The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  Committed to our path, perhaps foolishly so, we revved up our engine and charged forward under full power. We were going to make it, but it would be close. The other boats still couldn’t see us, and in our desire to remain undetected we decided to stay unlit and try to evade them without them ever knowing we were there.

  Just as we were passing its bow, the outline of the first small ship loomed up in the darkness. We were less than a quarter mile away.

  “If we can see them, they can see us,” Herbert muttered.

  Seconds later, the sky above was illuminated with a shocking bright light; the nearest boat had shot up a white flare, which soared fifty metres up, cast a brief and unearthly light, and fizzled out.

  To my rattled brain, there was something unspeakably ominous about the launching of this flare. My first, horrified, thought was that it might be marking our position, signalling the start of a multi-boat assault. Then I realized, with great embarrassment, that the reverse was more likely true. We were the ones, after all, travelling unlit, like thieves in the night. This was a probably just a simple fishing boat, launching the flare out of panic to summon help and scare away evil-doers, just as the ship in the piracy report had. How shocking it must have been for them to suddenly discover an unlit vessel right under their bow – and in a place known to be frequented by pirates, where no honest person travels without lights.

  Thank goodness we were anonymous. We steamed away into the welcoming darkness, the night hiding our red faces. We could only imagine the fright we had given them.

  “Well,” I said a few minutes later as we collected ourselves in the cockpit, feeling more than a little foolish, “there we go. We have survived yet another attack by pirates.”

  “No,” said Herbert, looking over his shoulder at the lights of the boats receding behind us, “they have.”

  We arrived at Massawa, Eritrea, four stressful days after leaving Yemen. Massawa’s harbour was amazingly clean, tidy, and modern, with giant new cranes busily offloading goods from several large ships. The Eritreans are a handsome people – dark skin like Africans, but with fine facial features like Arabs or Indians. The women are incredibly beautiful, tall and slender with colourful translucent robes. After the uniformly repressive and monotonous head-to-toe black of the Yemeni women, these diaphanous Eritrean beauties were a real treat.

  We anchored the boat near a once-magnificent silver-domed palace that looked like – and was – the victim of a bomb attack. This used to be the governor’s palace, but it was badly damaged in the fierce fighting that almost destroyed Massawa in 1990. Several other buildings at the har-bourfront – including a glorious pillared bank that looked magnificent enough to have been a palace in its own right – were similarly destroyed, full of bullet holes and larger wounds from shells.

  Once ashore, we gravitated automatically to that magnificent domed palace. We climbed up the great curving double staircase that led to its grand second-floor entrance. We shuffled through shards of shattered ceramic tile that used to face the palace, along with broken pieces of marble. The big silver dome had huge holes in it and was three-quarters gone. Pockmarks from bullet fire were everywhere. Several ornately carved wooden doors hung limply inwards on rusted hinges. We peeked in one of the shuttered windows and were surprised to see fancy dining-room furniture still inside – velvet upholstered chairs, china cabinets, serving tables, all covered with dust. This palace, a passing man told us, used to belong to Haile Selassie, the last great emperor of Ethiopia. Herbert and the boys scrambled in through a half-boarded up window, but just as I was about to climb in, someone came by. I pretended I was just looking around, inspecting my shoes and the broken tiles on the ground until the others returned. Inside the dusty ruins, they had found a squatter sleeping.

  Massawa had once been, and will be again, a lovely town. It was the victim of a misguided policy of colonialism when the British, only the last in a series of rulers, had drawn political boundaries without much consideration of ethnic and cultural ones. Eritrea had been handed over on a platter to Ethiopia, a much larger neighbour that didn’t share the same culture. Ethiopia had been ruthless in its suppression and control of Eritrea, even going so far as to make its language illegal.

  Beginning in the 1960s, Eritrea had waged a bloody but successful popular revolt that had liberated its territory bit by bit. Finally, in 1993, the population virtually unanimously voted in a referendum to separate from Ethiopia, which finally resulted in Eritrea’s acceptance as a nation by the world community. But for each of the previous three years, Ethiopia had attacked Eritrea, trying at least to regain its valuable Red Sea ports, Assab and Massawa, where we now were. The last fighting had taken place just a few months before our visit, the latest ceasefire signed only weeks before.

