OUR DEPARTURE FROM Gondar was delayed by Jock’s new saddle. Slowly I sorted out the tangle of straps, buckles and chains and got it securely in place, but the loading defeated me. My struggle was being watched by a score of men, and eventually I sent one of them to fetch help from Police Headquarters. An hour later an elderly sergeant came sauntering down the road. Once upon a time the Italians had taught him how to load their mules – but his technique had gone rusty, so another hour passed before we were on our way. However, this last hour was well spent, because now I, too, have learned the technique.
Beyond Gondar our track ran for eight miles between gentle hills on which royal ruins could occasionally be glimpsed amidst blue-gums. Then we rejoined the motor-road, passed an ugly village and came to a junction beside Gondar’s airstrip. There was no signpost, but according to my map the secondary road led to Gorgora.
Now, for the first time since leaving Massawah, I was walking through an undramatic landscape that might have been in Europe. To the west lay homely wooded ridges: to the east and north low hills and a heat haze concealed the mighty mountains: and to the south our road ran level between fields of atar, teff, barley, wheat, millet and maize. Small settlements were numerous and hundreds of thin cattle grazed in the charge of shepherd-boys who wore blue cotton shorts – for we are still in a ‘civilised’ area. There were no horses or mules, since for them the Lake Tana region is notoriously unhealthy, but I saw two tall, strong Sudanese donkeys grazing with the cattle. To improve the local breed of diminutive donkeys and mules, highlanders sometimes buy sires from Sennar and these are used only as stud-animals. They cost five or six times as much as the best native donkeys, so their owners charge high stud fees, which may be paid in cash or grain.
Many of the men we met were carrying rifles, and several expressed strong disapproval of a faranj travelling alone around Lake Tana. Towards sunset we were joined by a skinny young man who was driving a donkey loaded with atar. The faranj with the buccolo fascinated him, so he invited me to his settlement for talla – and soon found that he had a guest for the night. He and his family seemed delighted, though astonished, when I settled down in their compound; and now – despite the proximity of Gondar’s foreign colony – I am surrounded by dozens of interested men, women and children.
This fertile region should be prosperous, yet nowhere else have I seen such poverty and disease. Most of the children are pot-bellied, covered with infected scabies and suffering from either conjunctivitis or trachoma, and many of the adults are coughing tubercularly or trembling malariously. Six people have shown me festering wounds because everyone imagines that faranjs carry unlimited medical supplies.
When I unpacked my insecticide spray one mother begged me to use it on her half-blind daughter, and unhappily she refused to believe that it was not a medicine. While my back was turned she sprayed the infected eyes and the child’s screams of agony might have been heard in Khartoum.
No doubt much of this ill-health is caused by the comparatively low altitude and the nearness of Lake Tana. Today, for the first time since leaving Tembien, I found the noon sun a little too hot; but at least one can sleep out here, so now I’m going to spread my flea-bag on silky teff straw beneath the stars. I notice that some of the family also intend to sleep out, rolled in their shammas.
When I woke this morning I lay still for a moment, feeling absurdly surprised to think that by evening I should be on the shores of Lake Tana. At school geography bored me numb, but I had a list of places I longed to go to because of their names – and Lake Tana followed on Roncesvalles and the Kara Korum.
An hour after leaving the settlement we turned off the motor-road on to an animal track that went due south through ploughland, and fields of ripe grain, and mile after mile of long, yellow, tough grass. Sometimes patches of scarlet peppers lay like bloodstains among the usual crops, and I saw a few new birds and a variety of unfamiliar trees. Often the track multiplied confusingly or disappeared completely, but Lake Tana covers an area of 2,000 square miles, so it seemed unlikely that we would miss it. Then, at 4.15, came the first distant shimmer of a sheet of blue, wide as the sea – and an hour later Jock was drinking from the lake.
Here we were alone, and an immense peace enfolded this placid expanse of water – now colourless beneath a pale evening sky. Broad pastures and stubblefields sloped quietly down to the flat, marshy shore, a holy, wooded islet rose nearby from the calmness, and away to the hazy east there were faint, high shadows – the mere ghosts of mountains. All the beauty of this place was subtle and tranquil. Nothing could have been further from my childhood vision of a remote, sullen lake, hidden at the heart of Abyssinia amidst darkly tangled jungle.
