In Ethiopia with a Mule (28 page)

At 5.30 I returned to the Governor’s house to eat strips of fried dried beef and drink more high-class
talla
and
tej
. The highlanders must be among the world’s heaviest drinkers; several teachers have told me that children often roll in to school in a semi-inebriated condition, or give total inebriation as their reason for non-attendance. Yet I have never seen a drunken adult Ethiopian; and
talla
and
tej
are such healthy drinks that they cannot produce a hangover.

My knee doesn’t feel quite as painless tonight as it did this morning; but tomorrow we leave for Lalibela.

T
ODAY’S LANDSCAPE was a complete contrast to last week’s hot, silent world of golden-brown hills and valleys. Here we are on wide, cool uplands, where cattle and horses graze off sweeping yellow-green pastures, and the
new-ploughed
fields are grey-flecked with stones, and each hilltop has its tree-shaded settlement and streams sparkle every few miles.

Soon after midday we came to a compound where the menfolk were sitting drinking. One of them asked our destination, told me that we had gone astray and invited me to stop for
talla
before being guided back to the right track. Then, as I sat on a goatskin brought from a
tukul
in my honour, and felt
kindliness
lapping round me, I had to admit to myself that the locals’ attitude is important – though one may pretend at the time that it doesn’t much matter if most people glare and some people throw stones. Loneliness never touches me in uninhabited country, where my solitude is complete: but I do feel twinges of it where people are particularly unresponsive.

By four o’clock I was limping so badly that I received much incomprehensible medical advice from a group of men driving five spavined horses, piled high with hides, to Debre Tabor. Soon after we were overtaken by a tall, thin, elderly man with bright, deep-set eyes. He looked at my knee – now swelling again – muttered ‘
Metfo!
’ firmly took Jock’s halter, led us to this big village, installed me in his square, bug-infested hut and ordered his wife to scramble eggs for the
faranj
. He, too, had walked from Debre Tabor, and soon his young daughter appeared with a tin of warm water and a wooden bowl, to give us both a foot-wash and thorough massage from toes to knees. She paid special and rather painful attention to my right knee, and ended the ceremony by respectfully kissing my left big toe.

Kummerdingai is on a flat, windswept plateau, overlooked from the north by a range of rounded mountains. All day we had been climbing gradually and now the night air is so cold that I reckon we must be at about 9,000 feet. This seems a prosperous area, but my host’s family is very poor. They have no
talla
, and for Sunday supper they ate only
injara
and
berberie
paste; yet fifteen minutes ago the guest was given a second meal of
injara
and scrambled eggs.

Beyond Kummerdingai our track switchbacked for three hours over a series of steep, arid, smooth-topped ridges. Then we climbed to a wide, green plateau, where scores of horses were grazing, and from a large settlement two teachers came running towards us, shouting invitations to drink coffee. Settlements don’t normally have schools, but I soon discovered that the local headman is an unusually civic-spirited individual, who went to Gondar and persuaded the authorities to open a school, guaranteeing to organise the building of a schoolhouse by volunteer workers, and to provide for the teachers at his own expense. Happily, he has got the teachers he deserves – two refreshingly
idealistic
Gondares, who don’t at all resent living in discomfort and isolation.

Both the headman and his wife are charming, and he is one of the
handsomest
men I have ever seen – aged about fifty, well over six feet, broad-shouldered, with the head of a lion and the bearing of a king.

For two hours we sat in a large, clean, high-roofed
tukul
, drinking
talla
from glass carafes and coffee from tiny cups. Our conversation flowed with unusual ease, partly because the teachers spoke reasonably good English and partly because my host and hostess asked such intelligent questions. The coffee was being roasted, ground and brewed by a good-looking woman of twenty-eight, who had come from Gondar with the twenty-three-year-old boys as their joint temporary wife; recently her husband divorced her on grounds of infertility, but already she seems happy in her new rôle.

My
dula
split this morning, and when I was leaving my hostess noticed this and immediately fetched me a replacement which is much stronger than the original. It was now 11.30 and the sun felt uncomfortably strong, despite a cool, steady breeze. Yesterday the sky had become half-clouded over by eleven o’clock, but today there was no such relief and at this altitude the ultra-violet rays are quite fierce.

