The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  “The great temple,” I said, leaning back in a hurry, “I’ve been to Mount Moriah, where it supposedly stood.”

  “That’s a start, but what do you know of God’s Land?”

  I didn’t know what he meant.

  “I am talking about the ancient Egyptian Land of Punt,” he said.

  Then he licked his finger and held it in the air.

  “To understand the puzzle of Solomon’s mines,” he said, “you have to understand the riddle of Punt – the place from which Egypt once got its gold.”

  “Do you think Ophir and Punt were the same place?”

  The shopkeeper ignored my question.

  “The Israelites’ kingdom was destroyed after Solomon,” he said, “and their records were lost with them. You will find no clues from Solomon’s time, or from the centuries which followed. You have to go backwards, not forwards... back to the Egyptians.”

  He got up to serve a customer and then returned to resume the conversation.

  “What do you know about Queen Hatshepsut?”

  I shrugged.

  “There is a temple on the western side of Thebes called Deir el-Bahri. On its southern wall are hieroglyphs which I have seen with my own eyes! They show Queen Hatshepsut’s fleet returning from Punt. The journey wasn’t long before Solomon’s reign!”

  He thrust his face forward into mine, his eyes glittering with excitement. I tried not to flinch.

  “Most people say that Punt was in Somalia. But now the scientists have changed their minds. Now they say Punt may have been here in Ethiopia.”

  “When exactly did the Egyptians start going to Punt?”

  The shopkeeper gazed into my eyes. I sensed that he had waited years for a customer to turn up with an interest in Punt. Now such a man had arrived he was eager to demonstrate his knowledge.

  “The earliest record was in the Fifth Dynasty,” he said, “when Pharaoh Sahure sent a fleet of ships down the Red Sea. They returned in triumph, the boats piled high with Puntian myrrh, ivory, ebony, electrum and gold.”

  “Were Punt and Ophir connected in some way?”

  “They may have been the same,” whispered Abdul Majeed. “After all, the Israelites learned their skills of metal-working directly from the Egyptians. You must remember that until they arrived in the Promised Land, they’d been enslaved in Egypt.”

  “So you think that Solomon’s gold mines were really the mines of the Pharaohs?”

  “Imagine that you were Solomon,” he said. “You wanted a huge amount of gold, and you knew that your neighbours obtained it from mines not so far away. Surely you’d send ships to that place rather than begin an entirely new and dangerous search of your own.”

  The shopkeeper’s theory certainly made sense. But before I could give it much thought, he stepped over to one of the display cases and pulled out a set of earrings. They were circular convex shields made of eighteen-carat gold, each about an inch and a half wide. I expected the sales patter to begin but he wasn’t selling the jewellery.

  “Look at these,” he said. “They’re worn all over Ethiopia, but you can’t find them anywhere else in the world, except in Egypt. You can find identical jewellery in the Cairo Museum.”

  Abdul Majeed, the Servant of the Glorious, blew on his palm and held it out for me to shake once again. He’d enjoyed talking to me about the past, he said, as he hardly dared to think about history these days.

  “It’s not like the old days,” he said, leaning forward for the last time. “Ethiopians used to be proud of their traditions. They walked tall and had self-respect. Now all they care about is getting to America.”

  SEVEN

  The Emperor’s Jeep

  “Princes shall come forth out of Egypt, and Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God.”

  Marcus Mosiah Garvey

  Franco said he could not remember a time when he did not live in Addis Ababa. He had survived the bad times and the even worse times. He’d seen the capital set ablaze, and the gutters running with young men’s blood. Three generations of his family had lived and died in Ethiopia and the last thing he was going to do was leave now. When he had money he dined at Castelli, a plush Italian restaurant favoured by aid workers. In leaner times he sat on the porch of his ramshackle shop and drank Bedeli beer from a bottle. Five decades of the summer sun had seared lines into Franco’s face. They told his age like the rings of a tree.

  Most of Franco’s family possessions had passed through the shop at one time or another. He’d sold his mother’s wedding-gown, his father’s top hat, dozens of trinkets, even his grandmother’s false teeth. I poked about the shelves, admiring the merchandize, but Franco wasn’t really bothered whether I bought or not. His attitude was much the same as that of Abdul Majeed, his friend of forty years whose shop lay opposite, on the other side of the street.