My bilharzia-minded guidebook says ‘Caution: Lake Tana is not safe for swimming. The visitor should only admire – not swim, wade, drink or fall in.’ But it was plain that on our way to Bahar Dar this visitor would at least have to wade, sooner or later, so as Jock greedily cropped the moist grass I stripped and paddled through warm ooze and then was swimming joyously in deep, tepid water. A flock of startled Egyptian geese flew honking from a reed-bed and I floated to watch their pattern of loveliness against the sky. Further out I glimpsed Gorgora in its cove, and beyond stretched rough, forested cliffs – but the west shore remained invisible. Turning back I saw two men driving a donkey in the distance; luckily they were not coming in our direction, so there were no witnesses to a rather aged Venus rising from the lake.
Walking along the shore I counted six extravagantly-coloured varieties of water-birds, but my book only listed one of them – the Goliath Heron, which is nearly five feet tall. A couple of High-Crested Cranes were so engrossed in an intricate mating-dance that I might have captured them had I tried. Less pleasing were the clouds of mosquitoes and other tiresome flies that rose from the sour-smelling marsh as we squelched through.
On the outskirts of Gorgora schoolboys rushed to greet the faranj and led us to this doss-house. It is owned by a handsome, friendly young couple and behind the bar, across a narrow yard, are the bedrooms – converted Italianbuilt stables. I’m now sitting in the earth-floored bar, writing on a rough table by the light of a petrol-lamp. As the owners pride themselves on being urbanised only bottled beer is sold here, so I sent out for a kettle of talla. A brand-new transistor radio stands screaming on the counter and every few minutes my host self-consciously twiddles the knobs, glancing sideways at me to make sure that his mechanical skill is being observed. Five minutes ago his wife came from the kitchen and sat in a corner to chat with the customers while feeding her baby out of a filthy plastic bottle. She is a plump, vibrantly healthy young woman who could probably nurse triplets with ease, but recently feeding-bottles – introduced by Arab traders – have become status symbols. These are rarely washed, much less sterilised, so their use is a form of infanticide and WHO workers are trying to persuade Gondar merchants not to sell them.
My plans are causing some consternation here. Two English-speaking teachers have been helping me to empty the talla kettle and they insist that it is impossible to reach the west shore unless one follows the track from Gondar to Delghie. In this country, as in India, people frequently inflate difficulties into impossibilities.
Yesterday I discovered that the shores of Lake Tana are not as tranquil as they seem, and last night conditions were against diary-writing.
This country often gives one an Orlando-like illusion of living through different centuries and within an hour of leaving Gorgora the ‘motor-road world’ seemed a thousand years away. North of the town I found a path that took us west over steep hills, where a few fields lay between acres of high, aromatic shrubs and the compounds were guarded by curs whose owners made no attempt to restrain them for our benefit. Then all cultivation was left behind, the path vanished, and I began to feel slightly like an Intrepid Traveller as we forced our way through a dark, dense forest where thorny scrub pulled persistently at my shirt and tore long scratches on my bare limbs. Jock, too, was in trouble, for powerful, pliable branches repeatedly gripped his protruding-on-each-side load and I had to free him several times. Once he became firmly wedged between two trees and a sack had to be removed. Without our new pack-saddle Lake Tana’s north shore certainly would have been ‘impossible’.
Until noon we were going steeply up or down hill, making no progress in the required direction. This was not unlike the ‘tangled jungle’ of my childhood dreams and I soon decided that dream jungles are preferable to the real thing. When at last we escaped on to sunny grasslands every attempt to go west was thwarted by deep, narrow gullies. So I went towards the lake, hoping to find a way along the water’s edge, but treacherous swamps soon forced us north again – at a lucky spot, for ten minutes later a faint, westward path appeared. Eagerly I followed it across level grassland between towering wild fig-trees, and it led to a surprising pocket of cultivated land where a family was harvesting teff. Their compound must have been far away, because a woman was cooking injara beneath a straw shelter while her menfolk urged a yoke of oxen round the threshing circle. Everyone stopped work when we appeared and gathered about us in astonishment – which soon changed to friendly concern when they saw my deep scratches, now marked by lines of flies. Several talla-jars lay under a tree and I was given as much as I could drink and fed with roasted atar while the woman tried to persuade me to return to Gorgora and the men argued amongst themselves about the route to Dengel.
Finally they indicated that we must go north for some distance before turning west, so we followed a shallow valley, making our own path through high, tawny grass and flowering shrubs, with gold-tinted, wooded ridges on either side. Here the hot silence was broken only by an incessant, plaintive bird-call, and the only movement was an occasional flash of jewelled feathers amidst the bushes. Some strange, soothing melancholy hung over this bright valley: it seemed a secret, special place, lost between mountains and lake.
