In Ethiopia with a Mule (2 page)

This, then, was the background to my journey – a country not quite of Africa nor of Asia, with a civilisation that became completely introverted as time passed. During many centuries the currents of new thought merely lapped the Red Sea coast, reaching the interior as disturbing rumours to be at once rejected for seeming far less credible than the legends of the saints in the monastery manuscripts.

The preparations for a walking-tour are simple. I only had to buy a large rucksack, a strong pair of boots, a one-gallon plastic water-bottle, a Husky outfit of jacket, pants and socks that was light to carry but warm to wear, a few basic medical supplies, half-a-dozen notebooks and a dozen ballpoint pens. To maintain contact with my own civilisation I also packed a Shakespeare anthology,
Tom
Jones
, W. E. Carr’s
Poetry of the Middle Ages
, Cooper’s
Talleyrand
and Boros’
Pain and Providence
. Unfortunately other books inexplicably accumulated in my rucksack between London and Massawah and when climbing to the
8,000-foot
Eritrean plateau I found myself carrying a weight of fifty pounds.

I had been warned – by people who knew people who knew people who had been to Ethiopia – that the Ethiopian authorities distrust foreigners and would only give me a thirty-day tourist visa. Happily this proved to be nonsense. When I had presented my passport at the Ethiopian Embassy in London, filled in an application form for a six-months’ Business Visa and paid the fee, I was asked to call again at 10 a.m. the next day. I came at 10.05 a.m., expecting to encounter a large snag; but my passport had been duly signed and sealed and was at once delivered.

The real difficulty concerned maps. There is no such thing as a good map of Ethiopia, but Barbara Toy generously presented me with the Italian maps that she had used on her Ethiopian journey and these suited me perfectly. They were inaccurate enough to give me, at times, the gratifying illusion of being an explorer in trackless wastes – yet accurate enough to tell me that Addis Ababa is due south of Massawah. So it didn’t matter if I went mildly astray every day en route, provided I didn’t go east or west for too long at a stretch.

My homework was a little more arduous. I read most of the recently published books on Ethiopia and carefully studied
Wax and Gold
*
– which greatly increased the pleasure of my journey, for without Dr Levine’s
sympathetic
analysis of the Amharic culture I would have gone wandering through the highlands in a permanent daze of incomprehension.

Then, having had my ‘shots’, I flew to Cairo on 3 December, 1966, and eight days later boarded a Norwegian boat, at Port Said, for the five-day voyage to Massawah.

A
LL DAY THE COAST was in sight – a long line of low mountains, of en indistinguishable from the pale clouds that hung above it. No one could tell me where the Sudan ended and Ethiopia began, but at 5.40 p.m. we were approaching Massawah and a crimson sun slid quickly out of sight behind the high plateau of Abyssinia.

We anchored a mile offshore, to await our pilot, and as I stood impatiently on deck a tawny afterglow still lay above the mountains and a quarter-moon spread its golden, mobile sheen across the water. Near here stood Adulis, the principal port of the Aksumite Empire, and in the first century AD the anonymous author of the
Periplus of the Erythraean
Sea
wrote, ‘There are imported into these places double-fringed mantles; many articles of flint glass; brass, which is used for ornament and in cut pieces instead of coin; iron, which is made into spears used against wild beasts, and in their wars; wine of Laodicea and Italy, not much; olive oil, not much; for the King gold and silver plate made after the fashion of the country—— There are exported from these places ivory and tortoise-shell and rhinoceros-horn’. Then the traders feared the attacks of ‘barbarous natives’. Now my luxury-loaded Italian fellow-passengers fear the attacks of
shifta
(bandits) on their way to Asmara tomorrow.

Following the arrival of our pilot-boat we spent two hours with easy-going Immigration and Sanitary officials. The Passport officer was a small-boned, dark-skinned little man, with an expression like a grieved monkey, and he warned me against the natives of Massawah – a pack of ‘murderous, thieving Muslims’. From this I rightly deduced that he was a highlander. His home is in Tigre and he hates the climate here, but says that because the locals are so ignorant and unreliable highlanders have to fill all responsible posts.

At last the Customs officers deigned to come on duty and we were permitted to go ashore. The Customs shed was comically vast – it could easily have held two hundred passengers instead of seven. My rucksack and general appearance gave the usual convenient impression of grinding poverty, and I was chalked
and sympathetically waved on my way with a three months’ supply of tax-free cigarettes undetected.

I cannot remember feeling so alien during my first hours in any other country. One doesn’t think of Massawah as being Ethiopian, in any sense but the political, and I should find the atmosphere of an essentially Arab town quite familiar. Yet enough of the singularity of the tableland has spilled over to the coast for newcomers to be at once aware of Ethiopia’s isolation – even where contact with the outside world is closest.