  “Doesn’t it scare you that Massawa is one of the targeted cities?” I asked one man, whose nineteen-year-old son was now serving his compulsory duty in the armed forces.

  “Our fighters are very good, and they are fighting for their own homeland,” he explained. “The Ethiopian soldiers don’t really want to fight. They bring them here, and if they don’t fight, they get shot. They will never defeat us.”

  Our friend in Massawa was a man named Weldemicael, or Mike for short. Mike, in his late forties with a sprinkling of grey in his tightly curled hair, travelled by bicycle and lived in a typical crumbling stone house built by the Turks a century before, with twenty-foot ceilings and lots of gaps. He was quite well off by African standards, with electricity, TV, a fridge, and even a washing machine, with which he ran a laundry service. He took it upon himself to be our guide and friend, taking us to the market, showing us around, letting us use his phone, and arranging a driver to take us to Asmara, the capital of Eritrea.

  We were anxious to make that overnight trip as quickly as possible, because there was one thing we hated about Massawa – it was hot! We felt like lobsters boiled alive. No wonder all the stores closed up between noon and 4:00 p.m. But whereas the Massawans had their nice cool high-ceilinged houses in which to take their afternoon siestas, we had only our steaming steel lobster pot. Once we heard that Asmara was up in the mountains and cool, all we could think about was getting there. The Canadian embassy had been frantically e-mailing us, telling us not to stop anywhere in Eritrea on account of the war and undiscovered land-mines, but they confirmed at least that the road from Massawa to Asmara was clear, the only safe road in the country.

  The scenery along that road was spectacular. Before we arrived at the mountains, we drove through an area of desert and low scrub brush. Sometimes, we passed camels grazing in the sparse grass of a wadi, a dried riverbed chiselled out of the surrounding rocky sand. There were many bleached bones of long-dead animals, and once or twice the rusted carcass of a tank.

  As we left the arid coastal lowlands behind, the cool air embraced us. Nothing had prepared us for the beauty of these mountains. Each peak was covered with innumerable terraces. They had been created by generations of farmers painstakingly collecting the rocks that entirely covered the steep mountain faces and building them up into low walls. Looking at the work that went to build these hundreds of thousands of terraces, miles from any village or evidence of human habitation, made us consider how long it must have been that people were scratching out a living in this seemingly inhospitable place. This was one of the oldest states in the world, spanning more than two millennia.

  We passed many simple mountain villages, the inhabitants living in stone houses and looking picturesque in their swirling robes and with their working camels and donkeys alongside. There were hilltop monasteries that you could get to only by a steep, seven-kilometre walk – and only if you were a man. Eritrea has a population of about 3.5 million, about 1.5 million of whom are displaced refugees on account of the war, or victims of drought. A full 40 per cent of this struggling country’s population is barely clinging to life. We saw countless victims of the war, men missing arms or legs and hobbling around on wooden crutches. />
  After two and a half hours of driving on this steep and winding new road, we arrived in Asmara, perched near the top of this mountain chain, on hills noticeably greener than those that had preceded. Asmara was a clean, charming, and quiet little city, with a broad central avenue and many cafés opening up onto a main street dominated by a huge cathedral. The feeling was peaceful and cheerful. In the evening, it seemed as if the entire population was on the streets, promenading around, men holding hands, women linking arms, people chattering and laughing and enthusiastically greeting each other with a strange repetitious bumping of shoulders. Our friend Mike had told us that we could walk around in Asmara all night with pockets full of money and nothing would happen to us.