An hour later we met a vague east–west track which climbed to a narrow plateau, dotted with thorny scrub, and then expired. Now the lake was hidden by a long, forested ridge and, having investigated the impossible west side of the plateau, I realised that we must turn south again and descend into the ravine between plateau and ridge. Eventually I found a path that plunged through a gloom of gnarled trees and led us – after more load-trouble – on to the floor of the ravine. Here steep, wooded cliffs created a premature twilight and giant grey rocks thrust jaggedly through the jungle grass and sometimes ancient trees writhed beside the path. But soon we were again in sunlight, and I saw that the level land to the west was patchily cultivated.
Ten minutes later seven or eight tukuls appeared to the left of the path, in one big compound at the base of a cliff, and as we walked towards them I began to think hopefully about talla. Then a group of men, who had been watching our approach, came to the edge of the compound and invited me to stop for a drink. They were led by a priest – a small, slender man of perhaps thirty-five, with remarkably regular Semitic features, an effeminate voice, intelligent eyes and the cruellest mouth I have ever seen. This face so unnerved me that I declined the insistently repeated invitations and quickened my pace past the compound, hardly knowing whether to try to look friendly or formidable. For a few moments I could hear voices raised in excited argument behind us; then we rounded an outcrop of rock and were beyond sight and sound of the tukuls.
Topographical worries occupied the next twenty minutes. Lake Tana was again stretching ahead, beyond a sweep of jungle grass and a grove of wild fig-trees, and it seemed that one could easily walk round by the shore to the north side of a high ridge that rose from the plain half-a-mile away on our right. But when we got to the water’s edge I discovered two barriers – a muddy inlet, thick with reeds, and a narrow channel that made what had appeared to be a walkable part of the shore into a low, rocky islet.
It was now four o’clock and I felt tired, hungry and rather inclined to agree that the north shore of Lake Tana is impossible. As the bank was three feet above the still depths of the lake I watered Jock from his bucket before sitting down to eat dried apricots and contemplate this impasse.
A few moments later I heard voices and looked around to see four men approaching through the long grass. It didn’t greatly surprise me to recognise the priest in the lead, nonchalantly twirling his white horse-hair fly-whisk and reverently carrying his Coptic cross. His companions carried heavy dulas. One of them was an older man, with a narrow, sun-blackened face, restless eyes and a habit of nervously licking his lips. The other two were youths of eighteen or nineteen – one stocky, with unusually coarse features for a highlander, the other slim, mean-looking and clearly apprehensive.
The quartet sat beside me and for the next ten minutes we chatted as civilly as the language barrier allowed. I handed round my dried apricots, but they were not appreciated. The stocky youth tasted one gingerly, then spat it out with a grimace; the others felt and smelt theirs, before politely returning them to me. Meanwhile I was listening to the remarks being exchanged by the priest and the older man; the words for mule, money, medicine and clothes were disturbingly comprehensible. The priest then declared that I must spend the night in their compound, and his expression was tense as he watched for my reaction. I smiled, bowed gratefully and declined the invitation – which was perhaps a foolish thing to do, but at that stage my nerve was going and I only wanted to get away.
Standing up, I started to move towards Jock – and at once the four surrounded me. The laymen were holding their dulas rather obviously, no one was smiling any more and I could feel myself going white. As he spoke shrilly to his companions, the priest’s eyes were bright with greed; he used his cross to gesture towards me – and then towards the lake. Immediately an argument started, the stocky youth supporting the priest, the slim youth siding with the older man. I lit a cigarette.
During those brief, long moments I was reacting on two levels, for beneath the seething terror was a strange, indifferent acceptance – a feeling that gamblers can’t always win and that if this was it, it was it.
The argument only lasted for the length of a nervously smoked cigarette, but before it ended I had an odd experience – so unfamiliar that it is difficult to describe, yet so real that it cannot honestly be omitted. While the priest was shaking his fly-whisk angrily in the older man’s face, and before it was possible to judge who was winning, I suddenly knew that I was safe – as surely as if a platoon of police had appeared to rescue me. For an instant I was aware of being protected by some mysterious power; and to a person without definite religious convictions this was almost as great a shock as the unpleasant encounter itself.
A moment later the argument was over. The older man ran to Jock, took up the halter and turned towards the compound. The priest caught me by the arm – he was smiling again, though his eyes remained angry – and pointed after Jock, while the youths stood close behind us. But now I, too, was getting angry. Eluding the priest’s grasp I pursued Jock, grabbed the halter and waved my dula threateningly. At this stage my fear was of being injured, which is quite a different sensation to the fear of death and doesn’t deter one from trying to defend one’s possessions. However, my ridiculous dula-waving was ignored. Within seconds the four were around us again, the youths had seized my arms and the men were unloading Jock.
