by Tahir Shah
Prester John himself wore clothes fashioned from salamander skin, but despite his wealth he was as humble as any man alive. His only enemy was the new faith, Islam, against which he waged war with his army of superhuman cannibals.
In one corner of his kingdom issued forth the Fountain of Life. It restored the vigor of youth to any man who drank from it. Prester John had drunk from it many times, and though he was five hundred and sixty-two years old, he showed no signs of ageing.
For a thousand years the tale of Prester John dazzled all who heard it. Like Timbuctoo, the notion of such a place was intoxicating to Europeans, and many thousands of adventurers set out in search of the kingdom. Some went of their own accord. Others had little choice.
The Portuguese sent their degradados, convicted felons, to search for Prester John in the early 1500s. It was their last chance of gaining redemption. Those who succeeded in finding him and who returned to Portugal would be pardoned. None of them ever came back. But it was said that two Portuguese travelers who successfully disguised themselves did manage to pass through the Muslim lands surrounding Prester John’s kingdom. Eventually they presented themselves to the king, who was so enchanted by them that he refused them permission ever to leave.
High in the mountains we stopped at a village to get the punctures repaired. There was an Agip petrol station with an old Italian-made hand pump, but they’d run out of petrol years ago. The mechanic took one look at the Emperor’s Jeep and his eyes lit up. He knew we’d be good for business. Before he did any work he treated us all to coffee and brought out chairs. I was struck by the level of customer service, considering there wasn’t any competition for miles around. The mechanic said the road down the mountain was very hazardous indeed. We would need good tires and brakes. Since Bahru had sold three brake pads the Jeep had been using a single brake. Still, we had managed to cover hundreds of miles without serious mishap, and it seemed an extravagance to spend money on any more. A second cup of coffee was served, and the mechanic became more persistent. If we didn’t have the vehicle overhauled, he said, we would never get past the next village but one.
“Is the road that bad?”
“Of course the road is bad,” said the mechanic, “but the problem is the villagers. They are evil. They put boulders in the way and you have to stop very fast. You see, they like driving cars off the road. Then they strip the chassis clean.”
Bahru looked tense.
“I have heard of that place,” he said. “The drivers in Addis Ababa talk of it. They call it “The Place of Death”.”
“Come on, it can’t be any worse than elsewhere in the country,” I pointed out.
Bahru shook his head.
“This time the danger is real,” he said.
So we stopped the night there, while the Emperor’s Jeep was refurbished. The engine was tuned and tested, third-hand brake pads were fitted, the tires were replaced, and the leaking radiator was plugged. Working all night by the light of a paraffin lamp, the mechanic even fixed the faulty starter motor.
We slept on the floor of the village’s only bar. A legion of overdressed girls swanned up and offered their services. For such a modest village there were a lot of them. Basic economic principles of supply and demand hadn’t yet culled their numbers.
At six the next morning the mechanic woke us. The Jeep was better than new, he said. Bahru asked how much money he owed. The mechanic said something in Amharic. Samson grimaced. It was quite clear that Bahru didn’t have enough money to pay the bill. But he didn’t seem concerned. He invited the mechanic to sit down with him and play cards.
“But I don’t have any cards,” said the mechanic.
“I do,” said Bahru, and with that he produced a pack of cards from his pocket.
“If you win,” said Bahru, “I will pay you double what you are asking for, and if I win, I won’t pay anything.”
The mechanic looked down at his oily fists and considered the proposition.
“All right,” he said at last.
Bahru dealt them each nine cards. I’m not sure what game they were playing or how many hands it entailed, but it appeared to be some form of poker. We clustered round and looked at both men’s hands. Word of the game gradually spread. A wave of anticipation rippled through the village. Despite the early hour, people filtered in. Within a few minutes the garage was packed. All eyes were on Bahru and the mechanic. Some of the villagers placed side bets on who would win. It was the first time in Ethiopia that I’d seen a craze for gambling.
