13

Used Mules

‘God has given us mules but no roads to ride on.’

Ethiopian proverb

BACK AT THE bar, Bahru was lying in a heap in the corner. He was too drunk to stand. The gaggle of resident prostitutes said he had drunk a whole bottle of araki and had no money to pay. They asked why he was so dejected.

‘His luck has run out,’ said Samson coldly.

The women looked sympathetic and tutted to themselves while we helped Bahru to his feet, paid his bill and got him a room. Then we went off to buy some supplies.

If we were going to make an attempt to find Hayter’s mine, we’d need some specialized gear. My big worry was being able to illuminate a large cavern, as torches only give an isolated beam of light. I wanted to buy a pressure lantern which would run on kerosene. We also needed blankets, waterproofs for Samson, nylon ropes, a portable stove, some polythene sheeting, marker posts, mallets, and a sack of old clothes that might be bartered for food along the way. Fortunately, most of these items were readily available across Ethiopia. Shops seemed to remain reasonably well stocked because no one had any money to buy anything. In fact goods would stay on the shelves for years before a customer with cash turned up.

After a prolonged search we managed to buy almost everything except a waterproof coat for Samson. We’d found one high-quality waxed canvas jacket and Samson’s face had lit up when he saw it hanging in a polythene wrapper at the back of the shop. He’d hinted that it was his size and that it was just the thing to keep him dry, but it was much too expensive. Instead, he had to make do with a black bin-liner with holes cut for his arms and head.

Most of the garments on sale at Ethiopian used clothing stalls have come from Europe or America, but they are hopelessly unsuited to the harsh African conditions. Such flimsy clothing may be fine in the West where we rotate dozens of outfits, but in a place like Ethiopia clothing soon gets worn out. It kept striking me that someone ought to supply the market stalls with durable army surplus gear. Military clothing lasts forever and is extremely cheap. I was surprised to find my idea wasn’t original. In the 1920s, the geologist and gold prospector L. M. Nesbitt said that a destitute European in Ethiopia had wanted to import army surplus clothing from Marseilles, though the plan had come to nothing.

I asked the man who was selling the waxed jacket if he had any pressure lanterns. He stuck a finger in his ear and jiggled it about. He had had one once, he said. It had been on the shelf for twenty years so he’d not reordered when eventually it was sold. For the rest of the day we searched through virtually every kiosk, shop and stall in Nejo looking for a pressure lantern. Towards the end of the evening we came to a shoe shop on the outskirts of town. I wasn’t going to bother going inside, but Samson hoped to talk me into buying him a new pair of boots. Amidst the clutter of worn-out shoes sat a frail-looking man in a peakless pink baseball cap. I said we were looking for pressure lanterns. The salesman rummaged under the counter and brought out a box covered in soot. We opened it up and there sat a pressure lantern in almost mint condition.

‘Two hundred birr,’ he said.

It was a huge sum, almost twenty pounds, but I knew it was essential to have the right equipment. So I fished out the notes and slid them across the counter. Money spent on good-quality gear is always money well spent.

We returned to the bar to find Bahru sitting on the end of his bed, his knees pressed up to his chin. He had run out of qat and he was suffering from withdrawal symptoms. I showed him all the gear we’d bought.

‘We’re going to need every bit of it to get to Tullu Wallel,’ I said. Bahru stared at his feet.

‘I’m not going to Tullu Wallel,’ he muttered.

‘You don’t have to come up the mountain, you can park nearby.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

I couldn’t understand what had come over the man. He’d not shown signs of depression before. I offered to pay for his meals and to buy him a bale of the wicked green leaves. I even offered him more money. But he wouldn’t budge.

So, the next morning, with great reluctance, Samson and I unloaded our belongings from the Emperor’s Jeep and stood by the side of the road. We waited there for eight hours, until late morning turned into evening, but not a single vehicle passed by.

That night in the bar I treated Bahru to some more araki and gave him a gift, a bar of Greek-made chocolate. He cheered up a little and challenged a drunk in the bar to a game of cards. I winked at Samson.

‘That’s our old Bahru,’ I said.