They took my sleeping-bag, torch, spare Biros, matches, camera, insecticides, medicines (including a packet of Tampax, which amused me even at the time), two books (Ethiopian Birds and W. E. Carr’s Poetry of the Middle Ages), Jock’s bridle and a hundred and twenty Ethiopian dollars – about eighteen pounds sterling. My Huskies went unnoticed, being wrapped in the old pack-saddle, and neither cigarettes nor faranj food interested them, though these must be saleable commodities in Gondar. However, their oddest omissions were my watch (which I wear on my wrist, though in Makalle I was advised to carry it in my pocket lest it should tempt thieves) and Jock himself, who is worth another hundred dollars. Possibly they considered that in this region, where mules are uncommon, he would be an imprudently conspicuous acquisition if his owner were still alive.
When the quartet left us my knees suddenly went soggy, and as I began to reload Jock my hands were so shaky that I could scarcely tie the ropes. However, this was no time or place for indulging in the tremors – I wanted to be far away from that priest by sunset.
My topographical problem was still unsolved, but now I gave up bothering about the finer points of the compass and turned north. We climbed a high hill, pushing through leafless grey scrub, and from the crest I was overlooking a plain that appeared to be covered in tall jungle grass. It extended north for an indefinite distance, but was bounded to the west by a long, low ridge that looked no more than three miles away. On this ridge clumps of trees stood out against the sky, promising settlements and, presumably, safety.
Twenty minutes later I had discovered that the ‘grassy plain’ was a peculiarly hellish semi-swamp. Apart from patches of black mud, in which we occasionally sank to our knees, the vegetation was diabolical. Thick, wiry grass grew shoulder-high, the stiff, dense reeds were seven to nine feet tall, and a slim, five-foot growth, which looked dead, had such powerfully resilient thorny branches that I soon began to imagine it was deliberately thwarting me. From amidst these mingled horrors I could no longer see the ridge – or anything but an infinity of reed-tops and a darkening sky. Nor was it possible to steer straight, for we had to go where the ground was least swampy and the growth least obstructive – though whichever way I turned I was lacerated again and again by that nightmare thorny plant, and by a weird kind of thistle that now appeared to complete my demoralisation. As the light faded I cursed myself for not having turned back. This inferno was a real danger that could have been avoided, whereas murderous humans were merely contingent dangers.
By seven o’clock it was dark. I remembered that pythons are reputed to live here and was suitably depressed; this seemed my day for meeting a python. Then the vegetation ahead thinned – usually a sign of a swampy patch – and I poked cautiously at the ground with my dula. As there wasn’t any ground, swampy or otherwise, I stepped aside into the reeds on my left. Unfortunately there wasn’t any ground there either, so I fell into a hole six or seven feet deep. It contained glutinous black mud, too thin to stand on and too thick to swim in, and its vertical, slippery sides were unclimbable; but for Jock’s intelligent reaction I would not now be reporting the occurrence. Instinctively I had held on to the halter and steadfastly Jock stood braced on the brink of the hole – instead of bolting, as many a lesser mule would have done when their owner abruptly vanished. So I felt only a momentary panic, for I quickly realised that all would be well if the halter didn’t snap. Luckily mules are tough and the incomparable Jock showed no resentment as I hauled myself on to dry ground – though his ears and jawbones must have been taking at least half my weight.
I then decided that enough was enough and fumblingly unloaded Jock. A cautious starlight survey of our immediate surroundings revealed a bewildering number of deep, narrow channels, filled with mud or water – so if I lit an anti-animal fire amidst this density of dry growth we might soon have to choose between roasting and drowning.
Sitting dismally on a spot that I had partly cleared of the more dire vegetation I ate immoderately to cheer myself up. Apart from the advisability of guarding Jock I was too cold to sleep without my flea-bag, for a chill breeze had been blowing off the lake since sunset. In this situation there was an extraordinary incongruity about the prosaic little evening routine of winding my watch.
At 2.15 the waning moon rose – but by then I had been in misery for so long that the beauty of moonlight didn’t help. Reeds shaken by the wind now looked as though they were being shaken by advancing hyenas or leopards, and this new, calm lustre seemed to emphasise the lifeless silence of the marsh. Jock had at last stopped munching the short grass that flourished beneath the other growths, and there were no cicadas, or bird-stirrings, or distant dog-barks – nothing but the whispering rustle of the reeds. To pass the time I began to scrape the dried mud off my body, but when I realised that it was keeping me warm I desisted.
