THIS MORNING’S ASSEMBLY in the palace farmyard was comical – one long-suffering mule, one clueless faranj, one anxious-to-help but (in this context) equally clueless princess and five bewildered farm-hands. (All these men are expert mule-loaders, but none had ever before encountered such an intractable miscellany of baggage.) The pack-saddle is a simple square of well-padded, soft sacking and we began by roping on my rucksack, flea-bag, box of emergency rations and water-bottle, topping them with Jock’s natty plastic bucket (bought in Asmara) and Leilt Aida’s bulky contribution of imported foods.
After a forty-minute struggle everything seemed secure, so all goodbyes were said and everyone industriously waved to every-else as Christopher and I left the farmyard behind Jock and Gabre Maskal – the servant who had been deputed to guide us on to the Adua track. Then, on the verge of the road, a hooting Red Cross jeep caused Jock to buck frantically, and everything slowly slid under his belly and thence to the ground.
As we retreated to the yard I decided that two evenly weighted sacks would have to replace my awkwardly-shaped rucksack. In due course these were produced and I impatiently tumbled into them a conglomeration of books, clothes, matches, medicines, candles, pens, soup-cubes, cigarettes, toothpaste, torch batteries, notebooks, maps and insecticides. Then, after much testing and balancing of sacks, and tying and retying of ropes and leather thongs, reasonable security was assured. Undoubtedly Jock is a patient animal: there he stood, the picture of bored resignation, while the men crowded around him yelling argumentatively and heaving on the ropes like sailors in a storm. Their loading method is impossibly complex and I am singularly inept at acquiring such skills – so we will be dependent on hypothetical passers-by if we have to camp out at night.
Much of the route from Makalle to Adua follows a makeshift motor-track constructed during the Italian occupation but neglected for the past quarter of a century. Our guide evidently disapproved of Leilt Aida allowing faranjs to travel unescorted and he asked several peasants who were walking in our direction if they would take charge of us; but all were soon turning off this main track towards their settlements and eventually Gabre Maskal was persuaded to turn back.
For the next four miles our track ran direct over a light-brown, stony plain, bounded to east and west by low mountains. I walked ahead, leading Jock, and Christopher followed a little way behind, displaying remarkable stamina for a ten-year-old. Already I could see that he would never admit to being tired, so an early lunch seemed advisable and we stopped near the edge of the plateau, where a solitary, gnarled tree provided meagre shade. Here too was the first settlement we had seen – a few round, thatched huts (tukuls) clumsily constructed of stakes and mud. Several locals at once gathered around us and one young man asked if we were Italian or American; on being told that we were British and Irish he and his companions looked blank. These people must be quite used to seeing faranjs at Makalle, but beneath their formal courtesy I sensed – or imagined – a mixture of hostility, suspicion and contempt.
From the edge of the plateau we took a short cut down a steep, narrow path which wound around a mountain covered in low green scrub. This path was so rough that I urged Jock to go ahead and choose his own way, since my stumbling progress was making things more difficult for him, and on rejoining the main track he stood meekly waiting for me to catch up. All day his behaviour was angelic, apart from one slight aberration when he suddenly lay down beside a shallow river and attempted to roll in the fine sand; but the moment I tugged at the halter – exclaiming ‘Jock!’ in a horrified tone – he scrambled to his feet and consoled himself with a long drink. This docility was especially encouraging because I had by then removed the bit, which was obviously causing him great discomfort. At our next rest-halt I experimented further by letting him graze loose, and as a reward for my increasing trust he didn’t withdraw even a step when I went to catch him.
During the afternoon we were sometimes accompanied by groups of men and boys, driving mule or donkey caravans towards their invisible settlements in the folds of the hills. Everyone stared at us with astonishment and amusement – the amusement being caused by Jock’s eccentric load. Amidst surroundings innocent of the garishness that now disfigures many European landscapes my simple possessions look horribly ostentatious – a canary-yellow nylon flea-bag, a vivid green plastic bucket and a white and red plastic water-bottle. No wonder the locals are amused, as they stride along in their off-white shammas behind sober-hued, professionally-balanced loads of hides and salt-blocks.
There is a disconcerting lack of spontaneity in the highlanders’ reactions to a faranj. No doubt it is illogical to deduce hostility from restraint, yet one misses the friendly, unrepressed interest aroused in Asia by wandering foreigners.
All afternoon our track switchbacked through easy hills – some scrub-covered, some barren – and despite this region’s appearance of infertility the many herds of wide-horned cattle and small, fat-tailed sheep seemed in excellent condition.
As the sun declined pale colours softened the hills, and then came the quiet glory of the highland sunset. Without clouds there are no spectacular effects, but this evening broad bands of pastel light merged dreamily into one another above the royal blue solidness of a long, level escarpment some hundred yards west of our track.
When we heard the distant roar of the palace jeep I led Jock on to some ploughland and murmured soothingly in his ear; but as the noise came closer he began to tremble, and much to his disapproval I hastily replaced the bit, lest he should try to bolt. However, he managed to retain his self-control and quietly followed me back to the track after the vehicle had pulled up nearby.
To our surprise it was not the jeep, but the Mercedes – and Leilt Aida was sitting in front with a picnic-basket. As Christopher and I gulped cups of steaming tea she and the driver discussed what seemed to them a Problem – where I would sleep tonight. We had walked only fourteen miles, so both Jock and I were fresh enough to cope with the remaining four miles to the next village. But Leilt Aida forbade me to continue – ostensibly because hyenas might attack Jock after dark, though I suspect that her real fear was of shifta attacking me. She then sent the driver to reconnoitre a steep, uncultivated mountainside that rose directly from the track on our right; there was no trace of an upward path and it would never have occurred to me to look for shelter in such an apparently unpopulated area.
By now it was dark and as we sat waiting, on a low stone wall, Leilt Aida repeated that I must telephone her whenever possible and not hesitate to ask for help if in need. I thought then of the words spoken by one of her ancestors to the 1841 British trade mission. His Majesty Sahela Salassie, seventh King of Shoa, had said, ‘My children, all my gun-people shall accompany you; may you enter into safety. Whatsoever your hearts think or wish, that send word unto me. Saving myself, ye have no relative in this distant land.’ The difference here was that no gun-people were accompanying me, and it was obvious that Leilt Aida had already begun to reproach herself for not insisting on an escort.
Fifteen minutes later a favourable report was shouted from the hilltop and, waving goodbye to Leilt Aida and Christopher, I began to lead Jock up the steep slope, scrambling blindly over or around rough rocks and through excruciatingly prickly scrub. We were guided by the driver above and Leilt Aida below. He would yell down in Amharic, ‘More to the right,’ or ‘A little left there!’ and she would yell the translation up to me. Reaching the top, I saw by starlight that we were on a level, scrub-covered plateau. Here the driver produced as my guide an awe-stricken, speechless youth – whose name I later discovered to be Marcos – and then he bounded down to the track, while Leilt Aida and I yelled final goodbyes.
Ten minutes later, as we were being led along a narrow path, I saw the car jolting slowly away towards Makalle, which was visible as a cluster of dim lights on a plateau level with this. Across all the intervening countryside no other lights glimmered, though there must be many settlements among these hills, and the dwindling headlights of the Mercedes seemed pleasingly symbolic.