Bahru slapped the marked deck on the table and told the drunk to cut it. They played a few hands, with Bahru inevitably winning. But then the drunk pulled a knife and accused him of cheating. He snatched the pile of cash on the table and said that if Bahru challenged him for it, he’d stab him. The whores intervened and broke them up, and Bahru crept to his room, his head low, his arms dragging down at his sides.

‘My God,’ said Samson, as Bahru left, ‘maybe his luck really has run out.’

Next day we hauled the baggage back to the roadside. Three hours later a brick-red Landcruiser skidded to a halt beside us. It was the only vehicle we had seen moving since morning. The driver said he could drop us at Begi, seventy-five miles west of Nejo. After that we were on our own. I peered into the back of the Landcruiser. All I could see were dozens of arms and legs and faces squirming in discomfort. Samson hugged Bahru and then I too embraced him. It was a sad moment, but we had no choice. We had to continue without him. The next minute our bags were thrown up top and we squeezed into the tangle of limbs.

Anyone who has ever travelled in East Africa knows the joy of matatus, the ubiquitous communal vans that are the main form of local transport. They make even the worst overland bus journey seem luxurious. In a matatu the concept of personal space doesn’t exist. Passengers are pressed together so tightly that they become a single entity, with multiple heads, legs, hands and feet. If you sneeze, the entire organism shudders. You find yourself counting the minutes, wondering how you can stand another second. But time slips by, punctuated by flat tyres and pee stops. It seems incredible to me now, but there were twenty-four people pressed inside that Landcruiser, not including the three men clinging to the roof.

The hours passed and I grew used to having someone’s elbow in my back, and a candyfloss of hair pressed against my face. Samson had a long conversation about the Old Testament with the person squashed up beside him. I was sitting near him, but I didn’t feel like chatting. The fact that we had left Bahru behind, so far from his home, bothered me. The first rule of an expedition is that everyone should stick together. If Stanley had been leading the party he’d have thrown Bahru in chains and had him horse-whipped. But then things have changed since Stanley’s day.

Begi lies on a flat plain of grassland with hills to the south and east. It’s the sort of place at which, in more normal circumstances, you’d never stop, but there had been no time to check the maps before climbing aboard the Landcruiser. The driver appeared to think the small town was near Tullu Wallel, so we took his word for it. The few locals who watched us extricate ourselves from the back of the vehicle looked alarmed, and I half expected them to rush over and tell us we’d made a terrible mistake.

Then our bags and equipment were tossed down on to the edge of the road and, before we could look up, the matatu had driven off towards the border with Sudan.

I always try to get the best maps before going to a new country because generally, with the exception of India whose National Survey produces fantastically detailed maps, the last place you can get good maps is in the country itself. Michelin produces the most detailed series of civilian maps for the African continent, scaled at 1:4,000,000. I also had all the American tactical pilotage charts for Ethiopia. The one that covered the western region was segment K-5D, on a scale of 1:500,000. Although there weren’t many place names marked, it gave valuable relief information.

We looked at the maps and it immediately became clear that we were twenty-five miles north of Tullu Wallel. It would have been much better to approach from the south, as the road there runs nearer the mountain, but it was too late to turn back.

There was a single bar in Begi which served warm Pilsen lager and doubled as a brothel. The whores were sitting in the shade of the veranda, picking their teeth and plaiting each other’s hair. They looked over at us and then looked away. A foreigner and an Ethiopian with a Bible stuffed under his arm weren’t the kind of people who generally required their services. We dragged our belongings into the shade and asked the girls where we could hire mules. They screwed up their faces, and then one of them pointed silently across the street to a rickety wooden kiosk.

Inside, a man was asleep on a chair with a kitten curled up on his chest. All around him were stacked empty gin bottles. He woke up, disturbed by the opening door knocking over part of his stock. His cheeks and chin were covered in grey stubble, his eyes sagged down, and most of his nose was missing. He greeted us. We greeted him.

‘Mules,’ said Samson, ‘we’re looking for mules.’

‘How many do you want?’

Samson asked me for a figure.

‘Lots,’ I said, ‘we’ll need lots of mules.’

The man seemed pleased. He brushed the kitten away, stood up and called out of the door. A young boy came running. The man barked orders and the boy ran off.

‘It’s hard to get good mules,’ he said. ‘Why do you need them?’ ‘To go to Tullu Wallel.’

His face froze.

‘The mountain?’

‘Yes.’