Three and a half hours later the first light released us. I then saw that in the darkness we had crossed a natural bridge of solid ground and become trapped on what was almost an islet. Retracing our steps we resumed the struggle and, after sitting tensely for nine and a half hours, to be moving again was such bliss that neither slime nor thorns seemed to matter any more.
An hour later the vegetation began to thin and soon we were on ploughland at the foot of the ridge. A broad path led down towards the lake and as we followed it a young man came towards us, driving a few cattle. He took one look at me, yelled in terror and fled. No doubt I’ve now given birth to a myth – the Dawn Devil of Tana.
It took fifty minutes to wash the adhesive black mud out of my clothes and hair and off my body, and innumerable scratches began to bleed afresh as I removed their mud plaster. When we had climbed the ridge I found a clear westward track which we followed for four hours across hilly farmland, with the lake sparkling below on our left. There were many settlements, but the locals seemed unfriendly. One little man of about fifty – dressed in a ragged bush-shirt and cotton shorts – made a miscalculation when he saw the lone faranj. Standing before me on the path he grabbed my dula and tried swiftly to pick my pockets – in full view of three leering youths who were sitting under a tree. However, in populated areas one can afford to be aggressive and this morning my mood was not sunny: I punched him in the eye, wrested my dula from him and brought it down hard on his skull. As he reeled away I further relieved my feelings by throwing a stone at the youths and shouting ‘Hid!’
By midday my body and mind were limp with exhaustion. Ahead I could see blue-gums and soon we were in Delghie, a market town of many tin roofs on the west shore of the lake. I rested in a talla-beit for two hours and had a large meal of injara and wat and five pints. As we set off again, through the hot afternoon glare, I felt slightly drunk and much restored.
Our track ran close to the lake for three miles; vast herds of sleek cattle were grazing on the lush pastures of the shore and for a time we joined a dour family going home from the market. Then the track turned inland, became a faint path and switch-backed for three hours over a series of steep, thinly-forested hills where I saw only two distant settlements and a few small fields.
By sunset we had covered twenty-two miles, and though the lake was invisible all afternoon we are now overlooking it again, for these compounds stand on a clifftop high above the water. The locals welcomed me kindly, but the poverty and ill-health of this family are most depressing. My skinny, sunken-eyed hostess has recently had malaria, her haggard husband coughs incessantly, their five pot-bellied children have trachoma and boils, and a young man lying in a corner by the door has a gruesomely injured eye into which he frequently squeezes drops from a phial of penicillin marked ‘For Intra-muscular Injection Only’. Worst of all is the condition of the youngest child, a girl of about two; her feet and calves are covered in ulcerated burns and the poor little mite never stops screaming. Yet when I told her mother that she should be taken to Gondar hospital at once I got the impression that no one considered her cure worth such a long journey.
The walls of this tiny tukul are flimsy and already the night air is cold; so despite my exhaustion I foresee getting very little sleep.
By now I feel like a shipwrecked nonagenarian. I was being optimistic when I foresaw ‘getting very little sleep’. For the second successive night I got no sleep – a personal record which I would prefer not to have achieved. Possibly because of my exhaustion I felt the cold even more last night, and in that overcrowded hovel I had no room to move a finger. Fleas tickled and pricked relentlessly and bugs swarmed over me, inducing that peculiar, feverish irritation which cannot be imagined by those who have never experienced it. The unfortunate burnt child never stopped whimpering, my host never stopped coughing, the injured young man never stopped moaning and the local dogs never stopped barking. Rats raced all over everyone and two donkeys who ‘live in’ kicked me three times. At midnight I crawled out to the starlight, broken in spirit and shivering in body. I found a little pile of straw and burrowed under it, but it was too little to warm me – and anyway I’d brought the bugs with me in my clothes.
As I sat chain-smoking the moon rose over Lake Tana and lost itself in a drift of thin cloud that glowed above the water like a length of torn satin. Being deprived of any sleep for such an unnatural period strangely distorts one’s sense of time. It would seem logical to feel that one has lived longer; instead, towards dawn, I found that having twice failed to cross the normal frontier between consciousness and unconsciousness I was aware of the past forty-eight hours as only one long day.
Not surprisingly we covered less than sixteen miles today. During the morning our path wound through sweeps of jungle grass that shone like bright copper, and on either side low ridges were covered in vivid green shrubs, and sometimes Lake Tana’s blueness glinted between the hills.