When we reached this compound it, too, was in darkness – apart from the flicker of a dying wood-fire in the smallest of the three stone huts – and it took me fifteen minutes to unload Jock. (It was the measure of today’s disorganisation that my torch lay at the bottom of a sack and could only be got at after the untying of countless complicated knots.) Marcos must be used to unloading mules, but he seemed to have been mentally numbed by astonishment – or else he believes that there is some special mystique connected with faranj-owned pack-animals. He made no attempt to help until I had somehow induced everything to come to pieces; then, while I fumbled through the sacks for food, torch, insecticide-powder and notebook, he led Jock to a shelter, before carrying my load into the smallest hut. This was round and solidly built, with a pointed grass roof and two-foot thick walls. A quarter of the floor space was taken up by a mud ‘stove’, some eighteen inches high, another quarter by two six-foot mud-and-wicker grain storage bins, and the rest by an uneven mud couch, covered with a stiff cow-hide and raised two feet above the floor. Marcos dumped my load on this bed, bent down to blow the embers and, when a handful of twigs had begun to blaze, gave me an uneasy, sideways glance. I grinned cheerfully in reply – without saying anything, since my earlier attempts at communication had seemed only to scare him. He was a handsome youth, with a broad brow, a straight nose, slightly prominent cheek-bones and fine eyes. Beneath his unease I sensed a nice nature and now he responded to my grin with a quick, shy smile, before adding more twigs to the fire and putting a rusty basin of water to heat. I wondered if some beverage would in due course be produced from the basin; but instead, when the water was hot, Marcos began to remove my boots and socks, keeping his head respectfully bent. For the next ten minutes he violently massaged my legs from knees to toes, pouring water over them before each attack. Even without today’s severe sunburn – just where he was concentrating on my calf-muscles – such treatment would have been trying enough; but now my legs feel comfortably relaxed.
While replacing my boots I heard voices, and then saw, through the low doorway, a few vague shapes wrapped in shammas. The arrival of his family had an interesting effect on Marcos. He leaped up, his face shining with delighted relief, and only then did I realise that he had been seriously frightened of me. I hope this Italian-bred fear of faranjs is not common throughout Tigre, since fear can express itself in many ways.
As Marcos told his news three men and two women crowded up to see me, the women half-hiding behind their menfolk, covering the lower part of their faces with their shammas.
Released from the strain of my undiluted company, Marcos beamed at me in a proprietary way, as though my presence here were all his own work, and began self-importantly to make free with my possessions, which earlier he had dropped as if they might bite him. He held up my sleeping-bag and bucket to be admired – but was at once sharply reprimanded by his father for unnecessarily touching a guest’s belongings. By now the men had edged into the tukal and we were all sitting close together on the bed, while outside the women excitedly discussed me. Soon they had decided that I must be transferred to the main dwelling-house – a rectangular, high-ceilinged, single-storey building, which consists of one large room, where several tree-trunks support the wooden beams of the mud roof and many grain bins take up most of the floor-space. Here the mud bed – which has been sacrificed to me – is about three feet high and built four feet out from the wall. The younger members of the family sleep on the floor around the fire and the poultry roost on crude shelves directly above the bed.
When Marcos began to move my luggage I tried to stop him; but everyone insisted that it must remain beside me, so it has been stacked at the end of the bed. This attitude seems to indicate an endemic lack of trust. In similar circumstances elsewhere a host would store my kit in the most convenient spot – not necessarily anywhere near my sleeping quarters – after assuring me that it would be safe.
Having recovered from the initial shock, everyone wanted to talk to me. Marcos’ parents speak a little Italian and I do too; but a little Italian, spoken with strong Tigrean and Irish accents, doesn’t really facilitate conversation and we soon gave up. However, mutual attempts to communicate always warm the atmosphere and now I don’t feel at all excluded from the family circle, though I’ve been writing non-stop while everyone else chatters away ninety to the dozen. Just occasionally someone looks at me and laughs kindly at my dumbness, or Marcos leans over to count the pages I’ve written, or his mother urges me to move closer to the fire.
It is almost thirteen months since I last stayed in a peasant’s hut. That was in Nepal, and now it is somehow reassuring to be in similar surroundings on another continent, following the old routine of writing by firelight with wood-smoke in my eyes and sleepy hens clucking beside me and a variety of footloose vermin swarming over my body.
Bug-wise, last night was hell. My insecticide powder proved unequal to the occasion and repeatedly I woke from a restless doze to scratch. These African devils seem even more vicious than their Asian cousins and my body is now covered with inflamed lumps.
I was on the trail by 6.30, without sleep or breakfast, but full of the joys of life – as who wouldn’t be, in cool, clear air, amidst a silent wilderness of mountains, with a companionable mule following to heel and twelve sunny hours ahead. All day our track went up and down and round and down and up and round again. On every side the mountains lay in long, smooth lines, and the midday heat haze gave a familiar look to their lower slopes, whose mixture of red clay and green scrub produced a heathery tinge. We passed one very beautiful teff-harvesting scene. This cereal has grain and straw of the palest gold and for miles the whole countryside was glowing against the strong blue of the sky or the faint powder-blue of distant mountains. After the straw has been threshed by bullocks the women winnow the grain by tossing it on huge wicker trays.
For two hours this morning we accompanied a donkey-caravan on its way to a market-village on a mountain-top. The five men and boys registered the usual unsmiling astonishment when they first saw us, but I soon realised that despite their silence and inscrutability they had ‘taken charge’ of me – obviously as a duty rather than as a pleasure. If I stopped to examine a shrub or try to identify a bird they also stopped and waited politely for me to continue – which was very nice of them, though I would have preferred being left to dawdle uninhibitedly at my own pace. However, I soon had reason to feel genuinely grateful. Jock had been clumsily loaded by Marcos and on one steep slope everything suddenly fell off. Without even glancing at me, two of my escort went into action and professionally reloaded in a matter of moments; but had I been alone I might have spent hours sitting by the wayside waiting for help.
Today also taught me that it is less tiring to drive a pack-animal with a caravan. Even the nicest mules have definite personal opinions and Jock feels that there is something undignified about a single animal walking over one and a half miles an hour when loose, or two and a half miles when being led; and this go-slow policy causes a certain amount of frustration as my average speed is three and a half miles an hour. However, when we are with trotting donkeys he imagines the honour of muledom to be at stake, so he canters into the lead and effortlessly averages four miles per hour. This morning he sometimes went so far ahead that I could only distinguish him by the bouncing green bucket.
At half-past eleven, after a steep climb, we reached the village of Enda Mikael Tukul – a long straggle of round huts and rectangular stone shacks. Most highland towns and villages are marked by tall groves of the quick-growing Australian eucalyptus (or blue-gum), which was imported into Ethiopia by Menelik II, on French advice; now this is by far the commonest tree in the north and at midday its shade is welcome, despite the altitude.
When I stopped to rest, on the outskirts of the village, my companions characteristically continued towards the market-place without any word or gesture of farewell. They had done their duty by me and were doubtless relieved to be rid of the responsibility of escorting an inexplicable female faranj.
