The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  “My parents begged me to return home. They said Beelzebub was inside me. But I laughed at them and made fun of their poverty. Then one morning as 1 was shaving, I saw my face in the scrap of mirror. My eyes were bloodshot from drink and filled with anger. They were not my eyes — they belonged to the Lucifer.”

  Back at the taxi, Samson showed me his prize possession — an extremely large leather-bound Bible which he kept under the passenger seat. It had been printed near St Paul’s in London in 1673.

  The good book, Samson said, reminded him of the true path. But it also taught him that gold could be beneficial if given respect, if used for the good of all men. He had read the Books of Kings and Chronicles and knew all about King Solomon and the land of Ophir. Unable to believe my good fortune at meeting a man who was familiar with biblical history and who had worked as a gold miner, I took out my map and told Samson about my quest to find Solomon’s mines.

  “Traveling in Ethiopia is hard,” he said. “It’s not like America where the roads are as smooth as silk. Here the buses break down and the police want bribes. A foreigner searching for gold would surely be locked in a cell and beaten with a thorny stick.”

  I boasted that I had experience, that I’d only recently traveled to see the Shuar tribe who live deep in the jungles of the Peruvian Amazon. I told him how they shrink the heads of their enemies to the size of a grapefruit, and how they make manioc beer with the saliva of their ugliest crones. I omitted to say that the once feared Shuar warriors are now all fanatical Evangelists, desperate only for tambourines.

  “It sounds as if you are a man with no fear,” Samson replied, blowing into his hands. “But how will you find your way to the gold mines? You are a stranger in a foreign land.”

  “I need an assistant,” I replied meekly, “someone with a knowledge of history and gold. And if I’m to find King Solomon’s mines, I’ll need someone with a gigantic Bible to keep the Devil away.”

  THREE

  The Father of Madness

  “There is little doubt that Abyssinia is the real emporium of Ophir.”

  Frank Hayter, The Gold of Ethiopia

  In 1894, two engineers sought an audience with Emperor Menelik II, who had recently moved Ethiopia’s capital from Ankober to Addis Ababa. One was Swiss, the other French. They had realized that Menelik’s new capital would only expand if it were connected to the Red Sea coast; and so they proposed building a fabulous railway, linking Addis Ababa with the French port of Djibouti. The project would be a masterpiece of engineering skill. Never one to shun a modern idea, Menelik was intrigued by the scheme. But before he would agree to it, he set the two Europeans a task to test their expertise. They were confined to a room under armed guard, given some twine, an awl, a knife and a sheet of tanned leather, and ordered to make a pair of shoes before the sun rose at dawn. The engineers unpicked their own shoes and used them as patterns. They worked all night and, as the first rays of light swept across the capital, they presented the Emperor with a fine pair of leather shoes. Menelik pledged his support and three years later the railway was built.

  In the century since its completion, the railway has gradually decayed. In Ethiopia, if something breaks it stays broken. Now the paint on the railway carriages is peeling and the floorboards have cracked. The light-fittings have been stolen, the clock dials have lost their hands and the bolts have lost their nuts. Even the station-masters’ whistles no longer whistle. Packs of wild dogs feed on the rats which eat the cockroaches, which feast on the larvae which infest the wooden boards of the rolling stock.

  Samson and I turned up at the station in time to watch the third-class passengers being whipped into line with batons. As far as the police were concerned, third class were fair game. When the railway police had finished beating their passengers into submission, they turned their attention to the beggars. Addis Ababa is awash with desperate supplicants, lured from the countryside by the dream of streets paved with gold.

  I knew the journey to Harar was going to be bad when the train broke down three minutes after leaving Addis Ababa station. Samson, who had not been on a train before, pleaded with me to jump out into the sidings while we still had a chance to escape. Our cramped carriage was packed with a troop of riotous Somalis, and Samson was not happy. Understanding their language was, he said, a curse greater than any other imaginable. But the Somalis were nothing compared to the rain. The carriage leaked like a rusting sieve. In the summer such ventilation must be a boon, but during the heavy rains it soon drives you wild. Samson kept getting up to rearrange himself, frantic at the thought that the rain might drip on to his cherished Bible.