At midday we came to a village where the marketplace was crowded – though all morning we had been walking through uninhabited country – and when I told my robber story in a talla-beit this ill-treatment of a faranj roused everyone’s indignation, sympathy and generosity. The Medical Officer invited me to lunch and, though he is the poorly-paid father of nine children, he wanted to present me with five dollars and a blanket. His fair-skinned wife has a sweet, oval face and large, brilliant eyes; she is the same age as myself but looks ten years younger. At first she was very shy of me, but soon she relaxed, went to the iron bed and carefully opened an enormous bundle of clean blankets – to show off Number Nine, aged three weeks.
I would have liked to accept my host’s invitation to stay, but now I’m in a hurry to get to the telephone at Bahar Dar, since it is just possible that the Gondar Police may be able to recover my irreplacable high-altitude sleeping-bag, which I bought from a Japanese Himalayan expedition in Nepal.
When I left this kind family I discovered that extreme tiredness leaves one abnormally vulnerable to talla. Beyond the village I found myself swaying and stumbling across rough ploughland and the landscape went unnoticed. I felt sick and drunk and horrible as I hung on to Jock’s halter with one hand and leant heavily on my dula with the other. Inevitably we got lost, but that has proved a blessing. This little town is one of Lake Tana’s chief ports, from where grain and coffee are shipped on small steamers and huge, unwieldy reed rafts to Gorgora and Bahar Dar; therefore it has some uncommon amenities, including one tin of insecticide which almost reduced me to tears of relief when I saw it beside my bed.
The Port Manager noticed our arrival and at once offered hospitality; then an agreeable young teacher appeared and the three of us walked beyond the town to this tiny, corrugated-iron shed beside a warehouse at the top of a stone jetty. Here my host put down a camp-bed for me, and produced a ‘Visitors Book’ to be signed. There was only one other name in the thin exercise-book – Chris Barry, Churchtown, Dublin, Ireland. My compatriot had spent the night of 7 February, 1966, in this shed, on his way from Gorgora to Bahar Dar by steamer. It cannot be denied that we Irish get around.
After eleven hours’ deep sleep I woke to find that my host and the teacher had decided that we must have an escort to get us safely across the Little Nile. Few people walk from Kunzela to Zeghie, because the short boat-trip is so much quicker, but there is a track of sorts, used by the locals, and a tribe of pagan boatmen runs a ferry service. The teacher said that these boatmen are notoriously difficult to deal with and would be as likely to steal my load as to ferry it; so I greeted my escort enthusiastically, having had my fill of difficult lakeside dwellers.
We set off at 8.15, Jock being led by Fikre Selassie, a wiry little man of about forty who wore a permanently puzzled expression and was very polite but unbelievably dim-witted. As he wanted to get back to Kunzela before dark we walked non-stop for five and a half hours.
The track ran inland, at first across an uninhabited flatness where eight-foot thistles had flowers like foxgloves, and then through hilly, heavily-wooded country, inhabited by many small monkeys. Today the noon heat affected me more because of our forced march, and six of my swamp scratches have become throbbing streaks of pus – three on each leg – so I was not sorry when we passed a large settlement and came to the end of our marathon.
Here Lake Tana is very close, though invisible, and the Little Nile is some eighty yards wide, flowing deep and slow between low banks overhung by freshly-green shrubs. Wide, level pastures stretch away from both banks to the blue horizons and directly above the ferry-point the stream divides around a tree-covered islet. At times there is a disconcerting un-African-ness about these highlands. When I looked at this dark current, gently moving below its fringe of dense greenery, I could fancy for a moment that I was standing by the Blackwater River near my home. Yet some eccentrics still believe this stream to be the true source of the Blue Nile.
However, there was nothing homely about the human element here. At the ferry-point gravelly shores replace the banks and, as we approached, I could hear violent shouting. Then we saw one of three tall, bony, black-skinned boatmen viciously striking a passenger across the face, while abusing him for not paying the fee demanded. (I afterwards found that ten cents had already been paid for the ferrying of a small load of salt-blocks, but the boatman wanted another ten cents because the donkey had been towed by the same raft.) The passenger was a frail young man, hardly up to his opponent’s shoulder, and now his wife courageously intervened by throwing a stone – which unfortunately struck her husband instead of the boatman. Then a second boatman joined in – the third was on the far bank – and at that point the young man gave up and produced the extra ten cents. These ferrymen certainly take full advantage of the highlanders’ inability to cope with water-transport. By local standards eightpence is a most unscrupulous charge for a single crossing.
