by Tahir Shah
“What do you think?”
Amaya smiled at the woman.
“I think her back hurts,” he said gently, “but I don’t think she’s a witch.”
The desk clerk of Lalibela’s Sheba Hotel cursed the government for driving the tourists away.
We used to get pretty women coming here,” he said, staring into space. “They had nice pink lipstick and jewellery that rattled when they laughed. But our leaders don’t want the world to see the mess the country’s in. They’re greedy for the money the aid companies bring. The worse the situation sounds, the more money the United Nations sends. So of course they don’t want the place to be stable.”
For a man working as a desk clerk in a small hotel, he seemed unusually well-informed. I asked if he expected tourism to pick up again.
“Hah!” he jeered. “Only when the government falls.”
“When will that be?”
The clerk looked at his watch.
“It could happen any minute.”
Amaya had recommended that we spend the night at the Sheba Hotel and I had sent him off to find Samson. When I asked the clerk for my room key, he toyed with it, unwilling to end our conversation.
“I see from the register you’re from America,” he said.
I replied that I was.
“Ah, I am going to America.”
“Oh, when?”
“When beautiful Ursula sends me the ticket and the visa.”
“Who’s Ursula?”
The clerk leant over the counter and his eyes lit up.
“Ursula, beautiful Ursula!”
“Yes, but who is she?”
“She came here, from Texas,” he said. “She has white skin, like the shell of a goose egg, and soft hair. When she came to Sheba Hotel we talked for hours. She said she wanted me to see America with my own eyes. She promised me that one day I would be a guest, and I promised to wait for her letter... the one with the ticket and the visa.”
“When was Ursula here?”
“Eleven years ago.”
Lalibela’s buildings are unlike those in any other part of Ethiopia. The houses are circular with two storeys and are built of loose-fitting stones. The town’s inhabitants eke out a living by keeping a few animals and tending their meager crops of maize and teff. Around Petra or the Pyramids money from tourism trickles down into the local economy, and there’s a hustle and bustle in the air. But at Lalibela what little money there is from tourism goes straight into the priests’ pockets. The local people are ruinously poor and like all Christians in the country, they stand in awe of the priesthood.
Shortly before sunset, Samson turned up at the hotel. He’d spoken to some Danish aid workers about the bus crash and said they would go and have a look in the morning. I wondered how many more of the injured would have died by then, and cursed myself for not having ferried them to Lalibela myself.
“There’s no hospital in Lalibela,” said Samson, reading my thoughts. “And even if we did go and get them we’d run out of petrol. There’s none of that here either.” He was right. Lalibela had a severe petrol shortage, and the town was littered with cars that had been abandoned when their tanks ran dry.
The Emperor’s Jeep had an engine with an insatiable thirst, made worse by the fact that we could never turn it off. Our expedition was on a tight budget, but our transport had been constructed for an emperor who had had access to plentiful funds. Bahru had promised that the more distance we put between us and the capital, the cheaper petrol would become. By the time we were on the Eritrean border, he said, we’d find fuel was virtually given away. As a result, he had refused to fill up at any of the petrol stations en route and now we were running dangerously low.
Early next morning I told Samson to go and find some petrol. If he couldn’t find any, he was to look for high-octane aviation fuel. He ambled away in the direction of the market with a one-gallon bottle under his arm. He hadn’t quite understood the extent of the Jeep’s thirst.
An aid worker in Addis Ababa had told me to be careful when buying fuel in rural Ethiopia. Much of the stuff on sale is diluted with kerosene or even with water. The best way to test its quality is to offer a little fuel to the person you are buying from. If he jumps at the idea you know he’s hawking the real thing.
The only man in town with petrol for sale looked surprisingly gloomy given that he had a monopoly on all the fuel.
Samson checked the price and was quoted four times the usual rate.
“That’s scandalous!” I shouted. “But we’re desperate, so tell him that we’ll buy all the petrol he’s got – so long as he puts some in his own tank first.”