  Instead of staying in our usual ten dollar flea-bag room, we had splurged on a decent hotel for the night. We were feeling a little wrung out from all our recent experiences and felt we deserved a break. We were also starved for news – so much was happening in the world, and in the Middle East in particular, that we knew nothing about. Once ensconced in our suite, flopped on a big bed with the TV on, we could hardly be persuaded to move. What a treat! On Northern Magic, we were sleeping without pyjamas or even a top sheet, our beds soaking wet with sweat each morning. Here, we actually needed blankets! Here, we had a bathtub! Here, we had CNN!

  I got up only once during the night to check the anchor chain, and was reassured to find the hotel very securely anchored.

  We reluctantly checked out next morning for the trek back down the mountains, pleased with our interlude and with Eritreans in general, who impressed us as honest, civilized, decent people. It felt as if Eritrea was on the right track and, if given a chance, its people would build a fine country, well deserved after thirty years of desperate struggle.

  We continued on our way up the Red Sea, but our progress was disappointing. Something was wrong with the boat. After a slow overnight sail, we decided to stop at Difnein Island, about forty miles away from Massawa, where Herbert and Michael dove to see what was going on. They were dismayed to find a forest of algae and barnacles sprouting on our bottom. Our Kenyan antifouling paint was no good. In places it had peeled off, and the remnants of our old antifouling underneath, even half sanded off, repelled growth better than the brand-new paint we had so carefully applied with the help of Boniface and Hamisi just weeks before.

  All that work and money had been for nothing – no, not even for nothing, for we were far worse off than if we had just let the old paint be. Now, once a week, Herbert would have to dive down and scrape the bottom of the boat, an arduous and unpleasant task. Every time he had to do this, he emerged panting, dizzy, and in a bad mood.

  Arriving at Suakin, Sudan, we entered a narrow channel that was bounded by watchtowers, machine guns, and Howitzer gun emplacements. Not a very appealing welcome. There were tall brown mountains in the hazy distance, but the immediate surrounding was sandy desert. As we made our way down the channel, a flock of seven gangly pink flamingos flew overhead.

  Then we saw the ruins of old Suakin, an entire abandoned city made of coral stone, standing on a small island in the middle of the harbour. In the golden light of the afternoon sun, it looked spectacular and mysterious, with its crumbing minarets and half-collapsed buildings, mounds of rubble, and the odd lone wall holding out bravely. We shared the harbour with just one incredibly smelly fishing boat that was festooned with strings of drying fish and dozens of reeking shark fins. Originally, we had anchored ourselves downwind of that boat, but one whiff changed that plan.

  It was if we were the first foreigners ever to seek entry. Dozens of customs and immigration officers floated around in the dusty, mostly empty government buildings at the harbour, but no one seemed to know exactly what to do with us. Eventually, we got connected to an agent, a man named Mohammed, and with his help gained our shore passes. The next day, we were finally allowed to come ashore.

  Mohammed, a friendly black giant of a man in a long white robe and with size 15 feet, kindly showed us around the market. By now, we had seen hundreds of colourful outdoor markets, but none was quite like this. It wasn’t the food on display that was so impressive – in fact, the selection was disappointing, only the most basic vegetables and fruits – it was the people and animals of the Suakin market that spun our heads in a whirl.

  The transition from Eritrea to Sudan seemed to have thrown us back a thousand years. There were donkeys everywhere, braying their ineffectual rebellion against whip-wielding drivers. There were shaggy goat-sheep with funny long ears that hung down beside their heads and flopped around when they trotted, like a little girl’s pigtails. Some of the goats were skilled thieves, running through the market and snatching bites of the grains that were displayed on the ground in low wide baskets, grabbing one quick guilty mouthful before being beaten off by angry shopkeepers.

  There were women robed from head to toe in the colours of precious gems: ruby and topaz and sapphire. Some had masks over their lower faces the size and shape of a surgeon’s, ornamented with a beautiful and delicate tracery of tiny silver beads. Their hands were painted in fanciful designs in the dark red of henna, and from their wrists hung many bangles of gold and silver. Mohammed told us they belonged to a tribe from Saudi Arabia and were not really Sudanese, having arrived only some four hundred years ago.

