In Ethiopia with a Mule (27 page)

By 4.30 we were on top of a third hill which, like the other two, might be more accurately described as a mountain – if the climbing of three mountains in rapid succession didn’t sound a little improbable. I spent twenty minutes finding a way down from this broad summit. On one side the forest was impenetrable, on another there was a sheer 500-foot precipice overlooking a wooded ravine, and ahead there were minor precipices, fearsome tangles of thorny scrub, high grass and low trees. This scrub was excruciating. Its thorns proved easily
detachable
from its branches, but not easily detachable from one’s skin; just now I have been painfully picking them out of my arms and legs. Also the dry, slippery waist-high grass concealed treacherously broken ground, and on one steep slope I skidded, tumbled sideways into a gully and wrenched my right knee. This was slightly alarming, but having recovered from the first shock of pain I realised that the injury was not severe. Soon after I saw how we could descend, by
zig-zagging
to avoid cliffs, gullies and scrub-tangles, and half-an-hour later we were on level grassland, where hundreds of grey baboons swarmed between gigantic trees.

Another mile brought us to inhabited country. Here three small boys,
collecting
wood beside a stream, fled into the undergrowth at our approach and a pathlet led us to a slope where a young man was ploughing, chanting as he followed his oxen. Like many of the people of this region he was very
dark-skinned
(evidently Agow blood is unusually thick here) and when he noticed us he paused to stare in silent astonishment, before shouting a
shifta
warning. Then – his duty done – he showed no further interest, but turned back to his oxen, cracked his whip and resumed his chanting.

One of the most obvious highland characteristics is a lack of interest in the passing
faranj
. Even the few people who spontaneously offer hospitality remain essentially aloof from their guest, which can be disconcerting. Yet this aloofness is no longer creating the barrier it once did. My return to the true highlanders, after that ‘urban’ interlude, has made me realise what an unexpectedly deep affection I am developing for them – though the people around here are not conspicuously lovable.

By now my knee had become troublesome and as we approached a large
settlement
of scattered compounds I was in real pain. Our appearance roused a hostility that seemed more deep-seated than last evening’s, and for some reason my antennae warned me not to trust these people. I was immediately chased out of the first two compounds I entered and, when the women stoned me vigorously in the third, while the men stood by applauding their wives’ initiative, I decided to get away from it all.

As I retreated – rubbing an elbow, where one sharp missile had found its target – dusk was thick in the valley below the settlement; and by the time I had hobbled down to this level stretch of grassland at the foot of the mountain it was dark, but with a promise of moonlight. While I was unloading Jock we had the first rain of the trek – a downpour that continued for twenty minutes, leaving the air deliciously fresh.

Travelling in this country fosters an abnormal degree of fatalism, doubtless produced by one’s subconscious as a protection against nervous breakdowns. Tonight I’m past caring about untrustworthy locals,
shifta
, leopards or hyenas. The probability is that Jock and I will survive, and the possibility that either or both might be attacked has ceased to worry me.

At some time last night I woke suddenly, to see a sky wonderfully patterned with slowly-sailing, silvered clouds – and among them was the full moon, radiant against a royal blue background. I turned, and lay gazing up for some moments in a curiously disembodied state of enchantment; it seemed that I had ceased to exist as a person and had become only an apprehension of the beauty overhead. Perhaps such a sky may be seen quite often but, unaccountably, there was for me some supreme loveliness, some magical glory in this silent, drifting movement of silver against blue. And the memory of it has strengthened me throughout a painful day.

My knee was stiff and swollen this morning, and it didn’t improve during our ten-hour walk. Yet not even constant pain can dull one’s enjoyment of these endlessly varied highlands, where our trek has never taken us through the same sort of country for more than half a day.