The petrol-seller’s face froze as Samson translated my words. Then he grew very angry and threatened to call the police. While he was shouting, Samson took a sniff at the fuel he was touting.
“This isn’t petrol,” he said, “it smells like horse urine.”
For the next two days we waited for a petrol tanker to arrive. The two girls we’d picked up had wisely decided to catch a lift westwards to Gondar on a truck piled high with crates of ouzo. Like the espresso machines, ouzo had been introduced by the Italians, and the Ethiopians had developed a taste for it. As a result, there was a distinct correlation between wrecked trucks and the contents that they were carrying at the time of the crash. Many of the vehicles we saw that had plunged into ravines seemed to have been carrying ouzo or beer or vodka, or in some cases all three.
The problem with having your own transport is that it limits your movements. All I could do was force Samson and Bahru to stand by the roadside and flag down vehicles to ask if we could buy any of their fuel. On the first day only one truck passed, and it ran on diesel. On the second day they were a little luckier: a government jeep rolled into Lalibela. Samson begged the driver to sell us some precious fuel, but the man jeered at him and drove off.
I was secretly pleased to have been marooned in Lalibela and spent the first two days exploring the town and its churches with Amaya. But then, having seen all there was to see, I grew impatient.
By the third day, Samson and Bahru had still had no luck and I retreated to the Sheba Hotel. The desk clerk was also tired of waiting, in his case for non-existent guests. He asked me if I’d man the front desk while he took the afternoon off. What if a tidal wave of tourists flooded in? His face lit up for a second and then fell. “This is Lalibela,” he said, “not Las Vegas.”
So I sat behind the front desk and re-read Frank Hayter’s account of his discovery of the mine-shafts at Tullu Wallel·.
It was not until I was within a few yards that I realized what the patches of darker stone were — the entrance to underground caves; and not natural entrances either, for the stone uprights and heavy lintels that squared the openings had been fashioned by the hand of man.
Switching on my torch I stepped between the massive uprights. Ahead loomed a narrow passage which at some remote age had been hewn through the rock. I glanced at the walls and saw that they had been roughly chiselled. Here and there various-sized bosses of darker stone had been left protruding from the wall’s surface, giving the impression that the workmen had found the task of cutting through them an impossible one. Advancing step by step I penetrated some forty feet and was wondering how much farther I could go before the passage ended, when the torch-light illuminated the far wall of a huge cave.
After reading Hayter’s words, I took another look at the photograph of the mine opening in Captain Bartleet’s book. The dressed stone doorway near the rough cave entrance looked convincing, but I knew that the only way to solve the matter was to make for the mountain myself.
When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travelers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth. They are towering figures who persevered through the most brutal circumstances imaginable, often in disguise, though today their methods seem rather savage. If any of Stanley’s team gave him t
rouble, he had them put in chains.
Of them all my favourite is Samuel White Baker. He traveled throughout Abyssinia, as Ethiopia was then known, and he was instrumental in locating the source of the Nile. Baker was a man of overwhelming ambition who thrived on adversity. When the chips are down and I’m wondering how best to proceed, I turn to him.
Samuel Baker was the only Victorian ennobled directly as a result of his explorations. He was also the only adventurer of his era who traveled with his wife, Florence. Baker had purchased her at a Bulgarian slave market, and they became inseparable. The journey on which they met was typical of a time which, sadly, no longer exists.
Baker had agreed to take a young Indian Maharaja, Duleep Singh, on a bear-hunting trip to Transylvania. Duleep Singh divided his time between Claridge’s Hotel in London and a Scottish castle in the Highlands, where he pursued his passion for hunting. On the journey to Transylvania he traveled under the pseudonym of Captain Robert Melville. He also insisted on bringing his three English servants with him, including his butler. Most of his voluminous luggage seemed to consist of crates of vintage champagne. The party reached Budapest by train, and then Baker bundled the Maharaja and his entourage aboard a corn barge which was heading down the Danube.
