Garden of Eden (36 page)

At the appearance of the horses and riders the people who’ve been crowding around the Land Rover move slowly away without looking back. The men bearing the body move into place behind the horses, the villagers crowd around the pallet-bearers, and the procession begins to recede slowly. At once the wailing starts up again, although Iris can’t see the women making the noise. As Giyorgis puts their vehicle in gear and they drive on slowly past the rest of the huts, the keening fades away behind them. They drive on around a rising curve and a mountainside imposes itself between them and the procession.

“I was afraid,” Iris admits.

“Few strangers go down this road,” he says, explaining the villagers’ reaction to her. But what puzzles Iris most is that blankness on the people’s faces. She has seen enough Ethiopians now to know that they are normally as vivacious as any Canadians. She can’t think why they would wipe away all expression — the crowding she can understand if they were merely curious — but — could it be that mixed in with their curiosity was fear? Fear that she and Giyorgis were police or maybe government officials who might cause them trouble? Wouldn’t they just run away instead? She would like to ask Giyorgis what he thinks about this, but when she reflects, she remembers that he seemed not even to notice it. And he has had to explain the peculiarities of his country to her so many times since she got into his vehicle, more than once she felt her questions about the sad and ugly things she has observed have humiliated him, that she feels she will let this one pass.

They drive on in silence a few more miles, and Iris notices that the countryside is not only far more rugged than that which she saw
farther to the south yesterday, but that there is also much less vegetation and what there is appears parched, in need of rain. And the dust! The farther they go into the mountains and north toward the famous town of Lalibela, the drier and dustier it gets. On curves rising up a mountainside once or twice Giyorgis, having to drive very slowly because of the extruding rocks on the road, actually spins out, the layer of dry, loose dirt is so thick. He has to back up a little until his wheels find a place to grip, and then inch slowly upward again. Were it not for a lifetime as a country girl driving at least once a year somewhere in conditions like this — and don’t forget driving through blizzards in winter, she reminds herself — Iris would be alarmed, might even want to turn back.

Suddenly they round another curve and there it is: on the flat top of a mountain two mountains beyond, shining white in the afternoon sun, sits the magical town, Lalibela. Giyorgis, smiling proudly and with a touch of wonder of his own, slows so she can take a good look.

She has come all this way to Africa, braved this godforsaken road to ride for days by herself with only a stranger for a companion and, just when she’s afraid she’s approaching the limits of her endurance, there is her destination shining in the sun like some magnificent, lost, mythical city.

The child herders, the beggars, the armed gatekeeper, the funeral, her fear at the people crowding around the car pale and disappear. She has begun to tremble. She’s a
voyageur,
an Indiana Jones, and now, at last, after a cautious and smug lifetime, she understands what drives such people — the Henry Kelseys, Alexander Mackenzies, even the Irish soldier, Palliser, of her home landscape. Surely it is for moments like this that they yearn, that repay them a thousand times over for the hardships of the journey, for the terrors, for the suffering, for even the loved ones left behind — yes, the love abandoned, done without. Barney should be here too, but the thought vanishes as quickly as it comes. It is enough to be here herself.

They keep advancing, still climbing, the town appearing and disappearing with the twists in the road, and just when Iris thinks Lalibela is surely just over the next rise, instead of climbing they drop
a long way to cross a wide valley. They’re just in time to see a large silver plane circling above them — a plane? Here? Who on earth could be on board?

Then she sees that far to their left there is a wide landing strip, and next to it, another, apparently even bigger one being built. Iris keeps her eyes on the shining dot that is the circling plane, half thinking she’s imagining it, even though she knows she’s not. It’s just that a plane, especially one of such size and modernity breaks her reverie of being intrepid, trail-blazing, struggling into wilderness and beyond it into the land of the mythical. Abruptly, the ordinary world she has forgotten intrudes, breaking the spell.