  I had promised him a considerable wage if he would lead me to the gold mines. I suspected I’d kick myself later for hiring someone about whom I knew so little, but Samson had agreed willingly and he seemed amiable enough, if a little preoccupied with the Devil and biblical passages. Leaving his brother to look after the taxi, he packed a plastic carrier bag with a few old clothes and waved his girlfriend goodbye.

  Before heading south to Samson’s ancestral home, we would make a detour. I wanted to visit the walled town of Harar in the east, for it is there that hyenas are said to guard King Solomon’s gold.

  Three hours after breaking down, the train came alive, pulling out through the endless shanty towns that surround the capital. Corrugated iron shacks stretched to the horizon, slotted together like tin-plate toys. A band of shoeless children were playing hide-and-seek in thickets of bamboo while their older sisters thrashed clothes on a rock in a stagnant pool. Five men were drinking beer from dark brown bottles beneath a eucalyptus tree. A blind man hobbled down to the tracks to relieve himself. As the train struggled to gather speed, the stench of raw sewage and methane became overpowering.

  I found myself watching the Somalis in fascination. Quite different from the Ethiopians, who frown on boisterous behavior, they spent the journey passing a demijohn of hard liquor around. When they were not drinking they sang, and when they were not singing, they chewed qat, the mildly narcotic leaf that is so popular in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia. Periodically Samson would look up from his Bible and mutter darkly. He said they would rob us in the night and might even throw us out of the train altogether. Somalis, he said, are in league with the Devil.

  Just before dusk, the rain eased and allowed the dying sun to illuminate a mass of gray clouds on the horizon. Ten minutes later we were sitting in total darkness. The carriage’s lights had long ago burnt out. As the hours slipped by, our eyes adjusted to the darkness, and the Somalis’ unruliness reached new heights. One man stood up and urinated the length of the aisle. Then two others had a competition to see how far they could spit. The man sitting across from us, a soft-spoken engineer with a cross pinned to his lapel, informed me that they were not Christians. The depraved conduct of the Somalis was not their fault, he said, but that of their religion.

  Samson had brought out a candle stub and was reading the Psalms by its flickering light. He promised to stay awake, to ensure that the Somalis kept their hands off our baggage and our throats. I drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming of the hyenas of Harar and their cache of treasure.

  By nine o’clock the next morning the Somalis had passed out, and the sun was burning high above a desert. I gazed through the window, still half asleep, and thanked God for the change in climate. Low thorn trees and cacti threw shadows across the panorama of sand. Rabbits scuttled about in search of food. We passed a huge herd of camels hobbled near the tracks, their clay-colored hides reflecting the light. There were camel calves, too, tied together like convicts in a chain. When the carriage halted at a small station, herdsmen swarmed up to the windows, selling fresh camel milk and salted cheese. I bought some of the milk, which was passed up in an old tin can. It was still warm.

  Twenty-six hours after leaving the capital, we pulled into the terminus at Dire Dawa. Given the state of the track and the train, it was a miracle that we had arrived at all.

  A
s usual, I had far too much luggage with me. I had left most of my books in Addis Ababa, selecting only a few at random to read along the way. Even so, I was surrounded by military canvas sacks full of supplies. I like to be prepared for any eventuality. What I was not prepared for was a full luggage inspection. All alighting passengers were frisked before they could leave the station and every piece of luggage was searched by a team of officious female guards. They were looking for contraband. When I had heaved my belongings on to the inspection table, all the guards ran over to rifle through them. I might not have had any contraband, but I did have all manner of imported curiosities, including an electric razor and an inflatable camping chair. The chair was viewed with great suspicion and I was ordered to inflate it. Then, to my great annoyance, it was confiscated.

  I was eager to press on to Harar, but Samson had fallen into conversation with a fruit-seller on the station platform. The man spoke of an immense cave on the outskirts of Dire Dawa, in which gold had once been mined. Deciding to investigate further we took rooms at the Hotel Ras and then made a beeline for breakfast. The hotel had seen better days. The telephones had lost their dials and the ceiling fans were missing their blades. The lavatories leaked, and the floor tiles were hideously chipped. We took seats at one end of the dining-room and ordered a large quantity of buttered toast. Samson seemed very happy and said that he always tried to stay in hotels when he had the chance. I asked which was his favourite hotel. Rubbing his eyes with his thumbs, he confessed that he had not stayed in one before.