We stood there in uneasy silence. The man peered at me. I don’t know why but I feared blinking, as if by doing so I’d be revealing secret information.

‘The Devil lives on the mountain,’ he said.

‘Oh.’

‘He’ll kill you and eat your brains.’

‘Ah.’

There was an awkward silence.

‘Are you missionaries?’ he asked at length.

I looked at Samson, who was still holding his Bible.

‘Yes . . . yes, we’re missionaries,’ I said devoutly, grasping at straws. ‘We have come to get the Devil off Tullu Wallel. We’re going to kick him all the way back to Hell.’

The old man dipped his noseless head in appreciation.

‘That is good,’ he said. ‘Then you will need fine mules.’

‘The very best,’ I responded, ‘for we are doing God’s work.’

The gin-bottle man told us to come back a little later. His contact in the mule business would need time to get there. We sought refuge from the late afternoon rain back at the bar. The girls sat about waiting for the evening’s clients. There’s something very strange about African drinking dens during the day. They’re like discos when the house lights have been turned on. There’s something not quite right about them.

Samson opened his Bible at random and began to read the Psalms. I had expected my announcement that we were missionaries would infuriate him. But he was delighted and took the disguise very seriously.

One of the girls was serving drinks. I asked for a cup of coffee. There’s nothing like village coffee in Ethiopia. The only problem is you have to wait for it. A good cup can take up to two hours because it is made from scratch. After an hour of sitting around, I went into the yard behind the bar to see how things were progressing. The girl told me to be patient. The water supply had been cut, she said, which meant she had had to trek to a well a mile away. Then firewood needed to be collected. Only after that could the slow process of roasting the coffee begin.

When the beans had turned from pale green to dark brown, she held them up to my face for me to smell them. After that she tipped them into a mortar and ground them to powder. Only then could the cup of coffee be made. Almost two hours after placing the casual order, it finally arrived. It was the freshest, most delicious cup of coffee I can remember.

In the late evening the gin-bottle man sent his son to fetch us. His mule contact had turned up. We strolled across to the kiosk and were introduced to Tadesse. He was one of the most evil-looking men I have ever set eyes on. If I’d been told he had just chopped up his children and danced on their graves, I wouldn’t have been the least surprised. He had wicked, shifty eyes, high cheekbones, and a long waxy tongue which emerged from his mouth between sentences, like that of a tree frog catching flies. The gin-bottle man spoke highly of the muleteer, saying he was the only man who knew the mountain.

I asked Samson what he thought.

‘We don’t have to climb Tullu Wallel to find the Devil,’ he said. ‘He’s standing right here.’

The muleteer’s eyes flickered from side to side. He was waiting for our answer.

‘Where are the mules?’

He said he would take us to them once they had been rounded up. I asked how long that would take.

‘One or two days.’

‘That seems like a very long time.’

Tadesse looked at me hard.

‘Ethiopian mules are very wild,’ he said.

We arranged to inspect the animals at first light. If they still hadn’t been caught, I would view them through my binoculars. Business turned to the mountain itself. When I inquired if Tadesse was afraid of Tullu Wallel, he didn’t say anything; he just laughed manically.

‘He is a good man,’ said the gin-bottle man. ‘You will grow to like him.’

‘Are his mules strong?’

The gin-bottle man rubbed the hole where his nose ought to have been.

‘They’re as strong as the mountain,’ he said.

We thanked him for the introduction and turned on our heels to go. But I couldn’t leave yet. There was something I had to know. Unable to contain myself, I made Samson find out how he’d lost his nose. The gin-bottle man glanced down at the table, and I felt embarrassed at having asked.

‘A long time ago,’ he said, ‘I had an argument with my wife. She bit it off and ran away.’

On the way to the mules I bragged about my equestrian experience. I told Tadesse and Samson that my Pushtun ancestors prided themselves on their skill at buz-kashi, the Afghan national sport played on horseback with a headless goat. Polo is said to have developed from the game. The horses get so charged up that they bite each other if they get the chance. I went on about how I myself had been raised with horses. The animals were in my blood, I said. Of course it was all a lie. As children we did have a pair of vicious donkeys called Boney and Claude, but they rolled under the fence one day and were never seen again. Anyone mad enough to try saddling them up would have been torn to pieces.