The first hand went to the mechanic. He burst out laughing as the crowd pressed tighter. It was his turn to deal. He shuffled, and shuffled again. Then he dealt them both seven cards. Bahru glanced at the top card on the remaining pile. It was face down. He took it. Then he took another. And then another. The mechanic’s cool expression faltered, and Bahru laid a winning hand on the table. The cards were dealt again, and again Bahru won. Then the mechanic won a hand. Samson called for the audience to quieten down.
“Last hand,” he said.
Seven cards were dealt to each man. The mechanic snapped his into a fan and pressed them to his nose. He seemed confident. Bahru picked up his cards and glanced at them. Then he took a card from the pile, looked across at me, and winked. The mechanic looked up at the ceiling and began to whistle. I could tell he was close to winning. In my mind I went through the consequences if we lost. They were grim. Then, just before the mechanic took a card, Bahru stood to his feet and slammed his hand on the table. The crowd went wild. He had won.
Fifteen minutes later we were rolling through the countryside again. The mechanic had been very sporting, despite a significant loss of earnings. Bahru steered the Jeep through the next village, taking care not to run down any animals. A new, virtuous side of his character had emerged which I had not seen before. We drove on in silence, negotiating the hairpin bends. Quite suddenly Bahru slammed on the brakes as we rounded an oblique turn. Without them we would have gone over the cliff. In the middle of the road there was a boulder, partly camouflaged with branches and foliage. Samson and I climbed down and pushed it over the edge. Exhilarated at the thought of cheating death and the murderous villagers, I asked Bahru how he was so sure he’d win at cards. He changed into third gear and peered into the rear-view mirror.
“Marked cards,” he said.
The greatest red herring for anyone searching for King Solomon’s mines must be Henry Rider Haggard’s novel of the same name. The book is a tour de force of Victorian literature, a swashbuckling tale which has appealed to generations of young men. Its characters are larger than life, fearless, and charged with an insatiable lust for adventure. But Rider Haggard’s story is so embedded in fiction that it is of little use as a guide to finding ancient gold mines.
The book’s real achievement is more subtle. It may not have led men to riches, but it has inspired them to leave their ordinary lives behind and go in search of adventure. Between the wars thousands of young European men flocked to Africa. Their purpose was always the same – to hunt big game and to track down treasure. Many had little in the way of education or training, but some did have solid academic credentials. One such man was a young Polish Count called Byron de Prorok. He was intrepid beyond measure, an adventurer and an amateur archaeologist. If there was ever a real-life Indiana Jones, it was he.
De Prorok had spent years during the 1920s in North Africa, excavating in the high Atlas mountains, on the banks of the Red Sea, and at the site of Carthage, in what is now Tunisia. But his real obsession was Ethiopia. While in Carthage he claimed to have bought an old parchment map that showed an ancient slave route up the Nile to Khartoum, then eastward to Ethiopia. De Prorok believed the slaves had worked in gold mines near Beni Shangul and then transported the yellow metal westwards, back to Egypt.
I didn’t have much faith in de Prorok’s treasure map. It sounded about as genuine as the one I’d bought from Ah Baba. De Prorok, however, was determined to discover the ancient mines. In 19
34, leading an expedition that was both well-funded and well-equipped, he set out from Khartoum in the Sudan, and crossed into Ethiopia at Kurmuk by what he called “the back door”. He had difficulty in getting permission from Emperor Haile Selassie to travel through the west of the country and, when eventually permission was granted, de Prorok was forbidden to carry weapons.
Frank Hayter had traveled in secret and alone, but de Prorok brought along archaeologists and photographers, scientists and taxidermists, porters and a retinue of hangers-on. The Count knew how to travel in style, and the tale of his journey to Beni Shangul might well have come from the pages of King Solomon’s Mines. He claimed to have discovered ancient gold workings, and shafts carved into the mountains where emeralds had been mined long before. He spoke, too, of legions of children enslaved by a fiendish warlord known locally as the Mad Sultan Ghogoli. The despot forced them to work in the mines where they were guarded by brutal warders, who wielded Ápotamus-hide whips. The Sultan was rumored to be a hundred years old, and to have a thousand wives. Anyone who crossed him was strung up on a tree by the thumbs until he fell away from them. Ghogoli was more than a little reminiscent of Rider Haggard’s own antagonist, Gogool.