Beneath the aromatic blue-gums I ate the remains of a Palace fruit-cake while Jock grazed on next-to-nothing with every appearance of satisfaction. Already we’re such good buddies that when I turn him loose he never moves far away, though in Makalle I was warned never to leave him untethered.
Beyond the village – where everyone stared curiously at us, showing neither hostility nor friendliness – our path plunged down a precipice – and here I acquired the knack of allowing Jock to help me on steep, rough, slithery slopes. Instead of sending him ahead I continued to lead him, hanging on to the halter with one hand and leaning on my dula with the other. If he were at all unreliable this could be a dangerous technique, but he seemed to understand exactly what was required of him.
Soon afterwards I heard an extraordinary zooming sound overhead and looked up to see an enormous eagle dive-bombing towards a little brown civet-cat – which heard the zoom too and swerved to safety under a rock. The disappointed eagle then resumed its slow gliding over the valley; once the first surprise attack has failed a bird of prey has no hope of capturing any nimble animal and within moments the civet-cat emerged from his air-raid shelter and strolled on casually through the boulders.
At two o’clock we approached a settlement set among junipers on a slope above a murky stream. Coarse green grass grew thickly on the near bank and when Jock had drunk his fill he settled down to some serious grazing while I topped up my water-bottle and added two more purifying pills. In theory one should only water a pack-animal at the end of the day’s trek: but it would indeed be rash to try to stop a thirsty mule from drinking when and where he gets the chance.
Thirty yards upstream cattle were standing in ankle-deep water beneath an ancient wild-fig tree. Near them half-a-dozen men sat watching their womenfolk washing clothes in the trickle of discoloured water and soon, to my surprise, these men came towards me, shouting friendly questions. Then the women abandoned their laundrying and came too, and everyone sat around on the grass laughing uproariously. The fact that I don’t understand Tigrinya seems always to be a source of incredulous amusement, but I discovered that in this case my relationship with Jock was the joke. On arriving at the stream I had given him a little well-earned stroking on the neck and murmured a few sweet nothings in his ear – and to the locals this looked as comic as the stroking of a motor-truck would look to us.
While discussing my eccentricities the men were eating atar – a type of green pea which thrives in dry soil and is planted after the rains. These peas are often dried and stored for use in wat – especially during the long fasts – and they are also ground to make savoury puddings and breads. Two men had gone to pick some for me in an adjacent field, where I had previously noticed the little green bushes – about eighteen inches high – on which the pods are almost invisible among dense, fern-like foliage. Each pod contains two to four seeds and I was stupidly surprised to see these familiar green peas. They taste like our variety, though their shape is less regular.
This encounter made me feel more at ease in the Tigrean countryside and I set off happily on the next lap, my friends expressing great astonishment at the docility with which Jock allowed himself to be caught.
Two hours later we came to a bigger settlement, scattered over a hillside. Here the jeep-track went due west, and a well-defined animal-track went north-west towards Abbi Addi and Adua. A consultation with my map merely revealed the map’s limitations, so I approached three harvesters, pointed to the animal-track and said ‘Abbi Addi?’ All three men stared at me blankly, and when I pointed to the jeep-track and repeated ‘Abbi Addi?’ their blankness remained total. I then decided that since Adua lay to the north, and the animal-track went north, and I wanted to get to Adua, we would now leave the jeep-track – though I was aware that in this sort of terrain logical decisions can have dire consequences.
The men impassively watched us turning off the main track: but we were also being observed from the settlement, and soon five breathless young men overtook us. Their leader, who was dressed in European fashion, at once grabbed Jock’s halter, said ‘Yellum! yellum!’ (‘No! no!’) and released an argumentative spate of Tigrinya, flecked with unenlightening Italian and English phrases. Again I pointed ahead and inquired ‘Abbi Addi? Adua?’ and he replied ‘Yes’ in English, rapidly followed by ‘No’ and an elaborate series of gestures which, despite my fluency in sign language, conveyed nothing to me – except extreme disapproval of our continuing along this track. I reckoned that his objection might conceivably have a sensible basis, and to ignore such emphatic local advice, when one couldn’t find out what lay behind it, seemed distinctly unwise. So I turned back.
Ayela proved to be the headman’s son and as he led Jock up the slope he asked ‘American? Italian?’ On hearing that I was ‘Irish – from Ireland’ he nodded cheerfully and carefully pronounced ‘American – you are American. Ethiopian – I am Ethiopian.’ As it happens I find it peculiarly irritating to be mistaken for an American; but it is hardly reasonable to expect Ethiopians to have heard of Ireland, so I let the matter go.
The headman’s round, stone, tin-roofed tukul is unusual, being both white-washed and two-storeyed, with an outside stairway of uneven rocks leading up to the granary, where I’m now writing by the light of a smoky oil-lamp, leaning on a shaky wooden table and sitting on a disintegrating iron chair. Downstairs is the all-purpose living room and there are three smaller huts in the compound – one a kitchen, the others the homes of married sons. The headman and his wife and sister-in-law are splendid old people – gracious and warm-hearted – and on meeting them I was glad that we had been forced to stop here. Faranjs are obviously a rarity in their lives but these elders have an air of dignified assurance, though the younger people (except for the Adua-educated Ayela) are timid enough. Highland society has always been organised on strictly hierarchical lines and each headman wields considerable power within his own little realm.
When I arrived my host ordered this table and chair (status symbols of the first magnitude) to be brought up to the granary, which is also the guest-room, and soon we were being served with cups of freshly-ground coffee and roasted whole barley – a palatable combination. Crowds of children came to stare and were periodically shooed away by Ayela – only to return to squat around the doorway a moment later, having been emboldened by my distribution of Palace toffees.
Then my host raised the question of where I was to sleep. In sign-language he said, ‘Downstairs, with the family,’ and in the same language I firmly replied, ‘No! Up here on the floor.’ (Undoubtedly bed-bugs are my Achilles’ heel.) But, as everyone was appalled at the idea of my sleeping alone, the headman announced that his sister-in-law would sleep here too, to ‘protect’ me. At once I foresaw her importing bug-laden hides into this possibly bug-free granary, so at the risk of seeming rude I again said ‘No!’ – and eventually my obstinacy was accepted as a strange faranj fetish. However, half-an-hour later I saw, to my horror, an iron bedstead and a hair mattress being carried across the mountainside from the priest’s compound. At the very sight of the mattress I felt itchy and frantically explained that I had my own bed to put on the floor: whereupon Ayela shouted through the doorway and the generous little procession went into reverse and disappeared.
I haven’t yet discovered why we were prevented from continuing and I’m not even speculating about whether or not it will be in order for us to go north-west tomorrow. The first essential for the enjoyment of this sort of trek is to take each day as it comes.
Mercifully my liquid insecticide proved effective last night and I slept soundly until an odd message was shouted through the door, in warped English, at 5 a.m. At first I thought I must be dreaming, it all sounded so improbable – something about two policemen having arrived to escort me to Abbi Addi on Leilt Aida’s instructions, because yesterday shifta had been observed in the intervening mountains. Crawling out of my flea-bag I opened the door and saw by moonlight two armed policemen smartly coming to attention – and they were accompanied by the Chief Clerk of the Governor of Abbi Addi.