Everything I know about horses was passed on by an old family friend. An indomitable Swiss, he had decided that he’d trek with horses from Ulan Batur, in Outer Mongolia, to Vienna. He bought a pair of ponies from a horse-dealer in a suburb of the Mongolian capital. They were wild animals with sores all over their backs. The locals told him to pee on the sores. He soon found this was no easy feat. But when he did manage it they reared up and ran away, leaving him stranded in the frozen wastes of Mongolia. When, after many adventures, he arrived back home, I asked for his advice.

‘Always pick your animals very carefully,’ he said.

Those words rang in my mind as we walked the three miles to where the mules were grazing. There were eight of them, and Tadesse still hadn’t managed to catch them. However, their backs were covered in saddle sores, which meant that they must have been ridden at some point.

I asked the price.

Tadesse pointed out the high quality of the saddles and the harnesses.

‘There’s not a finer mule for a hundred miles,’ he said. ‘I’m only charging ten birr a day for each.’

That was about eight pounds a day for all eight. It sounded like a bargain, so we took the lot.

Samson didn’t understand why we needed so many animals but I justified the decision by saying that I expected injuries. It was going to be a long, hard trip. There were sure to be fatalities. In fact my reasons were different. There’s nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.

The night before we left Begi with the mules, I re-read Frank Hayter’s description of finding the mine-shafts at Tullu Wallel. A dejazmacth, a nobleman, had told him of a legend. It said that the ancient kings of Ethiopia had obtained their gold from two places in the west of the country. The first was Beni Shangul, and the second was at the base of Tullu Wallel. Both sets of mines were, he warned, ‘guarded by the spirits of the old rulers of this country’. The tip-off sent Hayter’s head spinning. He left at dawn the next day and, after days of trekking, he finally reached the twin peaks of Tullu Wallel, which he called Sheba’s Breasts.

The party continued their approach, pushing through a dense bamboo forest, and eventually reached the eastern flank of the mountain. There Hayter claimed to have discovered fourteen stone portals covered in vegetation. ‘They were the entrances to underground caves,’ he wrote, ‘and not natural entrances either, for the stone uprights and heavy lintels that squared the openings had been fashioned by the hands of man.’

Hayter’s two books on Ethiopia contain many black and white photographs. There are pictures of gold prospectors and mule caravans, of lepers and encampments and tribal ceremonies, and there are innumerable shots of Hayter himself, dressed in pith helmet and safari suit. The only image missing from his books is the one of the actual mine entrances. However, Hayter’s friend Captain E. J. Bartleet, who retold the tale in his own book In the Land of Sheba, includes an extraordinary photograph. At first glance it looks very ordinary, but on closer inspection you begin to appreciate its significance. At the top right of the picture there is a natural cave opening. But a few yards away, at the bottom of the photograph, there is the upper part of what looks like a man-made stone entrance. It is partly hidden by vegetation but it is unmistakable, and it appears to lead to a mine-shaft.

That night, before setting off for Tullu Wallel, I sat on my bed in the brothel, shining the beam of my torch on the picture from Bartleet’s book. A man was screaming in the next room. At first I thought it was the cry of passion. Then I remembered that Samson had taken the room next to mine and that he was devoted to his long-suffering girlfriend. So I got off my bed and knocked gently on the door, irritated that Samson should be making so much noise. The screams turned to a long, low groan. I pushed the door open. Samson was lying on the floor, sweating profusely and clutching his abdomen. I asked what all the fuss was about. From what I could understand, he claimed to be in a great deal of pain. I hoped it wasn’t a burst appendix. I remembered reading a book about climbing Everest. It had said that top climbers always have their appendix out before starting the ascent. I kicked myself for not thinking of it before. We were a man down and our assault on Tullu Wallel hadn’t even begun.

Unsure of what to do, I went and asked the Tigrayan whores. They spoke no English, so I clutched my stomach, stuck out my tongue and pointed to Samson’s room. The girls looked puzzled, and one of them nodded and stuck out her tongue. Then they walked off into another room, and a great deal of muffled shouting followed. I went back to Samson. A moment later there was a thump on the door. A tall, athletic-looking man wearing nothing but underpants was standing in the door frame. He said in English that he was a doctor. I pointed to my travelling companion. The doctor jabbed a finger into Samson’s belly.