  Bric-a-brac shops containing anything of real value have all but disappeared in the West. These days no one throws anything out for fear that it might be worth something. But a browse through Franco’s shop told the recent history of Ethiopia. There were pictures of Haile Selassie as a young man in his imperial robes. There were Fascist medals and rings made from Italian coins. On a hat-stand hung a pair of moth-eaten uniforms along with a pith helmet and a clutch of crumpled silk ties. There were dozens of Ge’ez prayer books and Bibles as well, and scrolls from monasteries, silver crosses and ebony neck-rests. The back wall was covered in feathered masks and clay lip-plates from the Mursi tribe on the Omo River. Adjacent to them, in the shadow of a forlorn stuffed lion, hung half a dozen crocodile-skin shields, tribal spears and amulets on strings.

  “That’s quality stuff,” said Franco, leaning over my shoulder. “You just can’t get it any more. It’s all from the Danakil.”

  He held a bowl up to my nose. It was filled with what looked like dirty shelled pistachio nuts.

  “What d”you think these are?”

  I had a sniff. They smelled of nothing at all.

  “Don’t know.”

  Franco rolled back on his heels and grinned.

  “They’re testicles,” he said.

  Back at the Hotel Ghion I thanked the hotel cleaner for his tip-off about Abdul Majeed’s shop and showed him my bowl of Danakil testicles, which impressed him no end. I found out later that they were fakes, which saddened me greatly. The cleaner pointed out three businessmen from Shanghai sitting in the hotel’s foyer. They were smoking cheap cigars and sharing a joke. Wiping his face with his rag, the cleaner said they wanted to meet me. The men were cement barons and they were eager to break into the European construction business. Shanghai cement, said my confidant in a whisper, is the best in the world. A man bright enough to buy Danakil testicles and other rare objets would, said the cleaner, surely see the value of an opening like this.

  There was no time for cement barons, I explained. I had work to do and pieces of a puzzle to slot together. My quest for Solomon’s mines was far from finished.

  Over a pot of tar-like coffee, I thought about the goldsmith’s advice. He was right: the best way to understand Ophir and Solomon was to look forward from the Egyptians, rather than back from the time of Christ.

  Queen Hatshepsut was indeed a key. As Abdul Majeed had recounted, in about 1500 bc, a little over five centuries before the time of Solomon’s reign, the Queen sent five great ships to Punt.

  There, as the hieroglyphs which adorn the reliefs at Deir el-Bahri relate,

  We loaded our ships very heavily with marvels of the country of Punt, all goodly fragrant woods of God’s Land, heaps of myrrh-resins, of fresh myrrh trees, with ebony and pure ivory, with green gold of Amu, with cinnamon-wood, with incense, eye cosmetic, with baboons, monkeys, dogs, with skins of the southern panther, with natives and their children. Never was the like of this brought for any king who has been since the beginning.

  The reliefs at Deir el-Bahri clearly show the Queen’s vessels piled high with exotic merchandize. This wasn’t the first time an Egyptian ruler
had sent an expedition to Punt, but it was probably the greatest and most successful of all the Puntian journeys, which explains why the Queen chose to immortalize the voyage in such an elaborate frieze.

  The reliefs, which still bear traces of their original paint, show glimpses of Punt. There are beehive-shaped huts, similar to those still found in some parts of Ethiopia, and alongside them there are Hamitic figures with refined features, perhaps related to one of the Ethiopian tribes like the Oromo or the Tigray.

  Scholars have pointed out other similarities between modern-day Ethiopia and ancient Egypt. Reed boats like those used in Pharaonic times still ply Lake Tana, and the traditional sistra instrument of Ethiopia is thought to be of Egyptian origin. Incense is still valued highly in Ethiopia, just as it was thousands of years ago in Egypt. Other experts have suggested etymological links between the two cultures. Graham Hancock, the celebrated hunter of the Ark of the Covenant, has spoken of the ancient Egyptian trade in dwarfs, who were needed to “dance before the gods” – the Egyptian word dink, or dwarf, is found today in both the Hamitic and the Semitic languages of Ethiopia.