I hadn’t hoped to be at Debre Tabor by nightfall, and it is a sheer fluke that we have got here so soon without benefit of map, compass, intelligent peasants or clear tracks. Today I lost count of the mountains we crossed. Until 3 p.m. we passed no settlements, yet occasionally I heard shepherds calling in the distance, so there must have been compounds somewhere. Often the path
disappeared
, but always I found it again, though at the time I never knew whether it was the right track or not. We forded several rivers and I had three swims – noticing evidence of local inhabitants, who had left their marks along the banks or on flat stones in midstream. It seems odd that the imprudence of using one’s water supply as a latrine is not obvious even to the most backward people. During the morning I almost trod on the tail of a leopard who was asleep under a bush by the path. Momentarily I mistook the tail for a snake; then its owner woke up and streaked into the undergrowth with a snarl of fear – which did slightly upset Jock.

Soon after 3 we reached a mountain-top where a large church, surrounded by ancient oleasters, indicated that we had left the forested wilds. From here I could see many blue-gums on another, higher mountain-top, beyond a wide valley, and I guessed correctly that these marked Debre Tabor.

This last lap took three hours and the final tough climb, to 8,500 feet, left me weak with pain.

In the valley were several settlements and a few flocks of mangy sheep. Below Debre Tabor the mountainside was crudely irrigated, which is unusual, though the early Semitic settlers introduced irrigation to the highlands and in Tigre
there are many traces of canals. But this skill, like Semitic architecture, never spread south and has long since been lost in the north.

From the edge of Debre Tabor delighted children escorted us up a long, rough ‘street’, between stalls displaying the usual limited array of goods, to the main ‘square’ where two Peace Corps boys promptly appeared and invited me to be their guest. Debre Tabor is the most isolated Peace Corps post in Ethiopia, so I didn’t hesitate to accept this invitation – though in general I am against sponging on volunteer workers.

However, I soon discovered that my acceptance had created an
International
Situation. Days ago the Governor-General had telephoned from Gondar and arranged for my entertainment here, and the local Governor was all set to receive me. This really was awkward. I would have preferred to stay with the Governor, and it seemed ungracious not to; but the Americans looked
crestfallen
at the prospect of losing their
faranj
guest and to treat their invitation as a ‘second-best’ would seem worse than ungracious. Therefore I compromised, and when my knee had been tightly bandaged I hobbled off to the Governor’s house, split a bottle of
tej
with him and had supper there. He is a kindly man, who understood my predicament and settled for entertaining Jock instead of me.

Today my knee needed so much rest that I have seen little of Debre Tabor. I lunched with the Governor and his interpreter, whose English is not much more fluent than my Amharinya. Having listened to this language during so many long evenings, and been forced sometimes to struggle seriously with it, I find that even my linguistic blockage is now giving way a little.

Debre Tabor was an Italian outpost, so the Governor’s quarters, the police barracks and the school are ugly, one-storey concrete buildings at the edge of the town. The Italians also built a motor-road from Gondar through Debre Tabor to Dessie, but many of the twenty bridges between Gondar and here were blown up by the Italian army as it retreated before the British liberators, and the rest have been allowed to collapse – as has the road itself. It seems that the Government is as casual about roads as the local chieftains are about tracks. In Nepal, where in most areas communication is also confined to mountain tracks, the village headmen co-operate to organise track maintenance; but here such a communal effort would be unthinkable. If a highland track becomes impassable it is usually repaired by the merchants who are most dependent on it, otherwise
maintenance is carried out only if the Emperor or a Governor-General is to visit a particular area, and then the work is so inefficiently done that the track soon relapses into its natural ‘state of chassis’.

On my way back from the Governor’s house I called at the Seventh-Day Adventist Mission, which was established here in the 1930s and runs a large school and a hospital. It is illegal for missionaries to proselytise Ethiopian
Christians
and the few Falasha or Muslim converts to Catholicism or Protestantism are not regarded as true Christians by the highlanders. However, to qualify for all the advantages offered by this school a number of locals do become temporary Seventh-Day Adventists.

I don’t expect to find twin souls in missionary compounds, but the ideals of this contingent completely unnerved me. After listening for some fifteen minutes to an earnest young woman I took out my cigarettes and said automatically ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ The air froze. My hostess looked at me as though I had uttered an obscenity. Then she said, ‘We never permit habit-forming drugs here’ – and went on to explain that tea is a sinful stimulant. Whereupon I looked at my watch, muttered wildly about an improbable urgent appointment and retreated in disorder.

