In Ethiopia with a Mule (35 page)

An hour ago the headmaster produced a twenty-year-old schoolboy, fittingly named Assefa, who will drive Satan to the bus terminus at Sali Dingai if I pay his bus fare north to Dessie. He doesn’t mind walking alone from Dessie to Worra Ilu, but he says that it would be ‘dangerous’ for him to return alone through Manz, where the people are ‘very wild’. The fact that he will miss a week’s schooling seems not to worry anyone, and I gather that many of these pupils attend classes only irregularly.

On our way out of Worra Ilu I stopped at the school to say goodbye just as that
familiar ceremony, which marks the start of each highland schoolday, was about to begin. Every morning all the pupils line up in military formation around a tall flagstaff to sing the National Anthem while Ethiopia’s flag is being raised, and this attempt to foster nationalism in a tribal society is followed by a prayer for the Emperor. One boy faces the assembly, bent double, and gives out the prayer – to which everyone else, also bent double, vigorously responds. Today, however, the Worra Ilu assembly didn’t bend very far, most eyes remaining on me.

Satan’s mood was no less satanic this morning. He tried to bite my leg as he was being loaded, and for the first five miles Assefa and I were fully occupied keeping him on the right track. Crowds were coming to market, many carrying balls of wool measuring at least two feet in circumference, for we are now in Ethiopia’s only wool-producing area. Elsewhere, highland sheep are rarely sheared and the idea of breeding sheep to sell their wool is unknown.

Here Satan allowed little leisure for admiring the landscape, but
occasionally
I paused to gaze over the rain-freshened miles of boulder-strewn turf that swept to the horizon on our right, or to peer into the chasm that separated this plateau from the next. Then our path temporarily left the edge of the chasm and wound across a few miles of pasture and ploughland, scattered with compounds enclosed by solid, shoulder-high walls. Some of the stone
tukuls
were
two-storeyed
and all seemed to have been built with unusual skill.

Soon we were again overlooking the gorge, from the point where our track began a four-hour descent. Visually, this was among the most dramatic moments of the whole trek. Standing on the edge of the escarpment I had an unimpeded view of the floor of the gorge 4,000 feet below, and the Uacit river was barely visible though it is now a considerable torrent. Beyond the gorge another long, level tableland rose sheer and to the south-east stretched a third, which was Manz.

The descent took us gradually south, on a giants’ stepladder formed by three flat, wide ledges. An almost vertical rock stairway led down the escarpment but from its base the gradient was easier and sometimes we were walking on level ground, through thick forest above tremendous drops, as the path sought another point from which it could continue the descent.

On each ledge were a few impoverished compounds and once we stopped to ask for
talla
. Approaching the
tukuls
, I saw a sight that briefly curdled my blood. In a stubble-field, beside a pile of red embers, an old man was hacking the head of a hideously human-looking form. When I came nearer, and realised that the corpse was a roasted baboon, I felt quite weak with relief. In this area baboons
do enormous damage to crops so they are sometimes pursued by men and dogs and clubbed to death when cornered. The victim is then roasted and fed to the dogs to increase their enthusiasm for the chase.

In this compound we were warmly welcomed by two old men and three old women. They gave us many pints of rough
talla
, many cups of weak coffee, an unfamiliar kind of chocolate-coloured
dabo
which was surprisingly palatable though it had a strange consistency (perhaps half-set cement would be similar), and cold stewed beans which both looked and tasted repulsive. The squalor of the
tukul
was extreme and the old people were grief-stricken because yesterday their only cow – due to calve soon – and their only ox died of some disease which has dysentery as its chief symptom. The magnitude of this disaster is hard for us to grasp. These animals were their most valuable possessions – worth at least two hundred dollars – and they have no hope of replacing them. The women wept as they told us, the men sat gazing dully at the floor. Now they are without an ox to pull the plough and the neighbours are too poor to lend them one. Yet when we left, full of their food and drink, they refused to accept any money.