Before long I had again lost the right track, so we descended to a river, failed to receive directions from youths who were watering cattle, climbed a steep,
forested mountain, crossed a few barley fields and went wandering over wide, windy slopes of short, golden grass. Here there were no paths and Jock found the slippery turf difficult; but soon I saw a clear stretch of main track, on the flank of the opposite ridge, and for the next two hours we were crossing undulating ploughland – mile after mile of it, sweeping brownly up to the deep blue sky.

From the edge of this plateau I was suddenly looking down into an
enchanting
little valley, set deep amidst rough grey peaks. On a floor of red-gold grass tawny-thatched
tukuls
were surrounded by slim green trees and each colour glowed pure and soft in the mellow afternoon brilliance.

These scattered compounds make up the village of Sali, and this morning’s teachers had given me a letter to their two
confrères
here. When we arrived my hosts were still at school, but their servant – a squat adolescent girl, plain by highland standards – welcomed me warmly, though timidly, and provided a foot-wash and massage, followed by a meal of fried dried meat and cold
injara
. Then the headman brought gifts of
talla
for me and fodder for Jock. The locals are more likeable than my singularly unintelligent Debarak-born hosts, who long to give up teaching and get ‘better jobs’, preferably as bank clerks in Asmara or Addis.

Tomorrow I’m going to the village of Bethlehem, where Thomas Pakenham discovered a well-preserved medieval church in 1955. To get from there to Lalibela I must return to Sali, so Jock will have a day off.

This two-roomed mud hovel was built three years ago, when the school opened, and it seems to be bugless though it vibrates with fleas. (Compared with what I feel for bugs my feeling for fleas is a tender affection.) The boys want to sacrifice one of their beds in the inner room but, as I have not enough faith in the establishment’s buglessness to risk this, I will share the living-room floor with the servant.

What misery! Last night I woke with a searing pain in my chest, a savage headache and what felt like congestion of the lungs. Groping through my sacks in the dark I found aspirin and antibiotics and then sat with my back to the wall, painfully struggling to breathe – if I lay down I at once experienced a terrifying suffocating sensation. Yet I had gone to sleep at 9.30 feeling perfectly well, so this was no ordinary influenza or bronchitis germ. Presumably it was sunstroke and, as I wheezed agonisingly through four long, dark hours, I tried to forget that sunstroke can cause pneumonia. Dawn was breaking before the
suffocating
sensation lessened – but an hour after taking the second acromycin I felt so much better that I decided to act on the ‘Fresh Air and Exercise’ principle and stick to my plans for today.

At nine o’clock I set off, with two schoolboys as guides, and four hours’ walking took us to Bethlehem. All the ascents were steep and at every breath my lungs felt as though they were being simultaneously compressed by some
instrument
of torture and scraped with sandpaper. I had brought my spare shirt to drape over my head and neck – a precaution I should have taken yesterday – but by 10.30 kind clouds had half covered the sky.

Part of this walk was through ‘conventional’ mountain scenery that might have been in the Himalayan foothills, but most of it was across roughly beautiful ridges – some thickly forested, some ploughed, some grassy – and from each crest wild ranges of dusky-blue mountains were visible against the horizon.

Bethlehem is a big settlement on a high spur. When we arrived a service was being held, to celebrate one of the innumerable Coptic feasts in honour of Mariam, and from without the enclosure we could hear splendid chanting and the beating of many drums and the clicking of many
sistra
. I felt reluctant to distract the faithful by appearing during the service, but my guides hurried me in, and at once I was surrounded by the entire congregation and welcomed by several polite, unpredatory priests.

At first sight Bethlehem’s church looks like any other circular highland church. To quote from Thomas Pakenham: ‘The
tukul
church was simply a rude veneer overlying an older church. Preserved inside the circular mud walls and under the conical roof was a rectangular mediaeval church of the most exciting design: the vast stumpy timbers of the doorways, and the pink stone walls polished like porphyry were finer of their sort than any yet known … I had … discovered an entirely unknown mediaeval church of the most dramatically exciting style.’