While sailing downriver, the corn barge collided with an ice floe near the Ottoman-controlled town of Widdin, in what is now Bulgaria, and the Maharaja and his retinue were forced ashore. Widdin was as sordid a place as one could imagine, its only business the sale of black, white and Chinese slaves. While waiting for the corn barge to be repaired Baker and the Maharaja went to look at the slave market, It was there that Baker first set eyes on Florence, with whom he fell in love instantly. He haggled furiously for her, but he never disclosed how much he had paid.
Four days after our arrival at Lalibela, Samson flagged down a jeep. In the back there were seven jerry-cans that belonged to a local businessman. Even before I saw the driver’s face, I knew the negotiations would be hard. I stood out of the way, for the appearance of a foreigner tends to quadruple the going price. Samson put on his most courteous voice and smiled so much that his eyes disappeared in creases. He motioned a finger to the cans. The driver nodded. Samson smiled again. I could tell money was being discussed. The driver kept nodding. The bargaining continued for about half an hour, with the driver nodding and Samson smiling. By the end of it Samson was no longer smiling, he was chewing his upper lip.
“How much?” I asked.
“A lot.”
I handed over all the money in my wallet.
“We’re going to need more than this,” said Samson nervously, “we’re going to need the money in your shoe as well.”
Before we left Lalibela I gave Amaya a selection of old clothes. He’d asked if I had a dress in his size. He’d always wanted a dress, he said. I was confused and rather concerned that a small boy wanted to dress up as a girl. I asked Samson to have a chat with him and explain that dresses are for little girls, not little boys. Amaya started to grin and then burst out laughing. Then Samson started to laugh.
“Amaya is a little girl!” he said.
Ten minutes later we were on the road again with Bahru crunching the gears and jerking the wheel as usual, an enormous quid of qat stuck in his cheek. The scenes we passed were now familiar: children with huge piles of sticks on their backs, goats being herded along the road, people trudging to distant destinations, solemn funeral processions of elders wrapped in white, making their way down mountain trails, walking in silence towards a burial ground. I asked Samson why so many people were dying.
“Life in the country is hard,” he replied. “If you fall sick you get sicker and then you die. People with a little money use it to buy food, not medicine.”
The contrast between village life and a small town in Ethiopia is astonishing. Small Ethiopian towns are vibrant places, full of bustle. Cluttered shops sell a colorful display of goods imported from China. Boys play table tennis on the sidewalks. The bars are alive with deafening music, the flow of warm bottled beer and the lascivious solicitations of whores. And all the while, there is a constant flow of people arriving from the villages to barter and to buy basic necessities. In a remote village or hamlet, days from the nearest road, there are no paraffin lamps or electricity, only candles; no running water either, or shops, or the noise of an ill-tuned transistor radio. I am not new to Africa or to lands where good, innocent people are struggling to survive. Even so I found myself reeling at the extraordinary level of hardship that rural Ethiopians endure.
Ask me to list all the things which I own and I wouldn’t know where to start. I have rooms filled with possessions I never use. Our attic is packed to bursting with objects I’ve collected and forgotten about. But ask a villager in the Ethiopian highlands what he has in his tukul and the list will be precise and short. Everything is functional and has ten uses. There’s a knife, perhaps an axe, a candle or two, or a lamp made from the bottom of a tin can, a blanket and hides, a bucket, a pot, a sheet of polythene, a few old clothes, some flour and a pile of sticks. That is all.
NINE
The Jinn of Suleiman
“It is better to die than to live without killing.”
Danakil proverb
Five hours out of Lalibela we passed a terrible accident on what was surely the world’s roughest road. A truck had somehow toppled over on a flat stretch, and its cargo of ouzo had shattered. The driver was dead. So was his companion. The bodies had been pulled out of the cab and were lying on the side of the road. The fact that there was so little blood indicated that they’d probably died instantly. To my relief there was no sign of the two Dutch girls. They had been traveling west. This road led north.
