CHAPTER 11

“CAN YOU SMELL THAT?” Ceseli asked.

“What?”

“You can almost smell it. The cradle of Christendom.”

“I thought you meant the mules,” Standish said, looking at her and kicking his mule to keep up.

Ceseli and Standish looked out over the spectacular Valley of Axum. The huge valley was lush, watered by the wide Mai Chan River. It was an astoundingly lovely day, with clear aquamarine skies and the few clouds overhead were thick, like giant sea turtles floating upside down.

Ceseli thought back on the previous days. The embassy’s truck had behaved admirably on the long drive from Addis up to Dessie. They drove through great forests of weeping Cedars, Podocarpus gracing the lower slopes along with Hagenia, St. John’s Wort, giant heath, and everlastings. The trip was alive with the flights of guinea fowl, herds of graceful gazelle, antelope, and eland. She had seen a buzzard almost as big as an ostrich. She could still smell the intense fragrance of the flowers and hear the songs of the small, brightly colored birds.

The emperor’s sky blue Puss Moth had met them in Dessie. It was a high-winged monoplane capable of flying at one hundred sixty miles per hour and carried a pilot and two passengers in a tricycle arrangement, with the pilot up front in a cabin under the broad sweep of the wings.

The handsome pilot was Yifru’s nephew, Yohannes. His handshake was firm and decisive. He was a bit taller than his uncle, slender, well built, with an open friendly smile and the same startlingly blue eyes. His hair was combed out into a huge halo setting off his high cheekbones and fine features. A white silk scarf and a mauve shirt under his smart khaki uniform accentuated the café latte color of his skin. On anyone else the color mauve would seem effeminate, but there was nothing effeminate about Yohannes. Both his English and French were excellent. Ceseli liked him immediately.

“Have you ever flown in a small plane, Miss Larson?” Yohannes asked.

“I’ve never flown at all.”

“I’ll take it very easy, no acrobatics. You’ll be fine.”

“Thank you for the reassurance,” she smiled.

Once they were airborne, Ceseli and Standish could see that the land was as unique as any in the world. A relief map could not do it justice. Sometimes it was lunar and sometimes infernal, but never merely earthly. In the north, the Ethiopian plateau rose sharply within a few miles from sea level to eight thousand feet. Representing the most gigantic swath of erosion in the world, this highland was cut through by innumerable gorges and valleys, many of them on the scale of the Grand Canyon. Extraordinary rock formations bore witness to the volcanic activity that had shaped the skeleton of this incredible landscape, its topography imposing isolation and with it timelessness.

Below, they could see that on the spurs and mesas that rose from the canyons, even when their sides were vertical and their surfaces just a few acres, there were fields and sometimes villages and round Coptic churches. On each plateau there were squat, toad-like tukuls made of piled fieldstone, all kraaled with a thorn fence and speckled around with grazing sheep and cattle. Each flat mountaintop was ringed with cactus euphorbia or wild lemon to prevent the cattle from falling over the edge of the plateau as sacrifices to the Gods of the Cliff.

“Look at that,” she yelled above the roar of the engine. “The highland protected them for thousands of years.”

“Who?” Standish shouted back.

“The Axumite people. The Axumite state covered this whole area from the Sudan to Somalia and all along the Red Sea coast and as far as the Nile. Their only rival was Rome.”

“How do you know that?”

“A sixth century Christian monk came here and wrote about it. He claimed that the Axumite merchant navies sailed as far as India, China, and even Gaul. They carried gold, ivory, rhinoceros horn, frankincense and myrrh, and in return imported cloth, glass, iron, olive oil, and wine.”

“Why did it end?”

She shrugged. “That’s what we’re trying to find out. Problem is that with one exception, there is no documentation. The only things we know are from a brief account written by a Greek traveler named Cosmas Indicopleustes, who after his trip to Axum reported that the King of Ethiopia’s four towered palace was adorned with four brass figures of a unicorn, as well as the skin of a rhinoceros stuffed with chaff. He wrote that the king dressed in a short toga with gold necklaces and armbands, rode about in a golden chariot pulled by elephants, and kept several giraffes as his pets. That was in the fifth century. I’m not sure one could call that barbaric splendor befitting a capital of what had by that time become the most important power between the Roman Empire and Persia.”

Today, as Ceseli and Standish rode their mules toward the center of the valley she could see the obelisks in front of her. Then in a large nearby field they finally found all the others, lying on the ground like a complicated maze of giant matchsticks. It was a horizontal forest of huge monolithic pieces of dark granite. Some of them were rudimentary, but others were elaborately carved.

“Each of the obelisks is a single block of granite. This could weigh three or four hundred tons,” she said, drawing her hand over the rough-hewn surface. “How do you think they carved them, brought them here, and erected them?”

Standish was walking around the side of an obelisk. “Like the pyramids, I guess. Elephants, or maybe slaves. What did they do with them?”

“They’re grave markers and they honor a celestial god,” Ceseli answered, feeling awed by these surroundings. “Sun worship was very popular in the towns of Yemen in Arabia. Queen Makeda ruled a part of southern Arabia in Sabea that is known as Sheba. That’s how she got the title of Queen of Axum and Sheba. People forget the Axum part and she is usually referred to as the Queen of Sheba. Do you believe that the Queen of Sheba was Ethiopian?” Ceseli asked, turning back to the present.