The senior policeman was the linguist; he said urgently – ‘Hurry! Quick! Big hurry! Much quick!’ I had no idea why the hurry was big, but since these unfortunates had apparently been walking all night on my behalf I felt obliged to be much quick. So I hurled everything into those confounded sacks and when Jock had been loaded, in the odd, ‘stagey’ glow of mingled moonlight and dawnlight, we turned towards the north-west trail.
Our party was led by a tall, handsome police lieutenant, carrying his rifle at the ready and followed by me. Next came the Chief Clerk’s armed servant, leading Jock, then a group of five armed local men, on their way to an animal-market at Abbi Addi, then the portly Chief Clerk on his riding mule (which he had gallantly offered to me) and finally the junior policeman. The locals take shifta* very seriously and were delighted to have police protection this morning. It seems odd that most Asians, and apparently most highland Ethiopians, are so much more jittery than we are about dangers of this sort; if they lived in Europe they would probably refuse to drive trucks after dark lest they should be hijacked.
Our walk was extremely frustrating; had I been alone I could have spent a day on this stretch, but we kept going non-stop until 10.30 a.m.
For a few miles we were crossing recently harvested, level fields. Then came a gradual descent, followed by a steep climb up a forested ridge, with a gloriously deep valley on our right and beyond it an array of jagged, tumbled mountains. (A ‘forest’ in the highlands usually means an area covered not with tall, green, shady trees, but with thick, thorny bush and scrub and low acacia trees.)
At the top of this ridge we were on the edge of a thousand-foot drop, overlooking miles of volcanic chaos – harsh, magnificent, unreal – and all around were violent colours and unbelievable contours. From the base of the escarpment savagely broken land fell away for another thousand feet and in the distance Abbi Addi’s tin roofs glinted on the plain. Even the highlanders, born and bred amidst geological dramas, paused here for a moment and smiled wryly at me, making gestures to indicate that they considered this a bloody awful stretch of country.
I would have thought it impossible for any non-mountaineer to tackle such a precipice; yet down we plunged, Jock and the riding-mule leading the party, lest they should concuss us with dislodged rocks, and myself thinking how much more dangerous this was than any shifta attack. Deep grey or red dust concealed round stones and pebbles that moved beneath our feet at every step and never before has my sense of balance – or power of regaining balance – been so severely tested. The locals, who are accustomed to this route, leaped down like baboons; but the police were perceptibly apprehensive and the Chief Clerk was soon a nervous wreck. Thorny scrub reaches out over the path – which, understandably, is not much used – and I was too busy avoiding a lethal slip to avoid the thorns, so this evening my painfully sunburnt legs are badly torn. Yet these barbs give only surface scratches to the highlanders’ tough skins.
At the base we waited for the Chief Clerk and the junior policeman, who were holding hands like a pair of frightened children as they came slowly slithering down in a cloud of dust. A moment before the sun had reached the top of the escarpment, and I gazed up with joy at those grotesquely eroded pinnacles, now looking as though freshly drenched in burgundy.
During the next half-hour we were crossing an already-too-hot area of black lava-beds, interspersed with deep, powdery, white ash and bluish chunks of rock which made a tinkling cinder-sound beneath our feet. Then came a steep descent, through an unexpected tangle of lush greenery, into the shadowed, narrow ravine of a dry river bed. Here walking was made difficult by unsteady stones lying hidden beneath fine, pale dust; but occasionally I paused to look up at the serrated tops of gold and crimson cliffs that were rising gloriously against a deep blue sky.
We passed many pools of scummy water – the breeding sites of malarial mosquitos – and now it was the mules’ turn to feel frustrated. They paused often to sniff at these pools, but had too much sense ever to drink from them.
Within the past few hours we had descended from 8,000 to 6,000 feet and, as the ravine widened, I began to suffer from the strong rays of this equatorial sun; but soon we turned up a cul-de-sac side-valley and came to a grotto where sparkling spring water dripped from the rock into a deep pool. The object of this detour was to water the animals and give everyone an opportunity to wash all over.
Abbi Addi is the administrative centre of the Tembien district, yet it is misleading to refer to the place as a ‘town’. Walking through its laneways one has to negotiate small boulders and minor gorges, and all the houses are single-storey, roughly-constructed shacks. The headquarters of the district administration is an extraordinary building, made of iron-sheeting, even to the floors; and because many sheets are missing one has to jump over six-foot-deep holes, half filled with chunks of rock.
When we reached the Governor’s office a pleasant man of about forty, dressed in a dark lounge suit, respectfully received me. He was sitting behind a paperless desk on which stood an antique winding telephone, and he looked so pitifully perplexed by my presence that I wanted to pat him on the head and tell him not to worry – though this wouldn’t have done much good, as he spoke not a word of English. There is no post office here, but an Italian-initiated telephone link of uncertain temper is maintained with Adua and Makalle, so I pointed to the machine and said loudly and clearly, ‘Leilt Aida’.
It took an hour to get my call through and while I was waiting the policemen, who had been standing to attention in the background, were signed off duty and eagerly came towards me to request a written testimonial for presentation to their superior officer. The possibility of any Ethiopian ever being able to decipher my handwriting – even if he could read English – is incalculably remote, but here the collection of such chits has become an obsession, which again indicates a deep-rooted lack of trust. Subordinates feel it necessary always to prove that they have done their duty well, where in our society this would be taken for granted.
After a brief argument with Leilt Aida, on the subject of bodyguards, she relented and spoke reassuringly to the perplexed Governor – though it was obvious that even her permission did not quite reconcile him to the idea of a lone faranj wandering around his district.
I then went to a talla-beit to drink several pints in preparation for the next eight-mile stage to this settlement. Jock had already been unloaded and provided with straw; he looked disillusioned on being reloaded so soon – by a group of local experts – but resignedly followed me when I set off in the cruel midday heat.
At first the track was ankle-deep in stifling volcanic ash and, as it wound between heat-reflecting boulders, I streamed sweat; but here the air is so dry that clothes never get damp – though my hair, under a wide straw hat, quickly becomes saturated. After a few miles I saw a woman and her filthy toddler sitting under a wild fig-tree beside a fat earthenware jar of talla. Assuming this to be the highland version of a roadside pub I collapsed nearby – to the terror of the toddler – and downed a quart at one draught. It was a thickish, grey-green brew, full of husks and unidentifiable bits and scraps, but I only cared that it was wet and had been kept cool by green leaves stuffed into the narrow mouth of the jar. The gourds used as drinking vessels never encounter washing-water; they are merely rinsed with a little talla before one’s drink is poured. While I was imbibing my second quart two old men came along and stopped to look wistfully at the talla-jar – and then hopefully at me. I stood them a drink each, and that was the end of my solitude for today. They too were coming here, so they insisted on accompanying me, one leading Jock. (It is considered frightfully non-U for a faranj to walk instead of riding and the absolute bottom for a faranj personally to lead a pack-animal.) The only traffic we saw was a man on a cantering mule, escorted by two servants running alongside – one armed with a rifle. Highlanders rich enough to own riding-mules never travel unprotected and their servants are natural long-distance runners. No wonder Ethiopia’s representative has won two Olympic Marathons – he probably regarded the twenty-six mile race as a sort of pre-breakfast stroll.