Beni Shangul was not far from Hayter’s mine-shafts, so I decided to head to Tullu Wallel via the Beni Shangul region. I had managed to get a copy of de Prorok’s account of his expedition, Dead Men Do Tell Tales, before leaving for Ethiopia. It bore many similarities to Hayter’s own description of the area in Gold of Ethiopia, which I took as a positive sign. Hayter noted that de Prorok had discovered positive proof that the Pharaohs had obtained gold from north-west Ethiopia. In fact the Count had actually taken gold samples from the west and had tested them against ancient Egyptian gold. He found the samples to be virtually identical.
The Jeep’s renovation in the highlands had been a godsend. But no sooner had some problems been solved than new ones surfaced. First the fuel pump failed, then we had a blown gasket and yet more punctures. The last straw was when one of the front tires burst on a blind bend. Bahru wrestled desperately with the steering-wheel as the vehicle lurched out of control, eventually managing to bring us to a juddering halt on the edge of a ravine.
Once we had celebrated having survived, Samson climbed on to the roof rack to untie the last good wheel. He threw it down to the ground for Bahru to catch. But the driver’s vision was clouded by an overdose of qat. He clutched at the air, and the wheel went over the cliff and into the ravine below. Samson volunteered to climb down and retrieve it. He was gone for four hours.
By dusk we reached Gondar, the seat of Ethiopian power from 1632 until the middle of the nineteenth century. Despite its glorious past, my first impressions of the town were not favourable. It started to pour with rain the moment we arrived, and it didn’t stop until we left. Much of the intervening time was spent hunting for lodgings and a place to eat. All the hotels were inexplicably full. Someone said something about a Pan African football match, but I found it hard to believe that the continent’s great football teams would converge on Gondar.
The manager of the only hotel in town with spare rooms took my money and led me to a peephole in the wall.
“Look through there,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Just look!”
He grinned. I put my eye to the hole and looked. Then I blushed and drew back quickly. A white woman and a black man were locked in an intimate embrace.
“She’s Israeli,” said the manager bitterly, “and she’s staying in there with her Ethiopian guide.”
“Maybe they’re in love,” I said.
The manager shook his head abruptly.
“It is not love.”
In the morning we ate breakfast in a large café with orange walls and a bright blue ceiling. The waitress ferried espressos to our table, and asked if we’d heard about the Israeli woman.
“That’s gossip,” snapped Samson righteously.
“Maybe they’re in love,” I said, repeating myself.
“No, no,” replied the girl, “it is not love.”
After a meal of crusty bread rolls dipped in thin gravy, we inspected the castles for which Gondar is famous. Sometimes on a journey you arrive at a town which is famed for its architecture, a place about which countless books have been written. But after casting an eye over it all, you wonder if you’re missing something. The royal enclosure, which contains the castles and palaces of Gondar, had been stripped bare. The buildings were empty shells, and all trace of their former residents had vanished.
Samson trudged behind me, enduring both the rain and my astringent comments on one of his nation’s greatest treasures. He suggested I look beyond the ruined walls and think of their history. He was right. The ground on which we walked was once regarded by the European powers as an Avalon, an enchanted seat of sovereignty. The Portuguese, the French, the British and others sent their explorers to present their credentials to its emperors. Many of them never completed the journey and those that did endured extraordinary hardships.
The most famous early explorer to arrive in Gondar was James Bruce, the Laird of Kinnaird, and a man of considerable private wealth. He set off from Scotland in search of the source of the Nile and eventually reached Gondar on St Valentine’s Day, 1770. Bruce was a great hulk of a man, standing six foot three, stout as a barrel, with a mane of bright red hair. He was a crack shot and a fine horseman, and he was also a severe hypochondriac. Contemporary accounts said he was easily offended and had a violent temper. When he grew angry his nose would start bleeding quite spontaneously.