At that time (eleven years ago) ‘there were many eighteenth-century frescoes painted on linen hangings superimposed on the pink stones of the west facade’. Now there are only marks on the walls, indicating where these frescoes once hung. The priests – assuming that I had come specially to look at the paintings – released a cataract of apologetic explanations, which conveyed nothing whatever to me. In fact I was not particularly disappointed, for the church itself had made my painful detour seem well worth while.

At the end of the service my guides and I were invited to accompany the priests, the village elders and the boy deacons to a broad ledge below the
enclosure, where we sat under giant wild fig-trees that looked as old as the world, and ate blessed hot
dabo
and drank thick grey-green
talla
from huge,
yellow-brown
gourds.

Beneath us a profound semicircular gorge separated our mountain from the blue-green-ochre slopes of its neighbours – and to all this wild glory cloud shadows ceaselessly brought subtle changes.

Soon a deacon came down the path carrying on his head a goatskin full of roast
atar
, and when the peas had been poured on to wicker platters these were laid within reach of every little group. Meanwhile other deacons were refilling gourds, fetching fresh pots of
talla
and distributing second rounds of
dabo
; and the priests and elders were discussing their own affairs, having lost interest in me as a
faranj
with characteristic rapidity. As a guest, however, I was not neglected: the chief priest repeatedly used his fly-whisk for my benefit and never allowed my gourd to be empty of
talla
or my fist of
dabo
. And here I felt such a deep contentment that this became – all unexpectedly – one of my happiest hours in these highlands.

There are two phases of enjoyment in journeying through an unknown country – the eager phase of wondering interest in every detail, and the relaxed phase when one feels no longer an observer of the exotic, but a participator in the rhythm of daily life. Now I am at ease among the highlanders, for wherever I go, in this static, stylised society, everything seems familiar. Not only the graceful formalities – significant though minute – but the long, lean faces and the clear brown eyes, the way men flick
atar
from palm to mouth, the movement of settling
shammas
about their bodies when they sit, their stance as they stand and talk, leaning their hands on the ends of a
dula
that rests across their shoulders, the harsh, staccato language, the expressive gesticulations, the sudden bursts of apparent anger that can quickly change to laughter. All this makes up a world which only two months ago seemed puzzling, amusing and sometimes a little frightening, yet which now seems as normal as my own far world away to the north.

Soon after we left Bethlehem it rained heavily for about twenty minutes. At sunset we were crossing the wide plain that lies below Sali and here the scene was so autumnal that it reminded me of Ireland in late September: above a
gold-brown
ridge lay sombre, torn clouds, against a blue-green horizon, and the cold wind was gusty.

This evening the headman and his wife called to see me, bringing another kettle of
talla
. All the usual questions were asked and my answers provoked
the usual reactions. It really distresses the highlanders to hear that I have no parents, brothers, sisters, husband or children. Some of the women almost weep in sympathy and an Amharic proverb is often quoted: ‘It is better to be unborn than to be alone.’

I felt better this morning, despite a restless night of wheezing. When we left Sali at 7.30 the sky was grey and for four hours we were climbing gradually across still, sunless widths of ploughland and moorland. From the edge of this plateau I saw a little town which seemed hardly twenty minutes walk away; but below the plateau there were so many deep chasms to be negotiated that it was one o’clock before we reached Nefas Moja.

At a
tej-beit
a kind woman filled me with
talla
,
tej
and tea, but would accept no payment. When we continued the sun was out, so I tied my spare shirt round my head. We were now back in ‘precipitous’ country, and during one nightmare descent poor Jock almost lost his footing on a narrow path overhanging a sheer drop of at least seven hundred feet. Then the track levelled out and for six miles wound round the flanks of forested mountains, with deep, golden valleys on our left, an upheaval of blue ranges beyond them and no settlements visible.

Soon we were overtaken by two men driving a donkey. The elder, aged about fifty, was small, slim and one-eyed – and I disliked the look in that one eye. The other, aged about twenty, was burly and thick-lipped, and at once he took Jock’s halter and urged me to walk on ahead. This is a common highland courtesy, but it was clear that my present companions were not being inspired by good manners. However, I feigned friendliness and walked beside the older man, behind Jock, watching my load. I felt so uneasy that had we met travellers going towards Nefas Moja I would have returned to the town with them.