The track was easy, running smoothly over a burnt-up golden-brown plain, with dusty-blue mountains in the middle distance and contorted red cliffs nearby. The highest of these cliffs was used for exterminating Italians during the war and one can still see a few bleached human bones lying at its base.
This settlement is on a hilltop from which superb mountains are visible in every direction and when we arrived, at half-past-four, it seemed that my appearance was the most shattering local event since the Italian invasion. A ten-year-old boy who goes to school at Abbi Addi was summoned as interpreter; his English is minimal, but he conveyed that soon the headman would come to welcome me. This encounter took place fifty yards from the edge of the settlement and pending the headman’s investigation I was not encouraged to approach any nearer. None of the many staring men who had surrounded me seemed at all well-disposed – which is understandable, when one remembers what this region suffered during the occupation and how impossible it is for these peasants to distinguish between Italians and other faranjs.
Indicating that Jock could safely be left, Yohannes, my young guide, led me to a nearby Italian military cemetery where scores of graves lie in neat rows – their headstones smashed or defaced – at the end of an avenue of mathematically-planted giant candelabra. In a country where neither building nor cultivation is planned or arranged, but everything appears merely to have ‘happened’, this little corner of forlorn orderliness was alien indeed – the epitome of the whole Italian-Ethiopian tragedy.
On our return we found Jock surrounded by Workhsegeh’s entire male population and the headman stepped forward to greet me ceremonially. He looked rather ill-at-ease in rumpled khaki slacks and a patched tweed jacket, so I deduced that he had been delayed by a compulsion to don these garments of state in my honour. It is sad that Western clothes have become status symbols – the highlanders look so dignified and right in even the most tattered shammas, which hang around them in swinging folds and gracefully emphasise their proud, erect bearing.
Yohannes explained that I was to stay in a hut in the chief’s sister’s compound; but another long delay followed because the hut was being cleaned out for my reception. There are some forty compounds here, each containing two or three tukuls and all securely fenced in by thorn bushes as a protection against hyenas and leopards. This hut is used only as a bedroom-cum-storeroom. A narrow mud platform runs around half the circumference and opposite is a mud ‘double-bed’, with a built-in ‘pillow bump’ at one end. The cow-hides and goat-skins must secrete bugs by the million so I have already sprayed fanatically, uncharitably wishing the livestock on the three children who will be my hut-mates. As I write, by the light of a tiny wick floating in oil, a clay vat of talla is fermenting audibly beside me.
The chief’s elderly sister is friendly though shy. When I entered the compound talla was immediately produced and each time I half-emptied my quart-measure gourd it was filled to the brim by Yohannes.
My supper consisted of two minute raw eggs, sucked from their shells, and a rusty tinful of fresh milk. Then I sat by the door watching the sunset colours and the first stars darting out in a still-blue sky. The men were all sitting on their haunches in the compound, talking and drinking talla, their shammas wrapped tightly around them against the evening air – which to me feels only pleasantly cool. The women were pounding peppers for wat in a hollow piece of tree-trunk, or cooking injara over a wood-fire in the main hut; probably none was offered to me because of a mistaken idea that it is unacceptable to faranjs.
My attempts to buy barley for Jock have failed and he is tethered to a gnarled, dry-leaved tree, mournfully chewing pale teff straw – which contains no nourishment whatever, though presumably it will take the edge off his hunger. This whole compound is rather miserable; a few thistles grow in corners and a little enclosed patch of cotton-bushes is the ‘garden’. But the people are very handsome, like most highlanders. Both men and women have the basic bone-structure that good looks become even more pronounced with old age and everyone shows the finest of teeth that seem never to decay. Few highlanders are conspicuously tall, though the young sub-chief here is well over six feet and devastatingly handsome. I suspect that he and several of his contemporaries have some Italian blood. This is not because of any difference in colouring (many of the highlanders are quite fair-skinned, owing to their part-Semitic ancestry), but because of a difference in physique. The spindly limbs of the highland men and the exaggerated buttocks of the women clearly distinguish them from any European race.
Ten minutes ago ferocious fighting broke out nearby. The roars and screams of pain and rage were rather alarming, but Yohannes calmly explained that it was only a quarrel about cattle-stealing between neighbours armed with mule-whips. Now all is silent again, and as the boys have just come in to sleep I’ll do likewise – I hope!
This has been an irritating New Year’s Day. When I was ready to start at 6.30 a.m. disaster befell me, for Yohannes was unequal to explaining (or the chief was unwilling to believe) that Leilt Aida had said I might travel alone. Therefore an escort of two was inflicted upon me and as these youths were anxious to get home this evening we arrived here at 2 p.m., having covered sixteen miles of rough terrain in six hours.
Our departure was delayed by the chief’s insistence on giving my escort a chit, to be delivered to the police on our arrival here; then the boys would be given a receipt from the police for the chief, confirming my safe delivery, and another chit from me informing all whom it might concern that they had done their duty in proper fashion. Such a preoccupation with the written word seems odd in a country where at least 99 per cent of the rural population is illiterate; but possibly it is because of this illiteracy that chits are considered so immensely significant. The sub-chief was the only person in Workhsegeh who could write and, when I had provided paper and pen, all the elders held a long and inexplicably acrimonious discussion about what was to be inscribed. Then the young man began his anguished struggle to form the Tigrinya characters. Merely to watch this effort made me feel mentally exhausted – and when we arrived here the whole performance was repeated, with variations.
Before we left I shocked everyone profoundly by trying to pay for my lodgings; looking at me with scorn Yohannes said – ‘Here we don’t like money.’
At 10.30 we stopped briefly for the boys to eat hunks of dark brown, bone dry dabo, which they wished to share with me. I can’t imagine how they swallow it without water: and they never seemed to get thirsty, despite the heat.
All day we climbed steeply up and down countless arid grey-brown hills, dotted with thorny scrub. An amount of white marble was mixed with the rock and clay – great chunks of it glistened in the sun and sometimes marble chips lay in such profusion that the slopes looked like urban cemeteries. No settlements were visible, though we passed several herds of cattle and flocks of goats – tended, as usual, by small, naked, circumcised boys. In the heat of the day these children wear their folded shammas as thick pads on top of their shaven heads.
Our toughest climb was during the hottest noon hour – up a precipitous mountain of bare rock on a rough, dusty path. Yet in these highlands a strong, cool breeze often relieves even the midday heat. This climb ended on a high pass, where I paused to drink deeply from my water-bottle while gazing across the hills that we had traversed since morning. Already the weirdly shaped ridges around Workhsegeh were blurred by haze and distance.
My impatient bodyguard had hurried on with Jock and, as I trotted downhill after them, I reflected that the machine-age has dangerously deprived Western man of whole areas of experience that until recently were common to the entire human race. Too many of us are now cut off from the basic sensual gratifications of resting after violent exercise, finding relief from extremes of heat or cold, eating when ravenously hungry and drinking when the ache of thirst makes water seem the most precious of God’s creations.