  At the time of the great voyage, the Israelites were still an enslaved people, but they would have heard of the mysterious land of Punt, and of the pomp and ceremony that greeted Hatshepsut’s fleet when it returned to Thebes. Such a voyage may well have passed into Israelite folklore, so providing Solomon with a source for the gold he required to build his temple.

  I felt I was beginning to make progress, but only by covering more ground could I hope to tease out the clues which, I was sure, lay in the Ethiopian hinterland. Frank Hayter and his fabulous mine-shafts were never far from my thoughts, but first I wanted to go north.

  While we were at the mines, Samson had left his taxi in the care of his youngest brother, Moses. The twenty-year-old Lada, which was rented for fifty birr a day, was Samson’s pride and joy. He polished it constantly with a rag, and each morning the seats were dusted down, the windows wiped and the engine checked over. Samson said that if he didn’t take pride in the car, he wouldn’t take pride in the job, and he’d tried desperately to instil the same reasoning in his brother. But Moses was more interested in meeting girls than in eking out a living with the taxi.

  The morning after our return from Kebra Mengist, Samson slunk into the Hotel Ghion. The bounce had gone out of him, and his conversation lacked its usual religious undertones. I wondered what had happened.

  “The Devil is on my shoulders,” he said ominously.

  He tapped a finger to his clavicle.

  “There,” he said, “can’t you see him?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  The first problem was that Moses had crashed the taxi. While it was being repaired, they would earn no income but would still have to pay the rental, not to mention the bill for the repair work. In addition the police had been called to the scene of the crash because the taxi’s passenger had sustained injuries. Who knew what further bills would follow? But that was only the beginning. On our arrival back in Addis the night before, Samson had gone out to buy some food. In the few minutes he was gone, Moses had managed to burn down the one-room shack in which they lived, and most of their possessions had been incinerated in the blaze. It seemed amazing that Moses had survived to tell the tale.

  “He put a candle on my radio,” said Samson, “and then he fell asleep. The candle fell and set fire to the mat, and then the bed and all my books. I came back with lots of food, but our house was in flames!”

  Samson stood tall and tried to hide the burns on his hands, but there were tears in his eyes.

  “I’ll never forgive him,” he said. “There are some things so precious that they can never be replaced. You see, my Bible was destroyed in the fire.”

  Together we went by taxi to look at what remained.

  Samson’s shack lay in a compound walled with a thorny hedge on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. As we neared the burned-out building, I could smell scorched plastic, and then I spotted a pile of charred belongings. Moses was sitting on a stool dolefully sorting through what was left. Samson gave him a poisonous glare and then led the way to the spot where their home had stood. It had been a rectangular mud-built structure, about the size of a family estate car. He had rented the room from a widow who lived opposite with her seven dogs, for 120 birr, ten pounds, a month. By Ethiopian standards, rents in the capital are extortionately high. The widow was sympathetic towards the brothers’ plight, but she needed money to rebuild. In the meantime, Samson and his brother had nowhere to live.

  That afternoon, I bought a few token objects and handed them over with a wad of low-denomination birr notes. Samson was bright and hard-working, and he had given himself an education but, like most Ethiopians, he lived on a knife-edge. Destitution was never far away, and a disaster such as this could ruin him.

  Despite his troubles, Samson had managed to find a car for the next leg of our journey. It sounded exactly what we were looking for — a brand-new Toyota Landcruiser with air-conditioning, off-road tires, a spare fuel tank and a skilled driver. When I asked the price, Samson said we’d have to negotiate, so we went to have a look at it and meet the owner.

  I cannot remember when I last saw such an exemplary vehicle. It was exactly what I had had in mind. The bodywork was immaculate, the tires had hardly ever been used, and the seats were upholstered in an attractive shade of lilac. My chest tightened in expectation.

  Standing next to the car was a man whom we took to be the driver. I asked the price. Samson translated the question.

  “How much did he say ?” I asked.

  Samson shook his head.