When one sees these rafts close to it no longer seems surprising that their management is an esoteric tribal skill. They are simple bundles of reeds, shaped like giant rugger-balls and no more than eight feet long and two feet above water amidships. One man punts them with a thin pole, some twenty feet long, and passengers ride astride with legs dangling in the water. If I were a non-swimmer I wouldn’t cross a deep river on one of those contraptions for all the salt in the Danakil.
As I unsaddled Jock three interested men and two loaded donkeys formed a queue behind us. Someone asked where Jock came from and when I replied ‘Makalle’ there was an outburst of discussion and everyone assured me that a Tigre mule would not swim a river. Highlanders delight in arguing about a situation for as long as possible before taking any action and if they can build up an atmosphere of doom and drama so much the better; but at this stage I only wanted to immerse my sweaty, bug-bitten body in the river, so I postponed the Jock problem, pulled off my shirt and plunged in. (It is convenient to be among people who are not shocked by women stripped to the waist.)
The ferrying of our load and saddlery required two trips, during which I swam watchfully back and forth beside the ridiculous raft, half-expecting my precious possessions to slide off at any moment. The water was cool, opaque, probably unhealthy and wonderfully restoring. I tried to dive to the bottom, but failed, so it must be about twelve feet deep.
Then the Jock problem had to be faced – and it is indeed true that Tigre mules don’t like deep rivers. Clearly Jock had never met one before, and he so loathed the Little Nile that for the first time since our partnership began he turned mulish. When all my efforts to lead him in had failed I looked away, for I couldn’t endure to see him being brutally thrashed by Fikre Selassie, the boatmen and the donkey-men. This was a poor return for his patient, life-saving loyalty.
Local donkeys are ferried by one man half-lifting them into the water towards another man, who is sitting waiting on a raft and who immediately grabs their ears and tows them across. So now the donkeymen suggested ferrying their animals first, to reassure and lure Jock. But this stratagem also failed. Then at last the poor devil was so tormented that he plunged despairingly in – and, following the men’s advice, I rushed after him, seized the halter and swam beside him. When he broke away my efforts to head him off from the shore merely revealed the interesting fact that a mule swims faster than I do. Twice this happened, but the third time I quickly wound the halter round my shoulder and kept so close to him that I was in no danger of being kicked. Now another return to shore meant towing me, so he decided that crossing the river was the lesser of two evils and followed meekly – at which point even the sullen boatmen raised a cheer. Half-way across I noticed that the panic had gone from his eyes and when we scrambled on to the opposite shore he was looking faintly surprised. Probably he had just realised that swimming a cool river on a hot day can be quite pleasant.
By 3.30 we were following a clear path across close-cropped pastureland, where a few herds were visible in the distance. Some half-a-mile away, on our left, lay the lake, hidden by a fringe of tall, feathery reeds, and soon after five o’clock the path vanished at the edge of a swamp. This was a much swampier swamp than our last one, but it was also more predictable; the reeds were only two or three feet high and beyond I could see trees along the horizon and black dots that meant grazing cattle. Yet the next fifty minutes were unpleasant enough, for I was wading through waist-high water, slushy with rotted vegetation. As always in hours of peril I held trustfully on to Jock’s halter, but the slippery ground remained solid underfoot. The stink of decay was nauseating, and at every step we disturbed clouds of mosquitoes and other sharp-stinging flies. Later, when we arrived here, I looked at my legs and saw that they were covered with immense, swollen leeches. After burning them off I bled so profusely that my hostess came over all queer and had to sit down in the middle of preparing supper.
Beyond the swamp a continuation of our path soon brought us to roughly-broken scrubland, and as darkness fell we entered a thick forest, where the filtered starlight didn’t help much. Yet by night a thin forest would be even more difficult; here one knew that the path went where the growth was least dense.
By 7.30 we were clear of the trees and about a mile away I could see a black, serrated mass against the stars – the blue-gums of Zeghie. Then I lost the path, amidst a chaos of boulders. Before long our way was blocked by an inlet from the lake, and having retreated from that we wandered into a stony gully which seemed to be a cul-de-sac, and on climbing out of this we became painfully enmeshed in a thorny thicket. I was about to give up and unload when suddenly the path reappeared, and twenty minutes later we were beneath the shadows of the blue-gums.
I stopped at the first talla-beit – identifiable because lamp-light was reflected in rows of glasses upturned on a wooden bench inside the door. As I drank half-a-dozen men stared at me in unfriendly silence, and I felt relieved when a breathless teacher came to offer me hospitality. (There is a hint of magic about the speed with which teachers materialise when a faranj appears in a small town. We had entered Zeghie in total darkness and seen no one on our way to the talla-beit.)
