The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  “What’s that, then?”

  “Testicles!”

  “But we’re driving in the Emperor’s Jeep,” I exclaimed, “no one’s going to mess with us.”

  Bahru’s jaw suddenly loosened in a torrent of Amharic.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Bahru says he’s not going to drive to Afar. If you want to go there you’ll have to go on foot.”

  I tried everything I could think of, but Bahru wouldn’t budge. He was a man with no fear, he explained, but he was more attached to his testicles than he could say. Wild horses wouldn’t drag him into the Danakil Desert. Bahru’s own tribe, the Somalis, have a formidable reputation for courage in battle, so I was surprised by his refusal to continue. Maybe going to Afar was too dangerous.

  “Samson, what do you think?”

  The indefatigable fixer wiped his face with his hand.

  “They’re heathens,” he said.

  “Then look on our journey as a missionary expedition to preach the Word of the Lord.”

  At that Samson seemed to perk up and I caught the glint of missionary zeal in his eye. He fished out a newly acquired Bible from his disintegrating tartan case. It was much smaller than the one he had lost in the fire, but the Word of the Lord takes many forms.

  “We will go to Afar,” he said boldly, “and we will spread the Word.”

  After a great deal of coaxing, Bahru agreed to take us as far as Didigsala on the edge of the Danakil Desert. He would leave us there and beat a hasty retreat, meeting us later at Mekele, the capital of Tigray. I’d heard that in Didigsala we could join one of the salt caravans that make their way through the desert to the market at Mekele.

  On my recent journey up the Amazon to the Shuar people, my companions and I had been terrified that we might have our heads chopped off and dramatically reduced in size. The very thought had had a dire effect on the morale of the expedition. But modern times have brought change, and missionaries have now replaced Shuar blowpipes with tambourines. The destruction of ancient customs in a matter of years angers me, but I suspected that the testicle-lopping days of the Danakil had probably come to an end. I informed Samson that Alabama missionaries had probably beaten us to the Danakil. He smiled widely. He looked forward to talking to them about Jesus.

  Wilfred Thesiger is one of the few to have written about the proud traditions of the Danakil. He was born at the British Legation in Addis Ababa in 1910. The capital was then still young, and until Thesiger was sent to boarding school in England at the age of eight, he’d never seen a car. His father, a high-ranking diplomat, was instrumental in helping Ras Tafari accede to the Ethiopian throne, but before the prince could be crowned as Emperor, Thesiger’s father died quite suddenly of a heart attack. Wishing to acknowledge his gratitude to the family, the Emperor extended a personal invitation to Wilfred Thesiger to attend his coronation in his father’s place.

  In November 1930, when the festivities came to an end, Thesiger embarked on his first true expedition. He had heard that the land of the Danakil had good hunting, so he set off for the desert, writing later that “The whole course of my life was to be permanently affected by that month.”

  Thesiger has often told me of that, his earliest, African expedition and he recounts the tale with characteristic animation. He was aware that the Danakil were ferocious, but he had little idea quite how dangerous. The more officials pleaded with him not to go, the more determined he became. Almost every foreign expedition that had headed into the Danakil Desert in the past had been wiped out, the testicles of every participant seized as trophies. When, therefore, Thesiger returned in one piece, he became something of a hero. He was just twenty years old.

  At virtually the same time that the young Wilfred Thesiger was rounding up pack animals for his journey, another European was returning from the Danakil Depression. L. M. Nesbitt was a prospector and the foreman of a gold mine in western Ethiopia. He believed he might find gold in Afar, though in his book Desert and Forest, he hardly mentions the subject – serious prospectors always keep their cards close to the chest. Still, the fact that Nesbitt, a seasoned prospector, made such a perilous journey was encouraging. There might well be gold in Afar after all.

  I rallied Samson and Bahru, telling them that Nesbitt’s expedition proved there was the possibility of finding gold, or even ancient mines, in the Danakil region. I decided not to relate the details of Nesbitt s trip or tell them exactly how many of his men lost their genitalia.