My map proclaims that Mai Cheneta is another town and I’m beginning to get the idea: any village with a police post and a primary school is a ‘town’.
My arrival here almost caused a riot. Hundreds of people raced to stare at me, the children trampling on each other in an effort to see the faranj clearly. Then a Muslim tailor invited me into his tiny workshop, ordered tea and sent his son to summon an English-speaking teacher. As I gulped the black syrupy tea three men had to stand by the door, beating back the populace with their dulas: in my experience this was an unique scene.
Soon the teacher arrived – a quiet, kind young man named Haile Mariam, who at once offered me his room for the night. I’m now installed in it, being attacked by apparently spray-proof bugs, while small rats scuttle round my feet. The Italians are responsible for most of Mai Cheneta’s solid buildings, of which this is one – high-ceilinged, about fifteen foot square, with a tin roof, an earth floor inches deep in dust, once whitewashed stone walls and a small, unglazed window. When I arrived the only piece of furniture was an iron bedstead with a hair mattress. (All the teacher’s possessions hang on the walls.) Then a battered table and chair were imported from the police station, so that I might write in comfort, and a few moments ago Haile Mariam came in with a big, bright oil-lamp.
When Jock had been looked after the three teachers urged me to visit their school-house on the summit of a hill overlooking the town. This house was built as the Italian CO’s residence and is now a semi-ruin. All the windows and doors have been removed, part of the tin roof has collapsed and hundreds of pigeons roost in the rafters and cover the floor with their droppings. There are four fine rooms, completely unfurnished save for small hanging blackboards and rows of stones brought in from the hillside as seats for the pupils. Two years ago, when the school opened, there were thirty on the roll; now there are ninety, despite much opposition from local parents and clergy. As is usual in such communities many parents are anti-school, preferring their children to herd flocks rather than to study; and the highland clergy resent the recent intrusion of the state on a domain that hitherto has been exclusively theirs.
Looking at a diagram of the planetary system on one of the blackboards I wondered how the parents of these children would react if their youngsters had the temerity to discuss astronomy when they went home from school. The highlanders still think that the earth is flat: some imagine it to be square, some see it as a disc and others believe it to be limitless. For them day and night are caused by the rotation of the sun above the earth, and the moon is responsible for the crops’ progress after the sun has brought the seedlings above ground. Theoretically it is desirable that such ignorance should be dispelled; but will these children be any better off, as they till their fields throughout the years ahead, for having had their conception of the cosmos thoroughly disorganised?
On returning here I found the Chief of Police, the headman and a character described as ‘the Sheriff’ sitting in a row on the bed debating how best to deal with the problem of me. A group of privileged children – presumably the offspring of the officials – had been permitted into the room and were squatting motionless along the walls, gazing at me as though hypnotised, while various other locally important personages stood around joining in the argument.
Had I been willing to ‘do in Rome …’ I would have accepted an escort for tomorrow’s trek; but escorts are so ruinous to my enjoyment that I remained obstinate – and eventually won the battle. I was then asked to write out and sign a statement (in triplicate: one copy for each official) declaring that I had been warned of the dangers and offered an escort, but had insisted on continuing alone. Obviously if I believed in these dangers I wouldn’t be such a fool; but the risk of being shot at by shifta while walking through Ethiopia is probably no greater than the risk of being strangled by a maniac while hitch-hiking through Britain.
In the course of our argument Haile Mariam had said reproachfully, ‘It is not part of our culture to travel alone’; and I suspect that the unconventionality of my trek upsets these people as much as the possibility of a faranj being murdered and local officials getting the blame. They cannot understand why anyone should want to travel alone – and not understanding they disapprove.
While our dispute was in progress a touching number of gifts were being brought to me by the locals – dozens of eggs, gourds of curds, flat slabs of different kinds of dabo and four chickens, all squawking frantically in premonition of the pot. (The teachers will benefit greatly from my visit.) Meanwhile the headman’s wife was pouring us tea from a kettle and handing round an earthen bowl of damp, roasted flour, rather like the Tibetans’ tsampa: we all dipped in for our handfuls and then kneaded them into little balls. The curds, too, were delicious; they tasted strongly of wood-smoke, as do some types of talla. One of the chickens became durro-wat for my supper, which I shared with the teachers.
Like many semi-educated young highlanders, these teachers despise their own Church. Haile Mariam ridiculed the Ethiopian fasting laws and said that the people endure them only because of a superstitious fear of the priests. Perhaps there is an element of truth in this, yet fasting is so emphasised by Ethiopian Christianity that to the average highlander ‘keeping the fast’ and ‘being a Christian’ are synonymous. These fasts have long been known to weaken the highlanders. Both Muslims and Gallas repeatedly attacked the highlands during Lent, but throughout the centuries the Church has been increasing the strictness of the laws, until now the average highlander is expected to fast on 165 days each year and the clergy and elders on about 250 days.*
Donald Levine states that ‘the rationale commonly given for the extensive schedule of fasting is that man’s nature is wicked and only by weakening himself in this manner will he be turned away from some act of aggression against others’. This reason for the imposition of such irrational laws is interesting. It hints that from the outset Ethiopian Christianity found itself incapable of effectively spreading Christ’s teachings among a people temperamentally opposed to any gospel of gentleness: so a desperate remedy was adopted and the highlanders’ harsh aggressiveness countered by an equally harsh code of mortification – which in time came to assume a disproportionate importance at the expense of most other aspects of Christian teaching. Yet even in the curbing of aggression the Ethiopian Church has not been very successful. It is still regarded as an honourable act to kill anyone who has given even the mildest provocation, and the lines of a popular Amharic poem say:
‘Kill a man! Kill a man! It is good to kill a man!
One who has not killed a man moves around sleepily.’
Haile Mariam and his two comrades are natives of Aksum, the religious capital of Ethiopia, and all three accused the priests of living in luxury off the peasants – and of being far too numerous anyway. Whatever about the former hackneyed accusation, the latter is evidently true; in Asmara I was told that Ethiopia has an estimated 70,000 Coptic clergy – and fewer than seventy doctors.
Which reminds me – this morning we met a comparatively well-dressed man, carrying a rifle, who produced a phial of penicillin and asked me in sign language to inject him. I tried to explain that even if I had a syringe I certainly wouldn’t inject anyone without knowing his medical history; but sign language is not really up to this sort of explanation and my would-be patient went on his way looking aggrieved. The Amharic word for ‘needle’ – and therefore for ‘injection’ – is ‘murfee’: so my name always causes great amusement.
Trachoma and other eye-diseases are tragically common here; also a number of men are blind in one eye – possibly as a result of injuries received while fighting.
I set off at 7.30 a.m. and arrived here ten hours later, having ambled along happily for eighteen miles, seeing only five adults and a few young shepherds.
All day the track climbed gradually between ridge after ridge of low hills. For miles a narrow river ran beside it, the water moving clear and green among gigantic, rounded boulders – many of them looking remarkably like Henry Moore’s reclining figures – and twice the temptation of deep, wide pools proved irresistable. Saying ‘Hang bilharzia!’ I turned Jock loose and jumped in, clutching a bar of soap.
