In Ethiopia with a Mule (11 page)

This evening Adua and Aksum – not to mention Asmara, Cairo and London – seem to belong to another planet.

Last evening the word
shifta
recurred often in my companions’ conversation and I could sense a crisis simmering. Then this morning Dawit’s grandfather – a vigorously authoritative old man – said bluntly that unless the last settlement in Tigre (beyond the
amba
) would provide a bodyguard Dawit must bring me back here. For our different reasons (laziness and pig-headedness) Dawit and I were equally opposed to this plan. But now I am a world away from visas, government permits and amenable princesses. In theory I am free to travel how and where I please, yet in practice I have become a responsibility of the locals and am caught firm in a web of centuries-old traditions. So for the moment I must accept my loss of freedom. To have defied tradition this morning would have been futile,
since I can’t load Jock. It would also have been ungracious, because these people were greatly inconveniencing themselves for my sake, and it might have been unwise. Instinct told me that beneath their dutiful solicitude lay a basic distrust of the unprecedented lone
faranj
, and I suspected that were I to inflame this by incomprehensible non-conformity I might see a very different aspect of the highland character. For me such a situation is new. I have never before travelled among people who inspired sufficient fear to make me abandon my aim of the moment.

The morning air was penetratingly cold as we stood in the compound while Dawit wrote – on paper provided by me – a message from his grandfather to be read to the relevant village headman. I would have thought a verbal message
sufficient
, but evidently my protector considered the solemnity of the written word better suited to the occasion.

At seven o’clock we set off, full of hot milk and hard
dabo
. Dawit, his
attendants
, a local man and myself went straight up, across and down the
amba
, but four of Dawit’s armed cousins led Jock a long way round. Not even highland mules can cope with this escarpment, for which ‘precipitous’ is utterly
inadequate
.

The top of the
amba
was about a mile wide and two miles long; low scrub dotted its stony, uncultivable flatness and the slanting sunlight showed up fresh leopard spoor in the dust of our faint path. Yet near the southern edge is another ‘famous church’ – how inaccessible can you make your famous churches! – which, as usual, was locked. Even here the roof was of tin: but the past fortnight has inured me to this disfigurement and I have come to accept, as an integral part of the highland scene, these circles of pale grey amidst a grove of trees on a height. Around the eaves hung hundreds of bells, crudely fashioned from bits of left-over tin, and at each touch of the wind these sent gentle, lonely little melodies far across the plateau. Here I also saw a stone bell, such as was noticed by Francisco Alvarez, the Portugese priest who visited the highlands for six years from 1520. This slim granite slab, some four feet by one and a half, was suspended at waist-level between two stunted wild fig-trees – and when I struck it with my
dula
, on the dent worn by centuries of strikings, it produced what Alvarez well described as ‘a sound like cracked bells heard at a distance’.

Near the church a gigantic wedge of rock has split away from the
amba
and stands alone, with surprisingly green vegetation covering its boat-shaped top. Such wedges are not uncommon in the highlands, but legend says that a miracle caused this split. Once a saintly monk was accused by malicious villagers of
keeping a mistress, so he announced that he would pray to the Virgin Mary to prove his innocence by splitting the
amba
– and next morning this wedge was seen to have broken away.

There were a few stone hovels between the church and the escarpment, but we saw no one as we passed; on these exposed heights people prefer not to get up until the sun has warmed the air. Now I was overlooking the Takazze Gorge, though it was still invisible – lying 5,500 feet below, lost amidst an intricate convulsion of mountains through which the river has been carving a deeper and deeper channel during aeons of time. Before we descended Dawit pointed to another
amba
, level with ours, that rose beyond the gorge and was almost overshadowed by the Semiens. He said that there I would spend the night, in the first settlement of the province of Begemdir and Semien. But as it happened he was wrong.