Hardly a single white man had ventured to Ethiopia since the Portuguese had left three centuries before. Bruce found himself in the middle of a barbaric civil war, but he managed to get to the headstream of the Blue Nile, although he mistook it for the main source of the river. The journey back to Britain was one of almost unbelievable hardship. Before returning home Bruce stopped at various European spas to cure his malaria, and to receive treatment for the guinea worm which riddled his right leg. He made the mistake of announcing his discoveries to the court of France. This was seen by the English as a direct snub. London wits, including Dr Johnson (who loathed the Scots, and who was regarded as an authority on Ethiopia although he’d never been there), tore Bruce’s story to shreds and turned him into a laughing stock. A broken man, the Laird retired to his Scottish estate and years later wrote a long, ponderous account of his adventure.
My interest in Gondar lay not in the ruins, but in some of the city’s inhabitants for it is here that the last of the Ethiopian Jews, known as the Beta Israel, once lived. A great deal of misinformation surrounds the Ethiopian Jews. Remarkably few academic studies have been conducted on the subject, and much of the work published is of questionable scholarship. Judaic scholars are not even certain when the Beta Israel arrived in Ethiopia. Some have put the date as early as the tenth century bc while others contend that they arrived as late as medieval times. Although it is a tempting idea, only the most dubious scholars believe that the Ethiopian Jews arrived during the reign of Solomon. The Beta Israel themselves believe that they are the descendants of Menelik I, the son of Solomon and Sheba. Others have postulated that they are the tribe of Dan, one of the ten lost tribes of Israel, or that they failed to cross with Moses when he parted the Red Sea, and so fled southwards out of Egypt.
For centuries the Ethiopian Jews survived encircled by Christianity. Commonly known as falashas, they were totally isolated from the world of mainstream Judaism. They were unable to read or speak Hebrew or to learn the Talmudic scriptures. Their religious life was based on the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and they kept to a kosher diet and observed the Sabbath.
Sometimes they were persecuted, and at other times they were left alone. Almost always they lived in their own villages, sequestered away from the Christian community. Many of them must have converted, for fear of losing their lands in times of persecution; in doing so, they affected Ethiopia’s ow
n unique blend of Christianity. In ancient times there may well have been hundreds of thousands of Beta Israel in Ethiopia. Yet gradually their numbers were decimated through persecution, conversions, famine and disease.
The Beta Israel made the news headlines in the mid-1980s and early 1990s when almost every one of them was airlifted to Israel. Operation Moses in 1984, and Operation Solomon in 1991, were two of the largest mass airlifts in history. No one is quite sure exactly how many Ethiopian Jews were moved in the evacuation, largely because the operations were so hurried. But it is thought that about forty-five thousand left in the exodus.
The strangest thing I have read about the Beta Israel was written by C. H. Walker, a former British Consul to western Ethiopia. He remarked that they were unsurpassed as craftsmen and that the local Christians didn’t trust them. Walker said the most feared section of the Beta Israel were the Buda, the religious hierarchy. They were believed to have the power to turn themselves into hyenas, and to transmit the Evil Eye. At night, in animal form they would ravage graves and feed on the dead. In human form they would typically wear a gold earring, quite unique in design. Walker said that hyenas were frequently shot and found to have the same curious rings pinned through their ears. Was there, I wondered, any connection with the hyenas of Harar?
A couple of miles from Gondar we came to a hand-written sign in white chalk which advertised that we had arrived at the “Falasha Village”. It was the kind of place that must have attracted many tourists before the evacuations, but now there were none. Bahru braked sharply and pointed to the sign. The village appeared to be deserted and all the houses were empty. Even the blacksmith’s foundry and the workshops, which would once have produced the ironwork, pottery and baskets for which the Ethiopian Jews were renowned, had been abandoned.