At 11 we stopped for brunch beneath a grove of tall, wide-spreading trees, and here I saw my first African monkeys – a troop of capuchins racing and swinging through the branches above me. Also – walking with bird-book in hand – I identified today the Lilac-breasted Roller, Bataleur, Namaqua Dove, Purple Grenadier, Red-cheeked Cordon Bleu and Black-billed Wood Hoopoe. These birds were marvellously tame; as Jock and I plodded quietly through thick dust we were often within a yard of them before they moved – and even then many only hopped or flew a few feet further away.
During the afternoon we passed a herd of over a hundred camels, all purposefully chewing the highest branches of small thorny trees and big thorny shrubs. One was pure white – a rare and beautiful animal. Probably this herd recently brought salt from the Danakil Desert and is now being rested in preparation for the journey home. Camels don’t survive long in the highlands, as the British Army soon discovered when it invaded Ethiopia from the Sudan in January 1941. Out of 15,000 camels fifty reached Addis Ababa in May and an officer reported that ‘a compass was not needed; one could orient the column by the stink of dead camels’. Various reasons have been suggested for the camel’s allergy to the highlands – thin air, precipitous paths, the cold and wet of the rainy season, the lush grass of some areas and the fact that camels have never learned to avoid certain unfamiliar herbs which lethally inflame their stomachs. In the past this allergy has saved the highlands from sharing Egypt’s fate and being repeatedly invaded by neighbouring camel-nomads.
This has been a day of deep contentment – wandering alone along a makeena-free track, seeing only hoof prints in the dust, with all around the healing quiet of wild places, unbroken save by birdsong. The loveliest time is from 4.30 p.m. on, when the light softens and colours glow. This afternoon, brown, red and yellow cliffs, flecked with white marble, were rising above dark green scrub, and on every side the outlines of high mountains became clearer as the heat-haze thinned.
At 5.30 we came to the crest of a hill and there, half-a-mile away, was Adua – a white-washed town at the foot of a splendidly distorted mountain-range, with lines of slim green trees between its houses. On the outskirts we were captured by the inevitable English-speaking schoolboys, who led us to this brothel, thinly disguised as a hotel. Bedrooms lead off the central courtyard on two sides, on the third are the cooking-quarters and stables, and on the fourth is an Italian-type bar, from which frightful wireless noises emanate continuously. Groups of girls lounge around the courtyard giggling and smoking – in this country cigarettes are the prostitute’s hallmark – and, though no one is overtly hostile, the faranj is aware of being regarded with contemptuous amusement. There could be no stronger contrast to my reception at Mai Cheneta.
When we arrived a rather tiresome young teacher was in the courtyard, bargaining with one of the girls – whom he temporarily abandoned to practise his English on me. I asked him to help me buy barley for Jock, but he seemed to think that this would entail too much delay so making an evasive reply he returned to his girl. Luckily the schoolboys proved more cooperative and while I was unloading Jock – watched by grinning servants who made no attempt to assist me – they fetched the grain in my bucket. Their profits must have been considerable, judging by the meagre change they returned out of a five dollar note: yet they demanded a fifty per cent tip each. By now Adua has become semi-Westernised, being on the Asmara–Gondar motor-road.
While I was unpacking another teacher appeared and, explaining that I wished to make a telephone call, I asked him to direct me to the post office. For some quaint reason Adua’s telephone lives in a chemist’s shop, to which this young man kindly guided me through steep, pitch-dark laneways. Before discovering that I had governmental connections my companion was rabidly revolutionary in his political views and he got an obvious shock on hearing me ask for the Palace at Makalle. While we were waiting for the call to come through he tried awkwardly to retrieve the situation, then finally decided to be frank and begged me not to repeat anything that he had said lest he should lose his job.
Most English-speakers soon ask me why my government ordered me to come to Ethiopia and how much money was granted for my expenses; and they are bewildered when I say that my government doesn’t even know I’m here and wouldn’t dream of paying my expenses. The average highlander cannot imagine a country in which people are free to go where they choose when they choose, without governmental permission – not can he imagine any ordinary individual being rich enough to travel abroad.
This little room has freshly whitewashed walls and the cotton sheets are spotless; yet appearances can be deceptive and the bugs are busy as I write. An electricity supply functions from 6 to 10.30 p.m., but there are no switches in the rooms and the bulbs give the dimmest possible light. However, one worthwhile local amenity is the crude and stinking loo next door; throughout the countryside the loo-problem is acute in every settlement – to my mystification, discomfort and embarrassment. (Here sign-language can always be used effectively in emergencies, but its use leads to a certain loss of dignity.) Squatting just anywhere is not customary, yet I never can find an authorised squatting-spot and sometimes wish that I were back in Nepal, where one simply goes outside the door like a dog.
There was a Jock crisis when we arrived here at 4 p.m. While unloading I noticed that the base of his tail has been rubbed raw – so I hurried off to seek some sort of veterinary aid. Predictably, none was available; and in a country where pack-animals are worked mercilessly, even when covered with suppurating saddle-sores, no one could be expected to take much notice of my little crisis. Therefore I’m now treating the patient with Yardley’s talcum powder – presented to me in Asmara for my feet – and the pale pink tin, embellished by graceful floral designs, is an object of much admiration in the hotel yard. Despite the incongruity of the treatment it should work within a few days, the sore being so small and new.
My companion’s physical state was not today’s only mule-trouble. The road from Adua to Aksum teems with traffic (relatively speaking – one vehicle passes about every twenty minutes) and those twelve miles shredded poor Jock’s nerves. While controlling his plunging and rearing I twice thought that my right arm had been dislocated, and tonight my shoulder muscles are throbbing. Yet Jock is not to blame; for some reason Ethiopian lorries are singularly noisy, especially when tackling steep slopes, and Ethiopian buses harbour fiendish radios and blow ear-splitting horns non-stop – so how could any rural mule retain his self-control?
This morning I rose at 5.30, to see Adua’s two most interesting churches. Ethiopian churches are locked after the daily Mass has been celebrated, and I prefer to avoid searching for a man who will search for a priest who will search for the key – and only find it if he has hopes of being well paid.
When we left the hotel at 8 a.m. hundreds of children were on their way to school – Adua being a centre for secondary education – and one gang of about twenty boys was soon following us, shouting and laughing and teasing Jock in an attempt to make him bolt. Jock very properly ignored all this, and at first I merely waved at the youngsters and laughed back; but then out of the corner of an eye I saw one boy whipping my straw hat off the top of the load and another putting his hand into the hanging bucket, where I keep my camera, torch and map. I swung round and gave the nearest lad a blow across the shoulders with my dula, whereupon they all fled.
After some five miles we climbed a steep – but not high – pass and at the top I sat on a flat boulder under a tree to eat brunch while enjoying Adua’s grotesque mountains and thinking about Adua’s significant battle – the first defeat of a European army by African warriors. Then we crossed a wide plain, where barley was ripe – though hardly more than a foot high, and dirty with five-foot thistles. (Most of the thistles I’ve seen so far are much smaller and have blue-green stems and large primrose-yellow flowers.) I had many fellow-walkers today, all of them curious and most of them friendly. About half-way I was joined by two men, one of whom insisted on leading Jock – until a truck approached and Jock decided otherwise. After that I led Jock.