During the rest of the descent it got hotter every moment and on the floor of the gorge the temperature must have been about 90ºF. When I looked up at the plateau from which we had come it seemed utterly inaccessible: and when I looked up at the plateau to which we were going that seemed equally
inaccessible
. Here we stood at the confluence of two rivers, both about two hundred yards wide. A week ago they would have been almost dry and even today they were hardly one-third full, but several streams of new flood-water (the colour of strong milky tea) went racing over boulders from between which little shrubs were being uprooted and swept away towards the Blue Nile, the White Nile and the Mediterranean.

Having crossed the Uacit we turned west up the tributary gorge. At the foot of each colossal mountain-wall strips of rich arable land were being ploughed and irrigated by men from invisible settlements on the plateaux, and twelve times we had to cross branches of the river. As we ascended, the ravine narrowed and the streams became deeper and faster, until we found it difficult to keep our feet on the stony bed against the powerful, waist-deep current. Here a slip would have been unfortunate, for no one could possibly swim in this swirling, boulderous torrent. Satan tackled these fordings gamely – give the devil his due. Half-way up the gorge we had been joined by a young priest riding a white horse and by two men driving donkeys. Undoubtedly this asinine company heartened Satan, who has probably never before travelled alone.

Even between wadings the going was tiring – over deep, fine sand or across stretches of big, loose stones. The discomfort of these stones was compensated for by their variety of tints – pale pink, primrose yellow, dark and light green, mauve, silver flecked with white, dark red, and a few chunks of what looked like Connemara marble.

The gorge had narrowed to about fifty yards when we came to the start of a two-hour climb as severe as any Semien ascent. Before going up we paused to rest and I offered the wilting Assefa some
dabo
, which Hussein had given me as a farewell present. Knowing it to have been baked by Muslims he sniffed at it suspiciously and asked if it contained milk, which would break his Lenten fasting laws. I took a chance and said ‘No milk – water’, and at once he ate it ravenously.

At 5.45 we began to climb and by 6.45 daylight had become bright moonlight, without any perceptible dusk. The exhilaration of such an ascent is so
tremendous
that I enjoyed every sweating step, though we were at the end of a long day. There was only one brief, unpleasant stretch, where the moon was hidden by an immeasurably high cliff. My torch didn’t help much and on one side of the rough rock stairs lay a deep ravine.

Then I heard a sound that took me back to the Semiens – the barking of hundreds of Gelada baboons. From every side they were abusing us and their shrieks, yells and screams, amplified and distorted by echoes, created an unearthly effect on this moonlit mountain, where previously the immense silence had been broken only by our footsteps.

I paused to wait for the others at the base of the escarpment and never shall I forget the beauty of that scene. Around me jagged escarpments rose sheer, and beyond the gorge lay the symmetrical, ebony line of the opposite plateau, and beneath a brilliant moon the strange splendour of this landscape seemed utterly unreal, with every abyss a well of blackness and every rocky pinnacle a monstrous tower of silver.

When we reached the top of the 10,000-foot Manz escarpment my shirt was sodden, for the normal highland evaporation had been unequal to the sweat produced by this climb. Here, to heighten the other-worldly feeling of my arrival at Manz, lightning such as I have never seen before went spurting in quivering flares of red and orange along the cloudy north-eastern horizon. I had expected an easy walk at this stage but several steep hills lay ahead and when the priest had remounted he led us towards them. During that last half-hour I exulted in the simple romance of our little procession, as we climbed a high ploughed hill
towards the tall black trees on its summit, following by moonlight the white horse with his white-robed, white-turbaned rider.

In this large compound the circular top storey of a stable is the guest-room. Within moments of our arrival a big fire had been lit so I took off my drenched shirt and sat close to the flames, eating new-baked
dabo
and curds. The local
talla
(
karakee
) is the best of all the highland beers – dark, slightly thick, bitter as unsweetened lemon-juice and miraculously restoring.

Our host and his sons are delightful, though very shy of the
faranj
. Oddly enough, no women have yet appeared. I asked if the locals often go to Addis – the capital is less than a week’s walk away – but none of the company had ever been there.

During supper Assefa told me about his own family, who live beyond the gorge. A year ago his two brothers and an aunt were killed by lightning, while sitting chatting in the aunt’s
tukul
, and he is the only surviving son. Because his parents are poor – ‘a little land, one donkey, one ox, two horses and three cows’ – his schooling is being paid for by a rich uncle who works as a waiter in Addis. Assefa’s intelligence is so limited that schooling is unlikely to be of the slightest benefit to him. But his parents imagine that once ‘educated’ he will be able to support them in their old age so, despite his brothers having been killed, they allow him to remain away from home and provide all his food – flour and spices.