The last Tigrean settlement is huddled on a sloping natural terrace
immediately
below the
amba
. Its women and children fled the moment they saw me, but a score of grim-faced men soon gathered round us and for the next forty-five minutes I sat on a pile of smooth rocks enjoying the morning sun while watching for Jock, but not enjoying Dawit’s angry argument with the locals. His
grandfather
’s message made no impression whatever – in spite of being written – and he was obviously aggravating things by adopting an officious ‘urban’ attitude towards these benighted savages who had never before seen a white woman. To me this attitude seemed as reckless as it was tactless, for the slim Dawit is about five foot three and any of his muscular opponents could have picked him up between two fingers and dropped him over the nearest precipice – which at a certain point I thought someone would do. By then his attitude had antagonised me too, and perhaps this was an advantage. I intervened to point out that no one was under any obligation to endure a gruelling two-day trek on behalf of a wandering stranger: and, as I spoke, the locals seemed to realise that I was on their side. Then Dawit changed his tactics and I heard frequent mentions of Leilt Aida and Ras Mangasha, followed by repeated references to the Emperor and gestures in my direction which made me suspect that I was now being presented as a close personal friend of Haile Selassie. At all events this litany of Imperial names worked, and when Jock’s green bucket appeared in the distance I was being entertained with cow-warm milk, and a surly bodyguard had begun
reluctantly
to assemble. Considering this surliness and reluctance I wondered if there was much to choose between being escorted by these men and being waylaid by
shifta
. 

Dawit was now suffering from conflict – feeling both relieved at having rid himself of responsibility and doleful at the thought of snapping his last link with Western civilisation. (For me it was indeed a novelty to be regarded as a link with any form of civilisation.) However, two people amongst us were completely happy – the small sons (aged twelve and ten) of an Aedat Muslim trader. For six days these boys had been camping on the terrace, with three donkey-loads of salt, hoping for the arrival of an armed party to protect them during their crossing of the gorge.

I was conscience-stricken on seeing the size of my escort – fourteen men, eight of them armed – but Dawit said that this was considered the minimum force for a safe passage through
shifta
territory. My would-be-unpretentious one-woman expedition had now got completely out of hand, and it seemed
iniquitous
to drag so many men into the dreaded depths of the Takazze Gorge. The malaria that I am protected against could bring endless misery to people who are beyond reach of medical aid, so before we left I asked Dawit to instruct my companions in the use of malaria tablets, which I promised to distribute at the end of the day when Jock was unloaded.

At 9.30 we set off – accompanied by the local priest – towards the terrace from which the descent begins. To me our path was indistinguishable from the rest of the rough mountainside so, looking ahead to the time when I will have eluded all guides, I tried to learn how to detect such trails.

On the level starting-point terrace – which was about forty yards wide and scattered with boulders and old, twisted, creeper-hung trees – the men paused and began what sounded like (but may not have been) a serious quarrel.
Apparently
some of them were trying to back out, now that the influence of the Imperial litany had waned, and two were glancing at me rather nastily. One of these was the priest, an elderly man with a hard mouth and cunning eyes, and the other was a youth whom I had noticed speculatively feeling Jock’s load before we left the village. Amidst the mountain stillness angry shouts were soon
reverberating
like a series of explosions, and then the two factions began to threaten each other with
dulas
and rifle-butts. I felt that it would merely heighten the tension were I to show any impatience, suspicion or fear – all of which I was feeling in varying degrees – so I sat impassively on a rock, while the animals grazed nearby on long, burnt-up grass. Then the two little boys joined me, looking
apprehensive
; and – despite their adult task and hitherto manly demeanour – when the shouting became more enraged they moved closer to the presumably soothing female presence. Luckily I have an irrational faith in the fundamental goodness
of human nature. I can never take the badness very seriously until it is operating, so throughout such crises as this my fear remains embryonic.

Then, suddenly and inexplicably, the quarrel was over, the priest turned back to the village – irritably twitching his horse-hair fly-whisk – and the rest of us walked silently towards the gorge.

This was the toughest descent I have ever experienced. I tend to accuse the highlanders of exaggerating the difficulties of my trek, but they certainly have not exaggerated the difficulty of crossing the Takazze Gorge here; if it were even a degree more difficult it would be impassable to humans. The best way to describe our progress is to say that for the next two and a half hours we were slowly falling down a mountain. Even my nimble companions frequently slipped, and over some stretches I had to toboggan on my behind, while all the time clouds of yellow dust were filling my mouth, eyes and nostrils and becoming mud on my sweat-drenched body.