  “I’ve made a mistake,” he said, “this is not the vehicle. It belongs to the French Ambassador. This man is his driver.”

  “Then where’s our car?”

  Samson pointed to a second vehicle which was parked at an angle behind the first. My face fell. A much earlier model of Landcruiser, it had seen its fair share of Ethiopian roads. In fact it looked as if someone had taken a mallet and struck every inch of its off-white body. The tires were balder than bald, and the back doors were welded shut. I peered through the cracked windscreen. A man was stretched out asleep on the back seat.

  “That must be the driver,” said Samson.

  I’ve never had much luck hiring vehicles for rough journeys. The last thing I rented was a rotting hulk of a riverboat in which I sailed up the Amazon. It looked like the African Queen shortly before she blew up. My Amazon trip had been fraught with incidents, many of them the result of the riverboat’s condition. I’d also had problems with the crew. This time I was going to make sure that the vehicle and its driver were carefully vetted.

  I clapped my hands to wake the driver up but he didn’t stir. So I leant through the passenger window and yanked his big toe. The man sat up with a start and then peered out of the window. His eyes were bloodshot and a trail of spittle ran down his chin.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Bahru.”

  “Where does he come from?”

  “He’s a Somali,” said Samson, grimacing.

  I said we were interested in hiring the vehicle. The driver got out of the car and did his best to stand to attention, though his gaze never strayed from my feet.

  We weren’t to be deceived by the rough condition of the vehicle, he said. Beneath the dents was a chassis of iron. We could search the whole of Addis Ababa and never find a car half as sturdy. Then Bahru lowered his voice.

  “This Jeep used to be very important,” he whispered. “It once led the imperial convoy of Haile Selassie.”

  We negotiated over the price for an hour and ended with a figure twice my original budget. Bahru agreed not to drink and drive, and that he’d provide his services free of charge and find his own place to sleep at night. I stressed that I wouldn’t pay for his food. It seemed miserly in the extreme, but through bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.
Finally, I gave him a list of repairs that I wanted carried out before we left Addis.

  Bahru said the Emperor’s Jeep wouldn’t be available for two days. A feud had arisen between his family and another. He couldn’t leave town until it was sorted out. Samson muttered that it was a mistake ever to use the services of a Somali, but I ignored him.

  “Is two days enough time for the feud to end?” I asked.

  Bahru rolled his bloodshot eyes. Then he licked his thumb and pressed it to his throat.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Some things cannot be translated,” said Samson.

  In Addis Ababa I kept seeing Rastafarians. Most were from Jamaica, although some had come from Europe. They would stroll about the streets with an air of confidence which many Ethiopians lacked. Intrigued by the Rasta link with Haile Selassie, and in turn with the line of Solomon, I had started reading books on the movement.

  As I understand it, the Rastafarians are concerned with the plight of black people. Yet they are not a political party nor a religious sect. Instead, like the Israelites, they see themselves as a people waiting to be reunited with their Promised Land — Africa. They believe that Haile Selassie is their Messiah, their redeemer.

  These days when we talk of Rastafarians, we think of their music, most notably the songs of Bob Marley, but the man who established the precursor of the modern Rastafarian movement, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, has all but been forgotten.

  Garvey was a Jamaican, and in the 1920s he promoted the Universal Negro Improvement Association whose aim was to return all black people to Africa. Blacks had become “mentally enslaved” by white people, he said. The only way to restore their dignity was to get them back to Africa. So Garvey used a black-owned steamship line to effect a mass migration to Liberia.

  Garvey’s work to repatriate African Americans failed, but his great interest in the continent survived. “Look to Africa,” he said, “when a black king shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near.” Soon after, in November 1930, Haile Selassie was crowned in Addis Ababa, fulfilling Garvey’s prophecy Garvey himself died in 1940, and in the years that followed, his influence waned, but the Rastafarian movement has grown. A line from Leviticus (“They shall not make baldness upon their head”) is taken to mean that Rastas should grow their hair, and another line from the Psalms (“He causeth the grass for the cattle, and the herb for the service of man”) lies behind the Rastas’ adoption of ganja, or marijuana.