This morning the clear dawn air felt icy. While Satan was being loaded I looked around my first Manze compound, which was built on a steep slope, with giant Semien-type thistles growing above it. There were three large dwellings, four two-storied stables-cum-granaries and three unusual igloo-type stone
grain-bins
. Everything had been solidly constructed with exceptional skill. Unlike the Semien people, these Manzes have been architecturally inspired by their climate. I noticed that cow-pats, with halved egg-shells embedded in them, had been stuck to the wall at eye-level beside each
tukul
door – presumably to ward off evil spirits.

By 6.30 a.m. the priest was leading us around the flank of the mountain on to a wide plain, dotted with round hills and flat-topped protuberances of bare volcanic rock which was riven by spectacular chasms.

On this vast expanse of yellow-green turf grazed thousands of tiny sheep. Their colouring was remarkably varied – black, red-brown, white, nigger-brown,
grey and every combination of all these colours. Many cattle also grazed here, and mules, horses and donkeys: but I saw no goats.

At ten o’clock we stopped at the priest’s wife’s grandmother’s compound and were entertained for two hours on roast barley, coffee,
injara
, bean-
wat
and, for the non-fasting
faranj
, three gourds of curds. This was a typical Manze compound with an attractive thatched archway over the entrance in the enclosure wall. Two cylindrical, straw-wrapped mud and wickerwork beehives were hanging below the eaves of the granary, each about four feet long and eighteen inches in circumference with a hole two inches in diameter at one end. Assefa told me that the highlanders consider bee-keeping ‘men’s work’ and traditionally the hives are cleaned on New Year’s Day, in September. Most of the honey is used for making
tej
, but sometimes it is eaten plain, as a delicacy. In Lalibela, at the Governor’s home, I was given a toffee-like confection made by spreading honey on a tray and leaving it beneath the sun for a few hours.

The priest was staying with his in-laws for the day so we continued on our own. All the morning Satan had been trotting contentedly behind the horse but now he lapsed into his evil ways and Assefa, who was complaining of leg-pains and general debility, left most of the work to me. However, on these glorious uplands – where the wind was cold, the sun warm and the sky patterned with high, white clouds – I felt so jubilant that the chasing of a demoniacal donkey seemed just another pleasure.

At three o’clock we reached this village, which is soon to be made the district administrative headquarters. Sheets of tin and piles of stones and building timber lie all over the place and I was startled to see a small tractor amidst the half-built houses. In the six years since Donald Levine wrote
Wax and Gold
there have been many changes here. He was the first
faranj
to explore Manz, but now a rough motor-track links it with Addis and during the dry season a slow bus rattles through twice a week to Mehal Meda, where one can buy
Italian-made
wine and beer. The rapid ‘progress’ of this area is perhaps owing to Haile Selassie’s special affection for Manz – the homeland of the present dynasty.

I wanted to spend the night in a settlement, and after half-an-hour at a
talla-beit
we continued down the main street. Then someone shouted and looking round I saw two angry men pursuing us. Within a moment we had been overtaken; they gripped my arms and claimed to be policemen, saying that I must come with them for questioning. One man was obviously drunk, neither wore anything remotely resembling a uniform and both were behaving
outrageously
. I therefore ‘resisted arrest’ and during the brawl that followed – watched
by half the village and by a cringing Assefa – the metal buckle of my bush-shirt was bent, my arms were bruised and the drunk gave me an agonising punch in the stomach. Then a third man intervened. He was wearing the remains of a uniform beneath a filthy
shamma
, and in poor English he confirmed that my attackers were policemen and explained that they wanted to see my passport. I replied furiously that though I have been in Ethiopia for three months the police had never before demanded my passport – which I don’t have with me, since the Begemdir Chief of Police had advised me to send it to Addis lest it should be stolen on the way. At this the third man accused me of lying, twisted my arms behind my back and marched me off to the police station – with the other two in attendance and a trembling Assefa driving Satan in our wake.