My Peace Corps hosts have now been here long enough to realise that at present the education of young highlanders is 95 per cent farce and 5 per cent achievement. Most of Debre Tabor’s twenty-five Ethiopian teachers are
themselves
poorly educated and have had little or no training for their job. Many of the 1,050 pupils come from settlements or villages two to six days’ walk away, as is usual, and they live with relatives or in rented
tukuls
or rooms shared by six or eight children. About one-fifth are girls – a surprisingly large proportion – and everyone’s ambition is to qualify for Gondar Secondary School. Yet the few who do qualify rarely achieve much in competition with city-born pupils – unless they are Muslims, whose average intelligence is higher than that of the Christian majority. However, this superiority increases their unpopularity with the local authorities, so the winning of scholarships can be even more difficult for them than for the others.

This morning I did a test walk to the local ‘famous church’. It stands on a high mountain, overlooking the (comparative) lowlands that we crossed on our way from Bahar Dar, and to the north-east I could see the towering barrier of rough ranges which lies between here and Lalibela.

The church was locked and in the nearby settlement no one would volunteer to open it. Situations like this repeatedly reveal an ingrained unhelpfulness in the highland character. Beside the enclosure, on the highest point of the broad summit, stand the overgrown ruins of one of those Italian stone forts which were constructed on many hilltops to repel Patriot raids. Climbing up, I sat there for more than an hour, gazing over the vastness and thinking of the
nineteenth-century
Englishmen who made their way to Debre Tabor.

Early in the nineteenth century, when Gondar was still the nominal capital, Ras Gugsa, the most powerful noble of the day, chose this town as his
headquarters
; and he was succeeded by Ras Ali, to whose court Lord Palmerston sent Walter Plowden as consul in 1848. Plowden was accompanied by John Bell, who had been with him on his first visit to Abyssinia in 1843 and who was to become a close friend of the Emperor Theodore. On arrival Plowden wrote, ‘Debre Tabor … is cold and healthy, but there is no stone house in it but that of the Ras.’ Three years of negotiation led to a trade treaty, which was signed in Ras Ali’s inner tent where the nobleman and the consul sat on carpets laid over the bare earth. Plowden wrote, ‘After the Abyssinian manner he (Ras Ali) kept talking … about a horse that was tied in the tent, and that was nearly treading me underfoot a dozen times.’ A few months later Ras Ali was conquered by Kassa (Theodore to be) and after his coronation Kassa also made Debre Tabor his headquarters because he despised Gondar as a ‘city of merchants’. Then, before moving to Magdala, he burned Debre Tabor to the ground – not a difficult feat, if there was only one stone house among hundreds of
tukuls
.

In 1879 General Gordon arrived at Debre Tabor from Egypt, to make peace on the Khedive’s behalf. The rebuilt town had become Yohannes IV’s capital and Gordon was not impressed by the highland nobles. He wrote, ‘I have seen many peoples, but I never met with a more fierce, savage set than these. The peasantry are good enough.’ At that time there were several foreigners at the court. Gordon mentions meeting the Greek consul from Suez and three Italians – and this afternoon, in a
tej-beit
, I met an English-speaking local merchant who told me that his great-grandfather was ‘an Egyptian Greek’. Yohannes IV and General Gordon did not get on well. The only thing they had in common was their destiny, for both were soon to be killed by followers of the Mahdi.

Returning to the town, I spent a few hours drinking in
tej-beits
and walking along rough laneways beneath tall blue-gums between solid houses of stone and mud. The population is now about 7,000 and the people are polite and friendly; as this is one of the province’s most important market-centres 3,000 outsiders
sometimes attend the Saturday market. Debre Tabor is also renowned for the number of its hyenas, the largeness of its donkeys and the potency of its
araki
– which is sold in Gondar, and sometimes even in Addis.