‘Probably the appendix,’ I said knowledgeably.

‘No,’ he said, ‘it is intestinal worms.’

I asked how much we owed for the diagnosis.

‘Fifty birr.’

The doctor said he would send one of the prostitutes to get medicine. Then he returned to his room. He clearly had unfinished business to attend to.

After the disturbance I went back to Bartleet’s book and ran over the facts again. The story seemed to fit. My American tactical pilotage chart indicated that Tullu Wallel did indeed have two peaks, reaching a height of 10,738 feet. The distances Hayter had given from Gambela and Gore were about right too. And, more importantly, like Beni Shangul just to the north, the area was well known as an ancient source of gold. But the question that haunted me was why Hayter hadn’t published the photograph of the cave entrance in his own book. Bartleet had scooped him, publishing the account of the find in 1934, a year before Hayter’s book appeared. In his account, Bartleet explained that he was supposed to go on the adventure but fell ill and had to stay behind in Addis Ababa. So Hayter went alone, and Bartleet never got to see the fourteen portals or the mine-shafts for himself. I assumed that Hayter must therefore have taken the picture but chose not to publish it himself. Perhaps he feared it would help others identity the place.

I had insisted we leave Begi at dawn. An early start on the first day keeps untested men and mules on their toes. Moreover, I didn’t want Tadesse to think I was a walkover, even though I’d agreed to pay his opening rate for the pack animals.

Tadesse had roped in his two sons, whom he said would work for free. The boys grinned wickedly. They had their father’s genes. The younger one carried a sharp bamboo stave which he used to poke the poor mules’ behinds. When he wasn’t poking, he was sharpening the stick. The other boy didn’t have any interest in being a muleteer, despite his father’s hopes. He had heard of a place called America, he said, where he could get money for free.

After taking a couple of sachets of yellow powder prescribed by the doctor, Samson said his symptoms had gone away. I felt rather guilty about not delaying our departure, but he exclaimed that he was fighting fit again. I think he was embarrassed that he had worms.

Tadesse herded the mules to the front of the bar. They huddled together, eyes staring and hooves stamping. Despite this feigned fear, I could tell they were longing to escape. They were wild animals and resented labouring for humans. I had seen the same deranged look in our donkeys’ eyes the day before they ran away.

The kitbags were soon strapped into position with leather thongs, and then the younger boy shaved a sliver off his bamboo shaft and plunged it into one of the mule’s backsides as if to let them know who was boss. I looked over to see if the gin-bottle man was up but, like everyone else in the small town, he must have been fast asleep.

There is something about walking with mules that stirs me. I’ve travelled with camels and yaks, and even llamas, but mules are quite different. I’ve been bitten by a llama and spat at by more than one angry camel. Donkeys are less hostile but you always get the feeling that you’re doing them an injustice. Mules on the other hand are built for rough work and thrive on hardship.

Samson was pleased to be heading for the mountain. He kept dropping hints about his new role as a preacher. I took him aside and said that we weren’t really missionaries. In case he hadn’t realized, I said, I wasn’t even a Christian.

The track from Begi veered to the east and skirted a hill called Gimi. We were very close to the border with Sudan, which lay on the other side of the hill. I was worried that we might be arrested as spies, for border areas in Africa tend to be patrolled by secret police. If we were arrested, I told Samson to hold his Bible high in the air and declare that we were working for God. If interrogated, I planned to pretend I was a recent convert to Christianity. Everyone knows that converts are the most fanatical followers of a faith.

We continued walking well into the afternoon. The saddles were in poor shape, but at least they kept the flies off the mules’ sores. The animals took every opportunity to stop and eat, and I knew they were all on the lookout for an escape route. As we trudged along, the humidity rose until finally, in the afternoon, it began to rain. We sought refuge under a bank of trees and waited for it to pass.

Tadesse asked me if I was really a missionary.

‘Of course I am,’ I replied firmly.

‘Then why do you talk about treasure so much?’

‘The Bible,’ I said, ‘that is the treasure that we are talking about.’

The muleteer narrowed his eyes and gave the order to move on.

‘The Devil will be waiting for us,’ he said.