Certainly there is no outward evidence of isolation here. I walked first along the sophisticated Italianate street that faces the quays and passed many groups of foreign sailors or local officials sitting at little tables drinking iced beer, or coffee, or smuggled spirits. Several beggars tried to ‘help’ by getting hold of my rucksack and leading me to the doss-house of their choice; but they were easily deterred and no one followed when I turned into a rough, narrow, ill-lit lane between tall houses. Most of these houses were brothels, and young Tigrean girls were sitting in the doorways playing with their toddlers (prostitution and family life are not incompatible here), or dressing each other’s hair in the multitudinous tiny plaits traditional among Tigrean women. In the gloom I was often mistaken for a customer and, on realising their error, most of the girls either jeered at me rather nastily or sent their children to beg from me.

However, this ‘hotel’ is congenial. The friendly owner – an elderly, handsome Tigrean woman – thinks I’m the funniest thing that has happened in years. She is now sitting nearby, with two neighbours, watching me write. Apparently the neighbours were called in because such a good joke has to be shared.

From the alleyway outside a high door – marked
Pensione
– opens into a large, square room where a few ugly metal tables and plastic chairs stand about on a wilderness of concrete flooring. Ethiopian Christians are very devoted to the Blessed Virgin, and two pictures of Our Lady of Good Counsel hang on the walls between several less edifying calendar ladies advertising Italian imports. Behind this ‘foyer’ – separated from it by wooden lattice-work – is a small, unroofed space, with a tiny charcoal cooking-stove in one corner and some unsteady wooden stairs leading up to a flat roof, off which are five clean three-bed bedrooms. Other hideous tables and chairs furnish this ‘lounge’, where I’m now sitting beneath a corrugated iron roof. The shutters of the unglazed windows and the upper half of the bedroom walls are also of lattice-work – attractive to the eye, but not conducive either to privacy or quiet. The loo hangs opposite me, adhering most oddly to the next-door wall, and the plumbing is weird and
nauseating in the extreme. Theoretically all should be well, since it is a Western loo with a plug that pulls successfully – one can see the water running towards it through transparent plastic pipes fixed to the roof. The snag is that nothing seems to get any further than a cess-pool, covered with an iron grille, which stands in the centre of the kitchen floor.

Tonight the heat is appalling and, while writing this, I’ve absorbed five pints of
talla
– the cloudy, home-brewed highland beer. As far as I can feel it is totally unintoxicating, though very refreshing and palatable.

At lunchtime today I had my first meal of
injara
and
wat
.
Injara
has a bitter taste and a gritty texture; it looks and feels exactly like damp, grey foam-rubber, but is a fermented bread made from
teff
– the cereal grain peculiar to the Ethiopian highlands – and cooked in sheets about half-an-inch thick and two feet in
circumference
. These are double-folded and served beside one’s plate of
wat
– a highly spiced stew of meat or chicken. One eats with the right hand (only), by mopping up the
wat
with the
injara
; and, as in Muslim countries, a servant pours water over one’s hands before and after each meal.

During the afternoon a blessed silence enfolds sun-stricken Massawah and I slept soundly from two to five. By then it was a little less hellish outside, so I set forth to see the sights – not that there are many to see here. Visitors are forbidden to enter the grounds of the Imperial Palace and women are forbidden to enter the mosques – of which there are several, though only the new Grand Mosque looks interesting. It was built by the Emperor, presumably to placate his
rebellious
Eritrean Muslim subjects.
*

In the old city, south of the port, the architecture is pure Arabic, though many of the present population have migrated from the highlands. The narrow streets of solid stone or brick houses seem full of ancient mystery and maimed beggars drag themselves through the dust while diseased dogs slink away at one’s approach, looking as though they wanted to snarl but hadn’t enough energy left.

The process of converting a cyclist into a hiker is being rather painful. Today I only walked eighteen miles, yet now I feel more tired than if I had cycled a hundred and eighteen; but this is perhaps understandable, as I’m out of training and was carrying fifty pounds from 3,000 to 6,000 feet. At the moment my shoulder muscles are fiery with pain and – despite the most comfortable of boots – three massive blisters are throbbing on each foot.

Yesterday Commander Iskander Desta of the Imperial Navy kindly suggested that I should be driven across the coastal desert strip in a naval jeep, which collected me from my
pensione
at eight o’clock this morning. The Eritrean driver spoke fluent Italian, but no English, and the dozen English-speaking cadets, who were going to spend Sunday at the 4,000-feet Embatcallo naval rest-camp, were not disposed to fraternise with the
faranj
(foreigner).

Beyond a straggle of new ‘council houses’ our road climbed through hillocks of red sand, scattered with small green shrubs. Then these hillocks became hills of bare rock – and all the time the high mountains were looming ahead in a blue haze, sharpening my eagerness to get among them. We passed one primitive settlement of half-a-dozen oblong huts, which is marked as a village on my map – perhaps because Coca-Cola is sold outside one of the shacks – and a few miles further on the road tackled the steep escarpment in a series of
brilliantly-engineered
hairpin bends.