  I am not sure why, but caves and gold tend to go hand in hand. Throughout Africa, Arabia and the Indian subcontinent, I’ve come across snippets of folklore which link the two firmly together. Underground caverns are of course the perfect place to hide treasure, just as they’re a good starting-point for digging shafts to reach gold-bearing veins. Of all the stories I have heard on the subject of caves and gold, the strangest was related by my father in his first travel book, Destination Mecca.

  Following Arab folklore, which says that Solomon took gold from the region north of Port Sudan, he prepared for an extensive search. Everyone he met on the Red Sea coast alerted him to the dangers he would face. Some warned of bandits. Others told him to beware of the Hadendowa tribe whom the British called “Fuzzy-Wuzzies” during their occupation of Sudan. They were reputed to hack off the limbs of intruders for sport. Still others spoke of death through thirst or hunger, or at the hand of supernatural forces. Undeterred, my father journeyed up the Red Sea coast. He hoped to meet a lone Irishman who had supposedly spent the previous twenty years prospecting the area for gold. He never found the Irishman but, after a long search, he came across hundreds of immense slag heaps that reminded him of the piles of coal tailings in Yorkshire. He reckoned they were probably thousands of years old and that the ancient Egyptians and perhaps Solomon’s legions had mined gold in the area.

  Not far from the slag heaps, he found a series of tunnels, many running more than three hundred feet into the ground. Once inside the workings,” he wrote, “there is something eerie about the silent maze of intersecting galleries, the abandoned piles of earthenware crucibles, the strange silence of the place.”

  But more peculiar still was the absence of carbon on the walls. Lamps or burning torches would have been required to illuminate the long tunnels and shafts, and they would have left a residue of carbon. When my father asked local people about the mines, they all gave the same reply. Obviously there was no sign of carbon, they said, because these mines were worked night and day by Solomon’s army of jinn.

  After breakfast Samson and I left the hotel, walked past the Coca Cola factory and made our way to the bazaar. On either side of it were hundreds of refugee tents but in the bazaar itself business was thriving. The stalls were piled high with dried ginger and spices, garlic and onions, rose-water, dried dates and limes, and on every table sticks of sandalwood incense were burning to ward off the flies.

  Now and again Samson would stop to ask a stall-holder about the legend of the cave filled with gold. Everyone he spoke to nodded vigorously. There was a legend, they said, and there was a cave filled with treasure. They were certain of that much. But when I inquired where the cave could be found, they swished at the flies and shook their heads.

  We pressed deeper into the bazaar. The entire market was roofed with a patchwork of sacking, but it didn’t keep out the heat or the flies. Children were whipping their home-made hoops through the streets past yet more stalls. I took a close look at the merchandize. As well as spices and fruit and vegetables, there were sacks of flour and oil donated by US Aid. Thousands of empty tin cans were on sale as well, and rusting car parts, tattered clothing and a sea of broken telephones, bicycles, kettles and shoes.

  A boy in a bright red shirt said he knew the cave. It wasn’t far and he would take us if his friend could tag along as well. What about the treasure? The boys shook their heads. No one ever went down there, they said, on account of the bats.

  Twenty minutes later, after rambling through a maze of back-streets and an enclosure filled with goats, we found ourselves looking down on a substantial crater that led to a wide-mouthed cave. From the smell it was evident that the crater and the front part of the cave were used as a public lavatory. Reluctantly, we climbed down.

  One of the boys offered to take us deep into the cave if we bought an old rubber boot and a cup of petrol. He needed these for a fire, which would provide light and keep away the bats. I handed over funds, and someone was sent to fetch the required materials.

  I was ready to endure hardship in my quest for Solomon’s mines but I’d not expected the first obstacle to be so unpleasant. The boy in the red shirt said it was the refugees who used the cave entrance as a lavatory He didn’t know where exactly they’d come from, but he said they squatted night and day.