  And there were tall, majestic black men in robes, long swords at their sides and nests of cloth on their heads. Most of them had decorative scars, three parallel lines, etched into their cheeks. Some of them were actually riding camels. If I looked hard enough, I was certain I would find the Three Kings around a corner somewhere, selecting the best frankincense and myrrh, both of which were on offer and whose perfume wafted pungently through the market.

  And the flies! They covered everything, clustering all over the pile of discarded sheep shins, hooves still attached, that lay rotting in front of the leathermaker, with his three types of whips on offer. Flies scrambled over the piles of garbage strewn everywhere amid the shabby shanties tacked together from burlap and tin from old fuel drums. Flies swarmed around the rubble of the ancient coral buildings. Flies crawled over the faces and even the lips of the Sudanese, who seemed hardly to notice their presence.

  Flies crawled by the hundreds over the piles of pita breads, the open baskets of dates, the bunches of blackening bananas, and the gory sides of mutton hanging in the butcher’s stall, whose rows of gleaming red and white ribs shimmered with clusters of moving, glistening black bodies. Many of the hanging carcasses had head, hooves, gonads, and long furry tail still attached. No doubt the stringy meat was being nicely tenderized by the ministrations of all these eager insects. It was also receiving an extra marinating, thanks to that unceasing north wind, in a piquant mixture of desert sand, camel dung, and pulverized donkey poop. All this at no extra charge, special price for you, today, my friend.

  Suakin was unlike any place we had ever seen before. Surrounded by the throngs of scar-faced men, the shy masked women, the curious young boys, the renegade sheep, the cacophonous donkeys, the belligerent camels, and the swarms of questing flies, our home in Canada had never seemed so far away.

  On our first afternoon, we grabbed the chance to explore those mysterious ruins. The three-thousand-year-old city had been abandoned since the Second World War, when it had ceased to serve its traditional purpose as a slave-trading centre – the last slave market in the world. Now its buildings were falling down, most of them already transformed into piles of coral stone rubble. Among the hundreds of mounds, however, there were still many standing houses, two mosques with tall minarets, and a small palace.

  The hills of rubble were tall enough that within minutes the five of us were having trouble keeping track of each other. I tried to keep up with Christopher, who was clambering over the four-metre-tall piles of stones with the ease of a mountain goat. I trailed behind, hampered by my modest floor-length skirt, worn in deference to the proprieties of this strict Muslim society in which most of the women kept at l
east their heads, if not their entire faces, covered. Finally, I was forced to hoist my voluminous skirts somewhat immodestly over one arm. But there was no one around to gawk; we had this fabulous abandoned city entirely to ourselves. Here and there, we stepped over the hooves, woolly skin, and bones of long-dead sheep.

  I had stopped to admire a single wall of what must have once been a beautiful house, because an ornately carved wooden window frame was still standing. Somewhere in the distance, I heard a call from Michael, and looking up I spotted him, waving from the top of the tallest point in the entire city, the slender, slightly leaning minaret of an ancient ruined mosque.

  I caught my breath, for he was standing on the outer rim of the tower, a slanted ledge with no railings. Abandoning my contemplation of the lone wall, I clambered over the obstacle course to where my son was perched high above. Long before I arrived, Jonathan had joined his brother on the top of the tipsy minaret.

  Soon, all of us had clambered in through a small window, climbed up the narrow spiral staircase, and from inside the tower enjoyed an eagle’s-eye view of the entire ruined city and Northern Magic anchored far below. We convinced the boys to climb down, whereupon they immediately launched themselves into a game of laser tag in the labyrinth of streets and ruined buildings. Christopher sketched out a map. By the time Herbert and I collected the three of them from the far-flung corners of their empire and returned to the boat, the boys were hot, panting, and satisfied.

  Our departure from Suakin was delayed by two things. The first was the failure of our transmission, which required us to take a bus ride into Port Sudan, where Herbert spent a day supervising the construction of a replacement part made out of welded-together bits and springs from old car transmissions. We named this strange contraption Frankenstein, and prayed it would bring us to Egypt, where we could have a new part delivered.