We slept the night at Gidami. My feet were sore and Samson’s arm ached from carrying the Bible all day. We’d walked for almost twenty miles. However, the mules seemed to be in high spirits. Samson took Tadesse and his sons to get some food and asked me if I would join them but I declined. An old English explorer whom I had once met near Hunza, in the Karakoram range, had passed on a valuable tip. He said that you have to turn yourself into a mythical figure early on in a journey: that is the only way of establishing your authority. The explorer’s method was simple. He told me not to eat, at least not in public.

‘I never chow with the natives,’ he explained, ‘not because I think I’m above them or because I don’t like the food. They see me going on day after day without anything in my stomach, and they think I’m superhuman. Try it out some time, old boy.’

I’d been waiting to put this into practice for years. I unpacked my kitbags. In them I still had eight of the tins I’d bought in Axum. Samson couldn’t understand why my luggage was so heavy and I’d let him assume it was full of books. That night I gorged myself on a can of corned beef. It’s an explorer’s staple. Count Byron de Prorok and many other travellers in Africa all swore by their inexhaustible supply of ‘bully beef’.

During the night a spider wove an enormous sticky web over my face. As a die-hard arachnophobe I was very disturbed by the event. None of the others could understand why I was so alarmed. Unable to convince them of my horror of spiders, I decided to bolster my spirits with another surreptitious tin of corned beef.

After a couple of hours of walking, Samson and the muleteers were ready for breakfast. They sat down to eat some crusts of bread and a few bruised pieces of fruit. Tadesse couldn’t believe I wasn’t hungry.

‘The Lord fills my stomach with His goodness,’ I said, looking over at him meekly.

That day we altered course, heading east, and Tadesse pointed a broken fingernail at the distant horizon.

‘That’s Tullu Wallel,’ he said.

I stopped and took a deep breath, and then glanced over at Samson. He was sucking his lower lip. Tadesse’s eyesight was either remarkably good or remarkably bad. When I looked I couldn’t see anything except for tall razor grass and the tops of trees. Only after another hour of trudging through rain did I see Tullu Wallel. It was fitting that I caught my first glimpse of the Devil’s abode in such horrible weather. Samson and I let the mules go on. We both needed a moment to stare at the mountain. The summit was lost in cloud, brooding and mysterious, but it quite obviously had twin peaks—Sheba’s Breasts, as Hayter had called them. Before we set off again Samson said a prayer. He looked up at the heavens and prayed that God would look after us and deliver us safely from the mountain.

I asked Tadesse how long it would take to get to Tullu Wallel.

‘Maybe one day, maybe four days,’ he replied.

It was an appropriate answer to a stupid question. Time didn’t matter. We were nearing the mountain and that was all that counted. Above us, in the trees, baboons swung from branch to branch, taunting us. Tadesse picked up some stones and flung them at the animals.

‘They are the Devil’s disciples,’ he said. ‘Beware of baboons.’

I didn’t tell him of Frank Hayter’s curse, but I was thinking of it as we passed the baboons. Hayter believed completely in the spell that was put on him by an Abyssinian monk, when he’d captured a hundred sacred baboons and shipped them back to London Zoo. That was back in 1924. He later wrote: ‘Let me put my feelings in a nutshell. Ten years ago I was a very fit man indeed, fit enough to enter the ring and defend my title as boxing champion of Herefordshire. Today I am no more capable of flying without wings than of boxing. And I am only thirty-three.’

During my research I had tried to find some trace of Frank Hayter’s family. He said that he married his cousin who bore him a son. I did manage to obtain copies of his birth and marriage certificates, but I do not know when he died. His last published book, The Garden of Eden, appeared in 1940. After that the trail goes cold. I wrote to hundreds of people all over the world called Hayter, but none appeared to be related to the explorer. Even so, I am sure that somewhere, in some forgotten attic, his notebooks and journals must survive.

Tadesse said the mules needed time to graze. We untied their packs and let them chew on the long grass. The muleteer’s sons decided to pass the time by throwing more stones at the baboons. I said it was probably unwise to aggravate them, as they could be cursed.

‘Of course they’re cursed!’ exclaimed Tadesse. ‘That’s why we throw stones at them.’

I asked Samson to go over to a clutch of low mud huts nearby and see if anyone knew about Tullu Wallel.

‘What should I ask?’

‘Ask them if they fear the mountain.’