  Eventually the rubber boot arrived, along with a cup of petrol and a metal tray. The oldest boy took charge. First he ripped the rubber boot into strips. Then he put the strips on the tray, poured the petrol over them, and struck a match. A few seconds later, the strips of boot were alight and belching black smoke. By now a crowd of children had joined us down in the hole. None of them seemed to mind sliding around in the faeces and choking in the smoke. They were determined not to miss the opportunity of watching a foreigner make a fool of himself.

  The blazing boot was carried ceremoniously into the cavern.

  Samson and I kept close behind. Thousands of orange-yellow eyes shone from the walls like stars on a clear night, but as soon as the first fumes billowed into the chamber all hell broke loose. Suddenly we were attacked by screaming harpies, diving, swooping and flapping, their leathery wings bombarding us from every direction. Then the rubber boot, which had heated the tray to an industrial temperature, went out, plunging us into darkness. Provoked beyond all reason, the bats redoubled their attack. I stood stock-still, hands drawn over my face to protect my eyes, trying desperately not to panic.

  Another boot was brought into the cave and ignited. I called out to Samson. Could he see any mine-shafts leading off or any sign of gold? Choking, he pointed to the far wall of the cavern. I peered through the mass of wings and dense smoke. In the lowest part of the wall there appeared to be a doorway which had long since been filled in with neatly cut blocks of stone. The boy in the red shirt said that a hermit used to live in the cave and that he drew paintings on the walls in bats’ blood. Behind the doorway there was a room, and in the room was the hermit’s skeleton. Local people had bricked up the doorway when the hermit died.

  The children didn’t know whether the hermit had been secretly searching for gold. What about the refugees? Had they ever been found digging for gold? The boys didn’t know that either. The refugees were very poor, they replied, in fact so poor that they lived in tattered tents and had almost no food — which made me wonder how such an ill-fed people could produce such monstrous amounts of sewage.

  After a cold shower back at the Hotel Ras, we took our
places in the dining-room once again. The waiter watched me show Samson how a formal table is laid, with multiple pieces of cutlery. He leaned over and adjusted the fly-paper which hung above our table. His shirt had become discolored over time and his bow tie was frayed and bleached from years of wear.

  “We used to lay the table like that,” he said wistfully. “That was in the old days, in 1965, when the Hotel Ras was a jewel. Of course I was a young man then, a foolish young man. But I remember those times. The parties, the music, the fine foreign food.”

  We ordered spaghetti and boiled potatoes, and the old waiter hurried off to serve a table of rowdy Russians on the other side of the room. I wondered what business had brought them to Dire Dawa. Gold, perhaps. They certainly had a great deal of money to spend, if the number of prostitutes at their table was anything to go by.

  Samson tried to count the dead and dying flies cemented to the fly-paper. I looked over at him as he counted energetically, and I congratulated myself. I was pleased with the way he had stood up to the rigours of the cave. He’d hardly complained, even when he realized that, like me, his hair was matted with bat excrement. I suggested we take high-powered torches and return to prize the blocks of stone out of the doorway. A mine-shaft might lie behind the blocked-up entrance. Samson ate his spaghetti without looking up.

  “The cave’s secret is obvious,” he said. “The Devil is waiting behind the doorway. He imprisoned the hermit and would do the same to us. As for the bats, they’re the Devil’s servants.”

  Unable to muster support for a second assault on the cave, I told Samson that we’d return to the bats if the hyenas of Harar didn’t live up to expectations. We left our bags at the hotel and then hailed a minibus heading for Harar.

  The road up to the walled city had been recently constructed by the Chinese. A sea of crooked-horned cattle ran down the olive-black asphalt as we approached, parting only long enough to allow us through. Like the road on which it drove, the minibus was brand-new and we were the only passengers, which made me suspicious. In a country like Ethiopia no vehicle travels if it’s not laden to bursting. The driver, whose face was tormented by a severe nervous tic, said he had won the vehicle in a game of cards. When I quizzed him why he had no other passengers, he changed the subject, declaring that Harar was the Pearl of Ethiopia. Once I’d set eyes on it, he said, I would weep like a child whose mother had died.