  The road to Didigsala was the greatest challenge that the Emperor’s Jeep had faced so far. The dilapidated vehicle rattled at every joint, as if it shared its driver’s fear of Danakil bandits. Thorn trees and eucalyptus gave way to low rocky hills and patchy scrub. We saw camels grazing, the odd shepherd with his flock of goats, and a smattering of huts nestling in the shadows between the hills. Samson took out his Bible and started selecting appropriate passages with which to convert.

  Before veering off the main road towards Didigsala, Bahru swapped the car’s jack for a bale of qat at a small hamlet. I would have stopped the unwise trade but we didn’t have a spare tire left, and there was little hope of getting one now. Bahru chewed so feverishly that his mouth foamed, and his eyes seemed to start from his head like those of a man being electrocuted. Four hours later, I spotted a cluster of low huts. We had reached the outskirts of Didigsala.

  Samson got down and asked the first man he saw when the next salt caravan would be leaving for Mekele. I watched as, ever polite and respectful of others, he posed the question only after lengthy salutations. The local man waved his hands frantically, motioned sideways and pointed at the sky. Then he bent down and put his palms on the ground, did five press-ups, jumped up again, pulled down his shorts and waved his genitalia about. Samson looked back at me despondently.

  “He’s a lunatic,” he said.

  Most small Ethiopian towns seemed to have a token madman, and in rural areas people seemed to delight in throwing stones at them. Samson passed a crust of bread to our madman, who whimpered with satisfaction. He was very thin, and the lines of his ribs showed through his shirt. As he choked down the bread, a middle-aged man dressed in a brilliant white shamma swept out of his house. He picked up a large stone, and flung it at the maniac, hitting him on the backside with considerable force. At that, the madman fled.

  A minute later a crowd had gathered round the Jeep. Thirty or forty old men clutching gray blankets had stumbled over and now they were peering in through the windows of the vehicle. Clearly visitors were rare.

  One of our new companions placed a hand on the Jeep’s bonnet and closed his eyes.

  “You have come far,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “We have come to meet the salt caravan which goes to Mekele.”

  “Ah, Mekele, very far.”

  “How far?”

  “Ah, very very far.”

  Samson translated and winced with worry.

  “When will the next salt caravan come from Afar?”

  The old man pulled his blanket more tightly around him and then, lifting up his walking cane, he swung it in an arc toward the horizon.

  “There they are now,” he said.

  We shaded our eyes to follow the line of the stick. I could see nothing.

  “He is right,” said Samson. “I can make out people and camels. Dots. Many dots.”

  “They will not reach here until morning,” said the man. “You will stay the night with me.”

  He led the way to his hut. Bahru needed no cue to unload our belongings. They were piled up on the sand before I’d said a word. Then he leapt back into the Jeep and said he’d meet us in Mekele.

  “When? When will you get there?”

  Bahru spat on his hands and revved the engine.

  “The question is when will you get there,” he replied.

  Then he was gone in a swirl of dust.

  “He is a coward,” said Samson. “Bahru is a disgrace to his tribe.”


  The man with the stick called the others to leave us alone and lashed out at them with his cane. We were his property. As he led the way to his hut he said his name was Adugna. His wife was dead, he explained, and so he lived with his son’s family. They were poor, but they were honored to accept us into their home. I inquired about the camel train to Mekele.

  “You will need strong legs,” he said. “It is very far.”

  “A week’s walk?”

  Adugna blinked his frosted eyes.

  “Many days.”

  Samson, who was brimming over with unexpected enthusiasm, comforted me.

  “We are in God’s hands,” he said. “We are the Israelites in the desert. The only thing we should fear is the Devil.”