A few miles further on Bahru sped through a village and hit a dog. He burst out laughing and clapped his hands. I turned round and through the rear window saw the poor creature writhing in its death throes. I shouted at Bahru, but he didn’t understand why I was so angry. As far as he was concerned stray animals on the road were fair game, something to enliven the tedium of the job.
By now, the deficiencies of the Emperor’s Jeep were becoming apparent. The worst problem was the tires. On a good day we would have only a couple of punctures. On bad days the number would rise to seven or eight. The reason was blatantly clear. The tires had gaping holes in them. At first I found myself yelling at Bahru. Why didn’t he get the tires properly repaired? But eventually I came to see his point of view. In Addis Ababa I had insisted that Bahru be responsible for all punctures and breakdowns. As far as he was concerned, the less money he laid out on tires, the more he had to spend on qat. If your life revolves around chewing an intoxicating leaf, it makes perfect sense.
Though Ethiopian villages have very little in the way of merchandize to offer, they do usually contain at least one shop selling a selection of worn and lacerated tires at highly inflated prices. At Sekota, Bahru was finally persuaded to buy ten tires. Though we all knew they probably wouldn’t get us through the day, I felt I’d achieved a minor victory.
While we were at the tire stall I got chatting to a frail balding man who smelt strongly of sulfur. Every few minutes he’d pull up his shirt and apply a layer of Indian-made ointment to a suppurating wound on his chest. He was old and underfed, and it was clear that the injury wasn’t healing. I had a look at the instructions on the tube. The ointment was supposed to ease back pain.
“Strong medicine,” said the man.
“Does it help?”
“Oh yes,” he said, “it’s imported medicine.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I bought it at the market. It was expensive.”
“But it says you must not put it on an open wound.”
The man looked confused but then he raised his shirt and massaged more ointment into the lesion. He grimaced with pain. In the Ethiopian highlands there’s an enduring trust in foreign-made goods. Local markets are flooded with cheap Indian medicines which are regarded as the height of sophist
ication. Imported drugs are seen as panaceas: a randomly selected cream, lotion or tablet is used to cure any illness.
Samson said that when he was a teenager his parents thought he had meningitis, so they went to the market to buy some medicine. The stall-holder there weighed out a few handfuls of uns’ ed tablets and prescribed them to be taken with chicken broth.
I asked Samson if he’d had seizures as a result.
“No, no,” he replied, “I got better with a little time, although my sweat turned brown.”
My geologist friend in London had looked at the map of Ethiopia and had said that he’d put money on Afar being the ancient Ophir. He had pointed to a ridge of low mountains that rise up along the Red Sea coast. They were the place he’d head for. I had scoured dozens of geological reports, but none of them mentioned there being any gold in Afar, though there were gold prospectors’ reports on just about every other corner of the country. Still, I knew I had to go and see for myself. And if Afar wasn’t Ophir, it had other attractions.
The north-eastern region of Afar is a desolate expanse of desert peopled by one of the most ferocious tribes imaginable — the Danakil.
I have always been fascinated by the curious habit of taking human body parts as trophies. Most cultures have at one time or another slain their foes, lopped off their heads and paraded around with them. But the Danakil developed a reputation for taking quite a different kind of trophy. Their predilection was for testicles. A warrior hadn’t proved himself as a man until he’d spilt his enemy’s blood and had the man’s genitals hanging round his neck. A search through Ethiopia for Solomon’s mines wouldn’t have been complete without a journey to Afar.
Once we were on the main road I told Bahru to start heading east rather than north. He continued to chew his qat and didn’t blink. I was pleased he hadn’t objected, so I added that we would be going to Afar in search of the Danakil. I watched Bahru’s face in the rear-view mirror as we bumped along. It contorted and then froze in paralysis, as if his qat-chewing jaw had at last seized up. Samson was equally horrified. He said that the Danakil were a brutal people who only had one thing on their minds.