s Allan Quartermain. In the book, which is a sequel to King Solomon’s Mines, the hero goes in search of a lost white race north of Mount Kenya. Boyes intended to follow Quartermain’s own route down into the Rift Valley. Very few white men had ever been accepted into the indigenous Kikuyu tribe before, and a number had recently been massacred.

When Boyes arrived at the first Kikuyu stronghold, he audaciously declared that he was a god, and he told the locals that he could not be killed. Such a claim might seem suicidal, but Boyes had a plan. Before the first spear could be hurled in his direction, he told the villagers that he would prove his power by drinking boiling water. He poured some water into a cup containing effervescent liver salts. The water bubbled furiously, and Boyes gulped it down, to the amazement of the tribesmen. Then he pulled out his phonograph, wound it up and played a record. That, he said, was an evil spirit trapped in a box.

In his book King of the Wa Kikuyu, Boyes claimed that tribal people from miles around came to pay homage to him as a result. Eventually he became their monarch, with five hundred thousand warriors under his command.

As we continued our journey, the rains grew heavier. In places the mud was so deep that it came up to the door handles, and traversing it with treadless tyres was a vile experience. Still, despite his enthusiasm for trapping wildlife under the wheels, and his constant qat-chewing, Bahru proved himself a skilled driver. While Samson would fall into a gloom of despondency, Bahru never complained. He was a man who lived from one minute to the next. Nothing fazed him. Sometimes we’d turn a bend to see a seemingly impassable stretch of track before us: a battlefield landscape of holes, mud and quicksand. Then, stuffing some qat leaves in his cheek, his eyes lighting up in delight, he’d stamp on the accelerator and charge through the quagmire and out the other side.

On the way to Nejo, our next stop, dense forest gave way to a patchwork of fields. The ground was clearly full of minerals, for each rocky outcrop gleamed with iron and quartz. The soil was fertile too. Samson said that if you planted a walking-stick here it would grow into a tree a hundred feet tall. Then he reminded me that, as all Ethiopians know, this was where the Garden of Eden had been.

Eventually the road levelled out and its surface improved. There were less potholes and less mud. Best of all, the rain had stopped. When I exclaimed at our good fortune, Samson said it was because God was watching over us. No sooner had he spoken than Bahru jammed on the brakes and the Emperor’s Jeep skidded to a halt.

Turning off the engine and pulling out the key, Bahru said his luck had run out. Samson and I looked at him.

A few miles before, when the road was indescribably bad, we would have taken his sudden alarm seriously. But things were looking up. Despite us offering to push-start the Jeep so we could drive the short distance to Nejo, Bahru was adamant. He wouldn’t drive another yard. So Samson had to drive while Bahru sat in the front passenger seat, hunched up, his knees pulled up against his chest.

An hour later we were slipping down Nejo’s muddy main street, past buildings with corrugated iron roofs and cement walls. We pulled up at a bar. Kerosene and sawdust had been sprinkled on the floor to keep away the flies. I ordered Bahru a large glass of araki. He slugged it down and asked for another. Still a cloud of depression hung over him. Samson told him to pray: beseeching God was the only path to redemption. Bahru said he needed a third drink. Then he asked to be left alone.

I had heard from several sources that Nejo was the site of ancient gold mines. Frank Hayter’s friend Captain Bartleet had written of ancient mines in the Wollega area, and the Swiss engineer and prospector Alfred Ilg (the same man who had proposed a railway from Djibouti to Addis Ababa and made a shoe to prove his skill to Menelik) was certain that he’d found the remains of ancient gold mines a few miles from the town.

After being granted a concession to mine gold near Nejo, Ilg returned to Europe to raise capital. Then, in 1901, he formed a company in Antwerp, naming it the ‘Mines d’Or du Wallaga’. Ilg’s concession, which was granted for fifty years, extended in a radius of eighteen miles around Nejo. The adventurer Herbert Weld Blundell visited the area in 1906. Commenting on the ‘lively and curious aspect’ of the place, he reported that the mine produced about eighty thousand American dollars’ worth of gold a year and that the Emperor received half of this as his share.

Samson and I went from one shop to another asking if anyone knew where the ancient gold mines were. Our questions were met with suspicion and no one would give us a straight answer. As I became increasingly frustrated, Samson begged me to stay calm. Foreigners searching for gold mines made people nervous, he said. At last we gave up and went to a small hotel which served European food. The place was empty because the owner refused to employ prostitutes. As far as most Ethiopians are concerned, a hotel or bar without whores is a bad joke.

The owner was unusually light-skinned, and he tiptoed around the table as I harangued Samson on one of my pet themes—the gap between utter failure and absolute success is often as narrow as a hair’s breadth, and in our quest for King Solomon’s mines we had to leave no stone unturned. Samson couldn’t stand my sermons, but he put up with them all the same.

When I had finished, the owner presented us with our macaroni and introduced himself. He said his name was Berehane and he’d heard we were looking for gold. He pointed to a faded sepia photograph hanging in a frame on the back wall. It was of a white man.

I couldn’t believe our luck. Zappa had been a gold miner and a friend of Frank Hayter in the 1920s, and he was mentioned in many of the books I’d read on pre-war Ethiopia. Berehane sat with us as we ate and said that most people made fun of his mixed ancestry. Half-castes are disliked, but those with Italian blood are especially despised.

When we’d finished eating Berehane jumped up and returned a minute later holding a battered leather case. We opened it up and began to leaf through a jumble of papers that had belonged to Zappa. There were black and white photographs of men panning and others building sluices. There were diaries, too, written in a spidery hand, some in English, others in Italian. Samson unfolded a set of maps and typed geological reports. But Berehane wanted us to see something else. He handed me a sheaf of letters. They bore wax seals and an embossed lion standing beside a flag, printed on brittle, yellowed paper.

‘They are from the Emperor to my grandfather,’ he said. ‘You see, they were friends.’

Early next morning Berehane took us to where his grandfather Antillio Zappa had mined three-quarters of a century before. We soon left Nejo behind us. Ahead lay rolling hills surrounded by a patchwork of fields in which farmers whipped oxen pulling homemade ploughs. The sky was inky black, threatening rain, and a pair of crows flew overhead, calling ‘Werk, werk!’

‘Do you here that?’ said Samson. ‘They are saying werk, which means gold. It’s a good omen.’

After some time we came to an exposed hillside. Berehane pointed to a vast crater the size of a football field.

‘Gold was mined here thousands of years ago,’ he said. ‘That’s why my grandfather came here. At one time there were hundreds of men digging and panning. But there isn’t much gold left now. Sometimes the farmers find small nuggets, but they sell them quietly. Everyone fears that the government will take their land away if they hear of gold being found.’

It was very likely that Zappa had dug where ancient gold mines had once existed. But all trace of any ancient mines had long since disappeared. Even the crater excavated by Zappa was far less deep than it would once have been, for the soil was soft and erosion during the rains swift. Despite the lack of evidence, I liked to think that the Pharaohs and, later, Solomon, might once have obtained gold from the hills near Nejo, from Signor Zappa’s mines.