By 10 a.m. I had been released from the truck at 3,000 feet, where mountains surrounded me on every side. Here the climate was tolerable, though for an hour or so sweat showered off me at every step; then clouds quickly piled up and a cool breeze rose. On the four-mile stretch to Ghinda I passed many other walkers – ragged, lean Muslim tribesmen, highlanders draped in
shammas
(white cotton cloaks) and skinny children herding even skinnier goats. Everyone stared at me suspiciously and only once was my greeting returned – by a tall, ebony-skinned tribesman. One doesn’t resent such aloofness, since surprise is probably the main cause, but I soon stopped being so unrewardingly amiable. Already I notice a difference between cycling
and walking in an unknown country; on foot one is even more sensitive to the local attitude and one feels a little less secure.

Ghinda is described in my official guidebook as ‘a small resort city’ to which people come to escape the cold of Asmara or the heat of Massawah. In fact it is a small town of tin-roofed hovels from which I personally would be glad to escape in any direction.

Just beyond Ghinda a squad of children advised me to avoid the main road and guided me up a steep short cut for about two miles. Later I took two other short cuts and discovered that on this loose, dry soil what looks like a reasonable climb is often an exhausting struggle. The busy Massawah–Asmara railway runs near the road and when I was attempting one short cut, up the embankment, I went sliding down on to the track just as an antiquated engine, belching clouds of black smoke, came round the corner twenty yards away. Happily this line does not cater for express trains; extermination by a steam-engine would be a prosaic ending to travels in Ethiopia. During the abrupt descent my knees had been deeply grazed and my hands torn by the thorny shrubs at which I clutched; but this was merely the initiation ceremony. When one has been injured by a country, then one really has arrived.

From Ghinda to the outskirts of Nefasit the rounded mountains and wooded gorges appear to be almost entirely uninhabited and uncultivated. Even this colonised fringe of Ethiopia feels desolate and the silence is profound. Many of the lower slopes are covered in green bushes, giant cacti and groves of tall trees; one lovely shrub blazes with flowers like the flames of a turf-fire and vividly coloured birds dart silently through the undergrowth. Around the few villages some terracing is attempted, but it looks crude and ineffective. My impression so far is of a country much more primitive, in both domestic architecture and agriculture, than any Asian region I know.

At intervals the weekend traffic passed me – Italian or American cars returning to Asmara in convoys of six or eight as a precaution against
shifta
. (There are 5,000 Americans stationed at the Kagnew Military Base near Asmara.) As another precaution two policemen sat watchfully by the roadside every five miles, leaning on antediluvian rifles. The
shifta
are said to be far better armed than the police, their foreign backers having equipped them well. Many cars stopped to offer me a lift, and soon this kindness became tiresome; it is difficult to persuade motorists that two legs can also get one there – at a later date. The last five miles were a hell of muscular exhaustion. At every other kilometre stone I had to stop, remove my rucksack and rest briefly.

Here I’m staying in a clean Italian doss-house and being overcharged for everything by the Eritrean-born proprietress. While writing this I’ve got slightly drunk on a seven-and-six-penny bottle of odious vinegar called ‘vino bianco’ – produced by the Italians in Asmara.

I awoke at 6.30 to see a cool, pearly dawn light on mountains that were framed in bougainvillea. The Eritrean servant indicated that
mangiare
was impossible, so by 6.50 I was on the road. After ten hours unbroken sleep my back felt
surprisingly
unstiff, though my feet were even more painful than I had expected.

From Nefasit the road zigzagged towards a high pass and before I had covered four miles all my foot-blisters burst wetly. During the next two hours of weakening pain only my flask of ‘emergency’ brandy kept me going. It seemed reckless to use it so soon, yet this did feel like a genuine emergency. Several cars stopped to offer me tempting lifts, but I then supported a theory (since abandoned) that the quickest way to cure footsores is by walking on them.

Here the road ran level, winding from mountain to mountain, and the whole wide sweep of hills and valleys was deserted and silent. These mountains are gently curved, though steep, and despite the immense heights and depths one sees none of the expected precipices or crags.

The sky remained cloudless all day, though a cool breeze countered any sensation of excessive heat. However, the sun’s ultra-violet rays are severe at this altitude and the back of my neck has been badly burned.

It takes a few days for one’s system to adjust to being above 6,000 feet and as I struggled towards the 8,000 foot plateau my head was throbbing from too little oxygen and my back from too much weight, though I hardly noticed these details because of the pain of my feet. Then at last I was there – exultantly
overlooking
a gleaming mass of pure white cloud that concealed the lower hills. But on this exposed ridge a strong, cold wind blew dust around me in stinging whirls and pierced through my sweat-soaked shirt; so I soon began to hobble down the slight incline towards Asmara.