He was gone for an hour and when, eventually, he came back to where we were sitting, he looked rather unnerved.

‘I think you had better meet these people,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Come and see.’

The seven huts were arranged in a horseshoe, with a fire smoking in the middle. The central yard was shaded by a thorn tree. Under the tree sat a man, a woman and about six children. The man greeted Samson and then stood up when he saw me.

‘You must sit down,’ said Samson.

I sat down. The children giggled, their mother smiled and their father nodded.

The parents were about thirty but looked sixty. Three decades of village life in western Ethiopia turns the skin to leather and callouses the hands and feet until they are almost unrecognizable. The man said his name was Jambo and that his wife was called Sara. We shook hands and Jambo offered me some berries. They were plum-coloured and pippy. I ate a few and praised them. The children giggled again. Sara smiled. Jambo nodded. Then I said how happy I was to have come to their home. We sat in silence. I was waiting for Samson to say something, but he didn’t.

‘Tullu Wallel,’ I said after some time.

I was expecting more giggles, more smiles, more nods. But Jambo and his family looked alarmed.

‘A bad mountain,’ said Jambo sternly.

‘The Devil . . .’

‘He lives there!’ he shouted, pointing away to the distance.

‘Have you ever been there?’

Sara looked nervous.

‘Of course not!’

‘They kill animals in honour of the mountain,’ said Samson gently.

I asked if this was true.

Jambo nodded. ‘Yes, sometimes we kill animals.’

‘Does it keep the Devil happy?’

‘Yes, when we kill animals, the Devil is happy.’

‘What if he is not happy?’

Jambo fell silent for a while and then spoke.

‘It is not good when the Devil is angry.’

I asked Jambo when he was planning the next sacrifice. He passed me some more berries.

‘No money to buy chickens.’

‘If you had money would you make a sacrifice?’

Jambo leapt up from his seat. Yes, they’d make a sacrifice immediately, he said. He had remembered that the mountain required an offering urgently.

‘What happens if no sacrifice is made?’

Jambo shook his head.

‘Trouble.’

I fished out a wad of low-denomination notes. Explaining that we were missionaries, I said we had come to kick the Devil back to the farthest reaches of Hell. But before we routed him, we would give him one last meal.

Jambo grabbed the cash, passed half of it to his wife, and barked at her as gruffly as he could. She returned a few minutes later with a rather mangy pair of chickens. Within moments Jambo had broken their necks, hacked off their heads and plucked them. The children crowded round. I sent Samson to bring Tadesse and his sons. We would spend a night camping out at Jambo’s place.

It wasn’t long before a watery stew had been prepared. Tadesse, his sons, Samson and Jambo’s family all dug in.

‘Don’t you have to hold the meat up to the mountain and say a prayer?’

Jambo gnawed at a bone.

‘We have already done that,’ he said.

‘Eat, eat!’ said Sara.

‘I’ve made a vow not to eat anything until the Devil has run away from Tullu Wallel.’

With that I got up and walked off into the darkness. I had an appointment with a tin of corned beef.

When the watery stew had been eaten, I asked Jambo to take a look at the photograph of the mine entrance in Bartleet’s book. He held the red binding up to his nose, and his family clustered around.

‘It’s the entrance to a shaft,’ I said. ‘Can you see the stone doorway?’

‘The shaft,’ said Jambo, ‘that is the place where the Devil lives. You must not go there.’

‘But I told you, we’re missionaries. It’s our job to get rid of the Devil so that you can live in peace.’

The farmer threw a chicken bone to one of his dogs.

‘The Devil will bite off your heads,’ he said.

‘We know there is danger,’ I replied. ‘But God will protect us.’

Jambo stood up and walked over to one of the huts. A few minutes later he returned and sat down beside me. There was something cupped in his hands. It was made from leather and was the size and shape of a film canister.

‘Tie this amulet around your neck,’ he said. ‘Inside there is a spell written on paper. It is written in Ge’ez, and it will give you extra protection.’

Jambo wiped his face with his hand. Then he stared into the fire, as if he was looking into the future.

‘Remember one thing,’ he added, ‘the Devil is very clever. Missionaries have been to Tullu Wallel before. Like you they said they were very strong but . . .’

‘But what?’

‘But they never came down from the mountain.’