They slow to a crawl. Iris sees a couple of yellow bulldozers, but mostly the work appears to be being done with pick and shovel in clouds of dust by a legion of tall, extremely slender men wearing that long piece of discoloured cotton that they wrap around themselves to make a shawl and headcovering — Giyorgis finally tells her it’s a
shamma
— which they wear over their worn jackets and shirts, and below that, trousers or shorts or a sort of skirt formed with another length of cotton. On their feet they wear leather-thong sandals. The incongruity of the malnourished, inadequately clad men with their picks and shovels and the airplane circling above drives her into silence.

They begin to climb again as Iris catches a glimpse of the plane descending to land, while on their right a rickety, aged bus leaves the parking area, lumbers across the road behind them and, kicking up a trail of dust, heads down a track toward the landing strip.

“Tourists,” Giyorgis says.

“What?” Iris says, although she has heard him perfectly well. She thinks of the two days of driving she has endured, today especially over nearly impassable trails, when she might have flown to the very doorstep of the rock churches. She finds she wouldn’t have missed the drive; it has made Lalibela only more precious.

Behind the flat mountaintop on which the town sits glinting in the sunshine is a distant, high, blue mountain range, and further ranges disappear into the blue of the sky behind it, as if for all the rest of the world, to its faraway, mythical edge, there are only uninhabited,
rugged mountains. Giyorgis points to a distinctive, high mountain with a flat-topped mountain in front of it to the northeast of the town and says, “Is called Abuna Yosef. Is more than four thousand metres. Lalibela is twenty-five hundred metres.” Automatically, she converts to feet, more than eight thousand.

The loose dirt and dust they’re driving through has taken on a red hue, and as they drive up the final road to the edge of the town meeting ragged, barefoot women bent almost double under enormous loads of firewood they’re carrying on their backs down the mountain, she sees that the town’s gleaming whiteness was an illusion. This town is red: red stone, red dust, red bricks.

Giyorgis is ready with the facts: “Volcanic rock. Red tufa.”

It’s like a town in the Arizona desert, it’s so dry. There are many dusty green trees but beneath them grows not a blade of grass, not a forb or a sedge or a lovely flowering shrub. Just rose-coloured or pink-tinted dirt, and dust inches thick, everywhere she looks. And what she thought was a city turns out to be only a town, its buildings strewn haphazardly up the sides and on flat spaces of this mountain which, within the general flatness, turns out to have short, but steep rises and narrow, dramatic clefts. She sees too that here the houses, still the familiar conical ones with the thatched roofs, are built of unpolished wine-coloured stone and that some are, surprisingly, two storeys high.

Immediately on their left is a handsome new-looking hotel built of red stone blocks. It occupies its own flat-topped rise, really the top of a cliff, and has the usual wide gate and fence, although here the fence is only barbed wire and shrubbery, not an actual concrete-block wall as she saw in Addis and Kombolcha. A valley inserts itself between this building and the first buildings of the town isolating the hotel. The dusty road dips and rises again, before it curves out of sight behind trees, another small hill, and the town proper.

“This is the Hilton,” Giyorgis tells her, “but the name is called ‘Roha,’” he adds. “Is the name of this town before King Lalibela came and built his churches.”

Iris says, “I wonder what the deal is? That Hilton would build it and the Ethiopian government run it? Or did the government just
take it over?” Vaguely, she recognizes this as not the sort of question — having to do with politics and government — that in the past she would have thought to ask. Giyorgis shrugs. They drive past what she now knows are the inevitable guards. It occurs to her to wonder who it is, in a place as remote as this, the guards are here to keep out. The poor again, she supposes. Giyorgis greets them and they call back a greeting, he parks their vehicle in the small, empty paved lot — there’s no sign of the bus from the landing strip yet — and, walking stiffly, Iris has trouble straightening up, they go inside to register.

The interior has that tropical-country look that Iris recognizes from the travel channel on television and from magazines: low ceilings, carpeted stone floors, a few wide steps leading to different levels, and Ethiopian rugs, wall hangings, and posters decorating the thick supporting pillars.

With a tentative expression, Giyorgis taps a sign posted on the wall near the desk informing guests that there is running, cold water only, for an hour each evening and each morning, and electricity only from six to eleven in the evenings. Iris is taken aback but then shrugs. A small matter. It will soon be dark, already it’s dusky in the lobby, and she’s famished and tired out and aching in every joint and not about to quibble over niggling matters like running water and electricity.

