In Ethiopia with a Mule (21 page)

O
UR 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.