“I’m not very good at believing.”

“No problem. Do you know anything about obelisks?” Ceseli asked as she circled one of the standing obelisks.

“Only that there are lots of them in Rome, and one in New York.”

“In Central Park. I used to play near there.”

“That’s where I learned to ride my bike.”

“Do you remember all the impromptu baseball games in the park?”

“I was an avid baseball fan. I wanted to be a professional pitcher,” Standish smiled.

“Yankees or Dodgers?”

“Yankees, of course.”

“Me too. I didn’t want to be a pitcher, but I loved playing softball with Daddy during the summer. Hey, look at this one,” she said, pausing to look more closely at a huge obelisk broken into four pieces. “It’s carved as if it were a tower. This is meant to be the door,” she said, pointing to the carved sham door which had a stone lock carved into it. “Count them. It’s thirteen stories tall.”

“They weren’t superstitious.”

“I guess not. The Sun God lives up there in the firmament at the top. These flat basins collected the blood from the offerings.”

“What kind of offering?” Standish asked.

“I’m sure they weren’t human,” Ceseli said as she took out her sketchpad and began drawing one of the standing obelisks. She looked up to the height of the obelisk. “Maybe sixty or seventy feet? What do you think?”

“You want to measure it?” he asked, shading his eyes from the sun.

“I was thinking of a small boy and a coconut tree.”

“And that I'd like, a coconut right about now.”

“I’m very serious,” she smiled.

“So am I! Must have been very impressive when they were all standing,” Standish said as he ventured looking out over the valley. “That’s very good,” he said, walking behind her to look at the sketch.

“Thank you. Drawing is one of the first things you learn as an archaeologist.” She turned to a new page and walked to a huge altar stone.

Standish stooped to look more closely at the carvings on the stone. “It’s like a house of cards. Any idea why the obelisks fell?”

“A group of German archaeologists who came here in 1906 thought it could have been the silting up of the Mai Chan River. That one,” she said, pointing in the direction of the river. “They lost their balance and toppled over. Or, razed to the ground by some Muslim army.”

“Or an earthquake?”

“That might explain why they go in every direction. Razing them would probably mean deciding in what direction.”

Ceseli had returned to the fallen obelisk and was stooping over one of the pieces. “This is carved on three of the surfaces. Do you know how rare that makes it? Think there’s any chance to look at the fourth side?”

“What were you thinking of?”

“Tunneling under just enough to see if the carving continues? Or lifting it.”

“I don’t know how many elephants or slaves we can count on.”

“What about oxen?”

Standish stooped to look at the thorns and grass matted around the edges. He walked around the obelisk and looked at the other broken pieces. “Perhaps down from this edge. We can try that tomorrow.”

Remounting, they galloped the mules over the meadow with its sky high grass. It could have been a sea with two ships, their sails trimmed neatly. The gait of the mule and the wooden western style saddle were different from those she had ridden before, but wasn’t uncomfortable. She looked across at Standish who was holding his own.

She felt exuberant, free, wild, transported. It was not yet hot and she had been right to wear her blue jeans rather than a pair of jodhpurs. Her hair was lightened by the sun, and braided in two thick tresses that barely contained its volume. As they rode, the wind blew her straw hat, held in place by a cord knotted under her chin onto her shoulders and she felt the wind warm against her face.

As they rode, they passed two young boys whipping an ox as it tilled the field with an archaic wooden plow pulled behind it. The ox was small by American standards, but so were the children, who looked to be seven or eight, but were probably several years older.

Finally they reached a magnificent tank, or reservoir, where the waters of a stream were artificially confined and from where the town got its water. It was an open deep water reservoir dug down into the red granite of the hillside and approached by means of a rough-hewn stairway.

“It’s known as the Queen of Sheba’s pleasure bath. Since the beginning of Christian times it was used for baptismal ceremonies to celebrate the Holy Epiphany, or Timkat.”

“Some bath! This must be one hundred fifty square feet,” Standish said. “Half of the ladies of Axum could have bathed in here with ease.”

As they watched, three women descended the rock-hewn steps carrying gourds balanced on their heads to collect water. Their stature was so regal, their balance so perfect that they could easily have been royal women in waiting rather than modest peasant women.

Ceseli looked at him before removing her boots, tucking her legs over the edge, and dangling them in the cold water.

“Can you hand me my bag?” she asked while making herself comfortable. Standish handed her the bag and was not surprised when she pulled out her bible. She opened it and began flipping through the pages. “You know why this place is so important?”

“It’s the place where the Ark of the Covenant is supposed to be.”

“That too. But because of its holiness, it has the status of a sacred city. Axum is the only place in Ethiopia where a man or woman can take refuge and be safe from justice. He only has to go to the porch of the sacred enclosure, ring the bell and declare three times in a loud voice his intention of taking refuge. And all Christian kings were crowned here up until the 1870s.”

“I wonder how many people actually take advantage of that,” Standish mused.

“I don’t know. Let’s go see St. Mary of Zion.”