By the time she and Giyorgis meet in the bar, it is full of the tourists from the plane. Most of them are middle-aged, the men with big stomachs, the women nondescript, grey-haired, tweedy. They all look wealthy though, and are speaking German. In another corner a smaller but louder contingent is speaking French. She and Giyorgis eat dinner in the elegant dining room, served by dignified local waiters, but without choice — there is only one meal being served. On their left at a long banquet table the Germans and their guide talk quietly as they eat and drink, and at another table at the back of the big, high-ceilinged room, laughter from the French tourists rises above the drone of voices. The only other guests are four people sharing a table behind Iris and Giyorgis. In a lull in the general buzz, Iris thinks she hears British accents. Aside from the waiters, Giyorgis is the only Ethiopian in the room.

By ten o’clock they are in their beds in rooms side by side. Iris is so tired that the night passes rapidly, dreamlessly; she doesn’t even have hot flashes, or if she does, she doesn’t wake during them. At dawn she is up in order to take advantage of the water supply, which comes gurgling and banging, and after a quick, light breakfast, which she and her driver have alone in the empty dining room — real tourists apparently sleep later than this — they head out in the Land Rover to visit, at last, the churches they’ve come so far to see.

They hire a guide, a slender, handsome young man, whose grasp of English is better than Giyorgis’s. He turns out to be not a professional guide but a friend of Giyorgis’s, who got to know him during his trips to Lalibela during the famine years of the late eighties. When Iris wonders if they shouldn’t have a professional guide, one is waiting eagerly at the hotel gate, Giyorgis explains to her in a careful way, as if it is important that she understand this, that Yared, who is seventeen or eighteen years old, is a student. He wants to go to university in Addis, but he is very poor, he needs to earn money. He’s neatly dressed in a clean, short-sleeved white shirt and navy trousers, although he’s wearing the leather sandals of the poor on his bare feet. He smiles tensely at her, and reluctantly Iris agrees to hire him. Delighted, he jumps quickly into the back seat.

The churches, Yared explains as they drive, are in three separate clusters short distances apart, although the third location has only one church, St. George’s, the famous cross-shaped church. He seems to think Iris already knows at least this much about them, when actually, although she doesn’t say so, she heard of them for the first time in her life only last night. It might be as much as a mile from the hotel gate to the first cluster of churches, none of which can be seen from a distance.

Yared leads them through the rituals necessary to get them past the courtyard of the first and main church. This involves courteously asking the beggars, both children and adults in their colourless rags, to move back, and trying to shield Iris without appearing to, from the emaciated young men selling handcrafted items and crosses
which they claim are solid silver, but which, by the men’s very surreptitiousness Iris suspects aren’t, and further, might be stolen. Or maybe it’s just that they don’t want the handful of priests seated on a stone bench across the courtyard to see what they’re up to. He shields her too from the children, who merely want to get close to stare, giggle, and possibly touch the
ferenji.
She has to pay a hundred-birr entrance fee, about twenty dollars, which seems high to Iris, but in a country so poor, how can she complain?

Two old beggar women follow her as she descends the stone steps following Yared and Giyorgis into the courtyard of the first group of churches. The steps are so old that their contours are worn to smooth concavity.

“Christos, Christos
,” the beggar women say, or, “
Sela Selassie,
” and although “Christos” is plain enough, and she knows they’re asking for alms, she has to ask Yared for a translation of the other.

“Selassie is the trinity,” he explains. “Haile Selassie is the power of the trinity.” She gives them each a birr.

These two old women are so thin that they might well be dying of starvation. At the bottom of the stairs, when she turns to look back, she has to look twice before she can separate them from the stone walls they lean against. Their skin colour from a lifetime out of doors, and the stony grey-beige of their aged, dirty rags, are the same colour as the rocks. It is as if they are wraiths, rock-ghosts, that detach themselves from the walls at sunrise and at nightfall meld silently back into them. She has never seen human beings this destitute. In an undertone she asks Yared how old he thinks the women might be. He says, “Maybe in their forties.”