The upper slopes of this mountain are forested, but the lower are naked and desert-hot and have been deeply scored by torrents cascading to the Takazze, which rises about fifteen feet during the wet season. We followed one of these water-courses for the last few hundred yards – and then were within the gorge, on almost level ground. But still the river remained hidden.

For the next half-hour our track wound through low hills covered in high, burnt-gold grass and dotted with baobab trees. These monstrous growths have smooth grey trunks some ten yards in circumference – though they are no more than twenty feet tall – and short, thick, leafless branches sprout from their tops only, making them look like repulsive prehistoric beasts. After three weeks at 8,000 feet the thick, hot air of the gorge oppressed me like an invisible substance as I tottered along amidst my little forest of rifles, vaguely noticing many birds and shrubs that one never sees on the highlands.

We had a moment of mild drama at the point where our path went through a narrow gap between two hills and brought us at last within sight of the river. Here the leader stopped abruptly and yelled ‘
Shifta
!’ as he bent to pick up a ragged
shamma
from the side of the path. The cotton cloak was stained with dried blood and had been torn by three bullet holes, and the stony ground nearby was also blood-stained. However, in a region where guns are so common, and many men are excessively prone to quarrelling, a little blood and a few bullet holes seem inconclusive evidence of
shifta
activity.

At this season the sluggish Takazze is only two feet deep and twenty yards wide, though from bank to bank across its sandy bed is a 200-yard walk. On the
southern side we rested for half-an-hour, beneath an enormous wild fig-tree, and the men washed all over – in two shifts, lest the Enemy should take us unawares. Meanwhile the unfortunate animals, having drunk deep, were pathetically seeking non-existent food amidst a cruelly hot wilderness of boulders. Each of their loads had slipped forward on to their necks at least twice during the descent, and by now they must have been fancying themselves in some sort of equine Hades.

As I sat smoking irreligiously, with my feet in the river, I became aware that this silent, motionless gorge has a curiously unquiet atmosphere. It is wide and bright and full of colour – green river, red-gold grasslands, silver sand, blue sky – yet such a strange uneasiness pervades it that I no longer wondered at the highlanders’ aversion to the place.

The second half of the marathon began with an enervating two-mile walk up a dry, rocky, sun-stricken river bed. Then we started our four-hour climb – a relentless ascent up slopes of scorched turf as slippery as ice, leading to slopes of shale so steep that for every three steps forward one slid two steps back, leading to a thousand-foot stairway of black lava rock on which one’s leg-muscles seemed to burn with exhaustion while one’s lungs ached at every breath. But all the time it was getting cooler, and the incomparable joy of ‘going higher’ was sustaining me.

At this stage all the barriers went down between my escort and myself. In the gorge they had been perceptibly less surly – even showing concern for my new crop of foot blisters – and now they were displaying a touchingly
affectionate
respect. The explanation was obvious. When tackling such a climb one has to go at one’s natural pace – to go either more quickly or more slowly adds to the strain – and, since my natural pace was somewhat faster than their own, my companions imagined me to be a superwoman of sorts. To the
highlanders
physical courage, or skill, or endurance are such important qualities that by inadvertently beating them to a mountain-top I had become an honoured guest instead of a damn nuisance.

When at last we reached level ground I almost wept with relief to see our path continuing level for a mile or so, curving around the mountain beneath a 300-foot wall of rock. This escarpment was so sheer that I decided we must have got to the end of the day’s climb, as not even a highlander would attempt it; so I went striding ahead – tiredness forgotten – thinking thirstily of
talla
. Then an urgent shout checked me – and I saw my companions going up the
escarpment
like flies. For a moment I considered accompanying the boys, who were
taking Jock and their donkeys a long way round; but not knowing how long that way might be I chose the short cut and eventually pulled myself on to the
amba
feeling proud of my new-found ability to rock-climb.