Aksum is one of Ethiopia’s main tourist attractions and outside the town I was commandeered by two small boys, who proved to be professional parasites. Both mistook me for a man and offered to get me ‘a good bad woman for tonight’, as they so graphically expressed it. They were taken aback when I put them right, but unlike their Indian counterparts did not then offer to provide me with ‘a good bad man’.
This hotel is shoddier than last night’s Ritz, but the staff are much more agreeable. Here I must get my kit sorted out; tomorrow I’ll look for cardboard boxes in which everything can be neatly packed. To load a mule securely the ropes have to be tightened to an extent that has left me with a mangled mess of ink on clothes, toothpaste on books, insecticide in dried fruit, pills mixed with broken glass, torch batteries crushed beyond redemption and films torn to shreds. Not to mention the fact that everything is permeated through and through with white dust, sacking being the least dust-resistant of materials.
Yardley’s talcum is working well, but I’ve decided to stay here an extra day to give the sore time to heal completely.
I spent an exhausting morning at Police Headquarters, having been ‘picked up’ after breakfast by a suspicious constable. It was bedlam in the CO’s little office, where eight officers were simultaneously shouting – in Tigrinya – about the impossibility of anyone walking through the Semien Mountains, least of all a solitary woman. After two hours I lost my temper at the stupidity of assuming a journey to be ‘impossible’ merely because one wouldn’t care to do it oneself. I hated bothering Leilt Aida again, but at last was forced to call Makalle and ask her to soothe the maddened crowd – which she did, with difficulty.
Aksum’s tourist trade is in its infancy, yet already the place reeks of commercialism. Everywhere one is furtively followed by little boys and shabby youths, each claiming out of the corner of his mouth to be ‘best guide, cheapest guide for Aksum’. Ras Mangasha recently ordered the suppression of this sort of thing – which makes it easier to shake off these touts, who greatly fear the police.
This evening I had a talk with Birhana Meskel, the official tourist guide – an elderly, knowledgeable man who deplored Aksum’s changing atmosphere. He assured me that ten years ago every woman here wore ankle-length skirts, but now many harlots have moved in from Adua and Asmara, wearing calf-length skirts, and generally the ancient city is fast losing its atmosphere of devotion and learning. I listened sympathetically to all this, though I couldn’t help thinking that Aksum’s devotion and learning must have become mummified quite some time ago: otherwise they would hardly have crumbled to dust at the first touch of tourism.
Now I must talcum Jock for the night. Since early this morning he has been enjoying the hospitality of a kind Peace Corps couple, who teach at the secondary school and live in a house surrounded by a large grassy garden.
Aksum is the first town on my route without a mosque; the resident Muslims wanted to build one, but the Old Testament-minded local priests said ‘We’re not allowed to have a church in Mecca, so you’re not having a mosque here’.
The population of Aksum is about 20,000 (500 of whom are clergy), though the town is so compact that this figure seems hard to credit. All these highland towns are extraordinarily ugly, but Aksum does have a certain sad, hidden splendour, discernible when one is alone among the ruins of an empire that once was ranked with Babylon, Rome and Egypt. Yet the melancholy is great wherever a proud past is not allowed to rest in peace, but is disturbed and degraded by trippers and touts.
No women are permitted to enter even the grounds of the monastic Church of St Mary of Zion – Ethiopia’s most hallowed church – but this morning I went to the Church of St Taklahaymanot, where many of the paintings have recently been renovated. Ethiopian church art is interesting, yet to me these naive, stylised paintings are not true art, if by art one means the disciplined product of a creative imagination. The delicacy of Moghul miniatures or the richness of Hindu carvings touch me, whereas these paintings, though inspired by our common Christianity, merely interest me. It has been suggested that here, as in Tibet, the development of pictorial art was inhibited by the rigid conservatism of clerical practitioners – but the best of the Ethiopian murals that I have seen so far cannot compare with a mediocre Tibetan thanka.
By now the talcum has been completely victorious and Jock is full of grass and the joys of life, so tomorrow we head for the Semiens. Ever since I arrived in Aksum they have been beckoning – a vast barrier of blue chunks stretching across the southern horizon.
* Dr Levine clearly defines the position of shifta in highland society. He writes, ‘The one area in which communal sentiments have seemed fairly strong among the Amharas has been in connection with the pursuit of outlaws. It is customary – in some Amhara districts, at least – for the local inhabitants to band together in informal posses when threatened by the presence of one or more shifta, or “outlaw”. Yet even here, in his attitude towards the shifta, the Amhara reveals an ambivalence regarding the maintenance of civil order and security.
‘The term shifta had, in former times, primarily a political connotation. It referred to someone who rebelled against his feudal superior and was applied only to persons of relatively high status. More recently the term has been vulgarised and broadened to include any sort of outlaw in the rural areas. In any case the shifta is a man apart, who makes his home in uninhabited mountainous country or lowlands and lives by stealing cattle and robbing travellers. Some Amhara become shifta because of a passion for this way of life; this is particularly true of soldiers who, after a long campaign, prefer the continuation of a predatory and free existence to a return to the hard work of the fields. Others do so involuntarily, in order to escape punishment after committing some violence in the course of a personal dispute.
‘The attitudes of civilian Amhara towards the shifta combine fear and dislike with a strong tendency towards idealisation. The shifta is feared because he is a killer; if a person happens to witness him performing some act of theft or murder, he will usually keep quiet about it for fear of reprisal. He is disliked because he lives parasitically off the productive activities of others. But the shifta is widely admired, on the other hand, because he possesses a number of qualities that are dear to the Amhara. He is reputed to be an expert singer … He is credited with unusually handsome features because … he has plenty to eat and no arduous work. … Above all he is guabaz – the great Amhara virtue that embodies bravery, fierceness, hardihood and general male competence. …
‘The Amhara’s admiration for the shifta is reminiscent of American attitude towards the outlaw in “western” films … [but] is not balanced by a corresponding idealisation of the sheriff-figure as the representative of civil order … There is no feeling … that the shifta must be captured simply because he is an outlaw. Instead … [he] is acknowledged as a legitimate social type and is tolerated at a distance so long as his killing does not become wanton or excessive. This approach … bespeaks a relatively weak commitment to the value of civil order.’ Wax and Gold by Donald N. Levine, The University of Chicago Press (Copyright 1965 The University of Chicago).
It is interesting that in Eritrea the word shifta has now regained a political connotation. Of course the men concerned repudiate the term and call themselves the Eritrean Liberation Army; but the government speaks of shifta, hoping that the ‘fear and dislike’ provoked by the traditional outlaws will also be aroused by the new political bandits – though the peasants are more likely to ‘idealise’ them as shifta than as foreign-supported political agitators.
* A highlander’s fast means nothing to eat or drink until midday – though he may have been working hard from sunrise – and even after midday milk, eggs, meat, animal-fat and fowl are forbidden, so he must survive on pulses and cereals. Children begin their first fast at about the age of seven, by abstaining before noon during the sixteen days of Felsata. After this the regular Wednesday and Friday fasts should be kept, though often this rule is not enforced until a child is ten or eleven; but from the age of fifteen the gruelling eight-week Lenten fast must be endured.