  Adugna led the way through a ring of thorns that encircled his son’s home. A hunting dog sprang at us from the shadow of the hut, but Adugna lunged at it with his stick. In the dark, smoky atmosphere of the one-room hut, a dozen eyes widened as we entered. I couldn’t make out the features of faces at first, just eyes, all winking like owls in the trees. Adugna swung his cane to make space for us, then clapped his hands and barked orders. His family members hurried out into the sunshine and sought refuge behind the hut.

  “You will stay with me for a month!” said Adugna. “This is your home. We are brothers.”

  “But we want to go to Mekele with the caravan,” I said.

  The old man laughed a deep and sinister laugh.

  “They will kill you and take your money,” he replied. “They are bad men. The salt traders are greedy. Not like us. We have no money. We have no use for it. Money is the Devil’s currency.”

  The old man’s son returned, stooping respectfully, and asked what we would like to drink. Without thinking, I said that tea would be very welcome. He stooped again, clasped my hand in his, thanked me, and left.

  An hour passed. Samson asked Adugna about life in the desert.

  “It’s very hard, very hot, very dusty,” said our host. “I was born at Lake Afrera in Afar. It’s even hotter there.”

  “How old are you?”

  Adugna scrunched up his face and wiped it with the corner of his shawl.

  Oh, I must be very old,” he said. “Maybe seventy by now, or eighty. Maybe even older. I remember the days when the Italians were here. I was a young man then. There were other faranji as well. They were looking for gold.”

  “Gold? Did they find any?”

  “There is no gold here any more,” he replied.

  “Did there used to be gold, though?”

  “Oh, yes, there used to be. Afar was richer in gold than any other place on earth. There was so much gold that our people were rich like kings. Gold was the only metal we had.”

  “When was that? When was there gold?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “How long – a hundred years, a thousand years?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Adugna. “That long.”

  “Which? A thousand years?”

  “Yes, a long time ago.”

  “What happened to the gold? Was it mined out?”

  “No, it was not all mined,” said our host. “There was too much ever to be mined. There was so much, I tell you, so much gold!”

  “So it’s still here, still in the ground?”

  Again Adugna wiped his face with his shawl.

  “It is here, but at the same time it is not here,” he said.

  “How can that be?”

  “Well, I will tell you. God got very angry with our people. He told them they were greedy, that they thought of nothing but themselves. So he punished them. He waved his cloak over the desert and turned all the gold into salt. But one day,” Adugna continued, “when our people are no longer greedy, he will pull his cloak away and reveal the gold. That is why we stay here. We are waiting.”

  Adugna called out to his daughter-in-law, telling her to bring the tea, which still hadn’t arrived.

  “Stay here with me,” he said. “Be my guest and stay here. We will sit together and wait for God to pull away his cloak, to show us the fields of gold.”

  Night had fallen by the time the tea finally arrived. Adugna’s son and daughter-in-law slipped into the hut with a pair of steaming cups. They presented one to me and the other to Samson. We breathed in the steam and thanked them for their hospitality. The family clustered around and watched us. I took a sip of the boiling liquid. It tasted earthy and weak. I assumed it was some blend of local tea.

  “Have another sip,” said Adugna’s son anxiously.

  So I did.

  “Delicious.”

  “Is it?” he asked earnestly. “Are you sure it is delicious?”

  “Yes, yes, quite delicious,” said Samson and I at the same time.

  The air of anxiety seemed to lift.

  “Can I tell you something?” asked Adugna’s son.

  “Of course.”

  He touched his hand to his heart.

  “Well, we did not have any tea,” he said. “But it is our custom to give an honored guest whatever he asks for. You asked us for tea. We did not know what to do. None of our neighbours had any tea either. Then someone found an old sack which had once had some tea in it. So we boiled up the sack. And we made tea from it.”