Abraha is a tall, broad-shouldered, handsome young man from Debra Marcos – the capital of Gojjam province, which we entered yesterday. Like most rural teachers he longs for further education and has just been asking me wistfully if the Irish Government offers scholarships to Ethiopians, and if so could I please arrange for him to have one – a pathetically common request. He detests life in Zeghie, where the school has about four hundred pupils (some from far-away villages) and five teachers. Many of the locals are so opposed to modern education that they boycott the teachers cruelly – which does not surprise me, for since leaving Gondar everyone with whom I have discussed my route has frowned and muttered ‘Metfo!’ (‘Bad!’) at the mention of Zeghie. It would be interesting to discover why these people are so renowned for unpleasantness.
When he came here last year Abraha took a wife on a temporary basis. She is the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a rich local coffee-farmer and was divorced by her first husband after five years of childless marriage. Abraha said that if she bears him a child he may keep her, otherwise he will leave her behind when he gets a transfer. Meanwhile, he treats her considerately, though I noticed a marked difference in her demeanour compared with that of the average wife and mother. She shows a rather servile manner towards Abraha, and though her expression is cheerful enough there is a resigned sadness behind her eyes.
This is going to be another hellishly buggy night; within minutes of my sitting down the ghoulish brutes were attacking me and, having discovered that my flea-bag had been stolen, Abraha insists that I must sleep on his hair-mattress. I would much prefer to lie outside under the blue-gums, coldly bugless, but to do so would dreadfully offend my host.
This morning I saw that Zeghie stands on a high cliff overlooking a bay sheltered to north and south by wooded promontories. Many of its square, sophisticated houses seem quite new; they have high tin roofs, smooth, solid mud walls, little unglazed windows, and doors made of chopped-up packing cases. These dwellings are so well spaced out, amidst tall, dignified blue-gums, that the town parodies a European ‘select residential area’.
Last night was as expected: I got no more than two hours’ sleep, in uneasy ten-minute snatches. Apart from the battalions of bugs, rats were rattling continuously amongst the cooking utensils and quarrelling with high-pitched squeals.
We left Zeghie at 8 a.m. and arrived here six hours later, having struggled through three rivers, each more difficult to cope with than the last. None was wide, or above four feet deep – but all were fast-flowing, and it was never clear where one should or could cross, and Jock didn’t want to cross any of them anywhere. If it wasn’t treacherous oozy mud underfoot it was treacherous slimy stones and between Jock’s nerves and the strength of the current I was submerged as often as not. This was a region of dense, green forest – the nearest I’ve ever been to a true jungle – and our path frequently disappeared. The three rivers were overhung by dark tangles of trees and creepers so that one could never go straight across – always it was necessary to wade up and down searching for the point of exit on the opposite bank. Twice, between rivers, Jock got wedged and had to be partially unloaded, while scores of little monkeys paused in their swingings to peer down at us and make impertinent remarks. Then at last we escaped on to a path thronged with people going to market and an hour later were back on the motor-road, which comes to Bahar Dar along the east shore of the lake.
At once I made for the newly-opened luxury Ras Hotel (the measure of my demoralisation!) and its dapper Ethiopian manager could hardly conceal his agitation when a room was booked by a repulsive object covered in mud and blood and wearing a shirt and shorts so torn that they had become mere tokens of the will to be decent. However, he relaxed somewhat when I changed a damp but valid traveller’s cheque from the roll in my money-belt. Then he noticed Jock standing patiently by the veranda – and all was well. Jumping from his chair he exclaimed ‘The Irish lady with the mule!’ and held out his hand. Even before he said it I knew that Leilt Aida had been on the telephone.
When a platoon of wide-eyed servants had conducted me to my room I sent one of them to buy barley for Jock and another to buy insecticide for me. This enormous hotel consists of rows and rows of rooms on the edge of the lake, laid out in chalet style. Tonight two rooms are occupied. My spacious, elegant suite has a private (pale pink) bathroom, limitless boiling water, a bed with primrose-yellow sheets and an ankle-deep, wall-to-wall olive-green carpet. The whole thing seems Hiltonian and I’m loving every inch and minute of it: I haven’t asked what the tariff is – and just now I couldn’t care less.
After a bath and before a late lunch I telephoned Colonel Aziz, who suggested that tomorrow I should leave Jock here and return to Gondar by bus to guide a Punitive Expedition to the Scene of the Crime. This seemed to me an excellent idea, and I said so with un-Christian enthusiasm.
Then I ate a huge meal, slept for four hours, ate another huge meal, wrote this – and am now going to sleep again.