  As I stretched out in the tukul waiting for sleep that night, I thought of Adugna’s story of the gold. Throughout Ethiopia, gold and folklore seemed to be closely connected. Where you found one, you found the other. Many people knew of the legend of God punishing the Danakil for being greedy — I was to hear the tale a dozen times in different parts of the country. When other tribes recounted it, they did so with scorn, doubtless because the Danakil are feared and disliked. The Danakil themselves sincerely believed the legend: one day, God will transform the salt back into gold.

  Adugna was an old man, but possibly not old enough to remember Nesbitt’s expedition, though he must have heard of others with the same ambition. Before the Second World War, Ethiopia was a magnet for those wishing to seek their fame and fortune. Nesbitt himself described the European population of Addis Ababa in the late 1920s as “always a mob of disillusioned, broken-down vagrants, meddlers, spies, sharpers — adventurers all. All are adept at something: some of them have academic titles, probably self-conferred... they are stayers-behind, dressed in ill-fitting threadbare clothes with untrimmed hair.”

  But Nesbitt was different. He was educated and well-organized, and he knew the dangers of traveling among the Danakil. Three Italian expeditions in the 1880s had ended with the entire party being butchered in Afar. The focus of life for any young Danakil man was to kill. A man who had not slain another would never be accepted as a husband and would be called a woman by his peers.

  The Danakil passion for killing is from another time, when slaying one’s enemies brought honor and respect. My own ancestors in the Hindu Kush thrived on a culture where killing was respectable. They would dress their womenfolk up in red clothing so they wouldn’t be killed in the crossfire.

  That night Adugna slept outside the hut with his family, leaving Samson and me alone. I began to imagine a midnight assassination, but Samson seemed untroubled.

  “Adugna’s parents were wild people,” he said, “but he and the others have kindness in their eyes.”

  He was right. While we slept, the old man’s daughter-in-law took our clothes and washed them. Her husband cleaned my shoes, and their children sprinkled the petals of fragrant flowers over us. I was grateful for their hospitality but saddened at the same time.

  It seemed as if the Danakil had been called into line, like the Shuar and so many other once proud tribes.

  Next morning, before the first light of dawn cut across the horizon, the salt caravan arrived. Forty camels and ten men walked briskly into the settlement. The camels were laden with what seemed to be large gray slabs of stone. Like every camel on earth, they resented being enslaved by man, but they were energetic, for their day had just begun. Their leader gave the order for the beasts to be given
water and he checked the bindings of their loads. Then he came over to where we were standing.

  Adugna introduced us. Kefla Mohammed was a slender man with skinny legs, callused hands and an occasional squint. He walked with a limp, plunging his long stick into the sand as he went, like a gondolier. He must have been the same age as me, but he looked much older, his skin roughened by decades of desert sun.

  When Adugna had introduced us, Kefla pressed his shoulders to mine in greeting.

  “We will be friends for a thousand years,” he said.

  “We wish to journey to Mekele.”

  The leader stood tall, pushing himself up on his stick.

  “You will walk with us and share our food,” he replied, “for we are brothers.”

  I thanked him.

  “How many days’ trek is it?”

  Kefla took a step back.

  “Far,” he said. “It is very far.”

  “Two days?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “More than that?”

  Again he stepped back. Then he glanced at the fine sand which covered his feet.

  “Perhaps.”

  Two hours later our bags and our water-bottles were strapped on the strongest of the she-camels, and we took our positions at the rear of the caravan. Adugna and his family stood to attention and wished us good fortune. Other villagers came to bid us farewell too, but Adugna fought them away with his stick. This was his moment. I promised to return when I had visited Mekele, when I had found the gold of Solomon.

  “I have told you,” he called as we left, “come and stay here with me and we shall wait together for God’s cloak to lift.”

  Setting out on a journey of uncertain length in an unknown land is a thrilling prospect. I asked Samson if Kefla and his troop seemed trustworthy. He hugged his Bible close to his chest and hinted that they were good people but that they needed his Christian counsel. Only then, he said, would God raise his veil and restore the fortunes of the Danakil.

  “Do you really believe the legend?” I asked.