by Tahir Shah
Lucas said the tunnels ran along a rich seam and that they always had a hole at each end so as to ensure an escape route if the roof caved in.
“Are there cave-ins?”
“Often,” he said, “especially in the rains when the ground is so wet. There’s nothing we can do except make sure we prop up the sides of the tunnels with wood. Last week one of the men was almost killed. We dug for many hours. But he was a strong man, thank God, and he survived.”
Samson stripped off his shirt, kicked off his shoes and jumped down the tunnel, disappearing like a ferret down a rabbit-hole. He clearly hadn’t forgotten his mining days. Lucas asked if I wanted to go down. I took a small torch from my camera bag and followed him into the shaft. It went straight down like a well shaft. For someone unused to the work, clambering down was an unnerving experience. Lucas made it look so easy. He glided down the thirty-foot hole without giving it another thought. Behind him, I was wheezing and struggling. Eventually the shaft levelled out and led to a passage, little more than three feet in height, that continued for fifty feet, before diving down again, this time in a steep slope. It reminded me of the cramped passage which leads to the heart of the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza. We crawled on our stomachs over soil that had been tamped down by innumerable bodies. The light from my torch was dim and in the end I switched it off. It was easier to shut my eyes and rely on the sense of touch.
After a great deal of crawling I heard voices. Samson had reached the mine face and was calling out.
“This is the seam,” said Lucas, pressing my hand to a jagged wall of soil. “There is much gold here. You can smell it, can’t you?”
I turned on my torch and then breathed in. All I could smell was red African earth and sweat. Lucas showed how the miners chipped away at the seam with a sharp iron pike. Most of them didn’t bother with lanterns or torches. Years of tunnelling had given them a sense of their surroundings. Like moles, they had no need to see.
Back on the surface, after a gruelling ascent, I followed the procession of children who shuttled the baskets and pans from the mine face to the river. The boys were apprentices. One day they would continue the work of their fathers, as their fathers had done before them. But first they had to scurry back and forth like rats through the tunnels. In our society we regard the idea of child labor as deplorable, but most of the world knows no other way. Children’s miniature frames and nimble movements make them the obvious choice for tunnelling.
Down at the river twenty-five women were sweeping the round wooden pans in the flow. They became uneasy when they spotted me but then relaxed when they saw Lucas by my side. A couple of girls were bathing on the rocks and rinsing their dresses. They shrieked for us to turn away until they’d slipped back into their clothes. Others were singing. Samson said it was a song of lost love. Each woman wore a miniature gourd, no bigger than the bowl of a pipe, strung around her neck. In it was kept the gold dust for which they worked so hard. Squatting on their haunches, the women swirled water around the great pans until all the soil was gone, leaving no more than a speck or two of gold. Vast quantities of dirt have to be sifted to produce even the smallest trace of gold dust. For every grain of it a gallon of sweat is lost.
During the rains the river is high, providing the water needed to pan the gold, but in spring and autumn the water level drops. Then the villagers work in the fields instead.
I asked if the government ever tried to restrict their mining.
“The officials are fearful of this place,” said Lucas. “They think that we will cut their throats and kill them. And they know about the Devil in the mountain.”
“Which mountain?”
Lucas pointed a finger to a double peak in the distance. It resembled the so-called Sheba’s Breasts in Rider Haggard’s novel.
“The Devil is up there on Gorba,” he said. “The peak on the right is male, and the one on the left is female. The Devil is on the female hill.”
“Have you seen him?”
“No, I haven’t,” he said, “and I don’t wish to. The people who have been there have all died. Sometimes they climb up and disappear. Even faranjis have gone up there and disappeared.”
Just as Ethiopian caves are frequently associated with gold and treasure, mountains are often linked to the Devil. I had read a description of another Devil mountain in the Simien range, written by Paul Hartlmaier, a German traveling in Ethiopia during the 1950s. He said the Devil supposedly dwelt near the village of Addi Arkai, on a mountain called Amba Hawasa. The locals believed that anyone stupid enough to venture up the mountain would be cast into the chasm below. Whatever the case, such tales are an effective method of keeping inquisitive visitors away.
I wondered if Frank Hayter or Count de Prorok had ever explored the mountain of Gorba. After all, de Prorok had searched the area before the Mad Sultan’s army chased him away. He had found a river called Werk Warka, literally the “River of Gold”, at which hundreds of Ghogoli’s child slaves were toiling. De Prorok said the slaves were in a pitiful condition and that anyone who ran away and was caught was flayed alive by the guards’ hippopotamus-hide whips. Near the river the Count found chambers full of graves. When his team excavated them they discovered ancient human bones, embalmed skeletons, a number of amphorae, and necklaces similar to those found in ancient Egyptian tombs.
The Ethiopian porters were so terrified of opening the graves that de Prorok and the other Europeans had to leave the camp during the night and exhume the bodies alone. The Count thought the bones might have belonged to Egyptian gold miners working the area even before the time of Solomon, and he claimed to have come across what looked like an obelisk, made from porphyry. As if that wasn’t enough, de Prorok also said he’d found an ancient emerald mine at Beni Shangul.
The Mad Sultan’s forces hounded the expedition out of the area before the obelisk and their other discoveries could be removed. I asked Lucas and his fellow villagers if they knew of Werk Warka, and if they had heard of ancient graves and an obelisk. They all laughed at the question.
“Take my advice,” Lucas said as we walked back to the hamlet, “don’t waste your time with these things. Go back to your country and forget about the gold and the emeralds.” He stopped and turned to face the twin peaks of Gorba.
“Why?”
“Because the Devil is watching you.”
Christmas swayed across the yard, brushing a chicken away with her broom, each stride starting at the hips, buttocks moving legs. Her feet were bare, callused like the hull of a ship which has been at sea for many months. She fluttered her eyelashes at Samson and sighed deeply. He said the woman wasn’t his type, and in any case he was faithful to his girlfriend. But the bar owner’s wife had fallen head over heels in love.
Samson and I had shared a room at the back of the bar, in a village called Mengay, two days on from the mining hamlet. The road had deteriorated even further and I dreaded the journey ahead.
The room at the bar had cracked mud walls, a high tin roof and a pair of rope beds. During the day, light would stream in through a glassless window. There were bats roosting in the darkened corners where the tin roof met the walls. At night they would flutter out of the window to hunt for insects above the trees. There was also a gap often inches below the door, under which chickens would scramble in their perpetual search for grain.
That night I was so tired that I fell into a deep sleep. In the early hours a live creature armed with many claws plunged the thirteen feet from the tin roof on to my chest. I sat up screaming and gasping for air. It was the bar’s cat stalking bats.
Next morning I asked Christmas about the bats.
“The Death Birds!” she cried. “Did they bite you?”
As I probed for puncture marks on my neck, she served Samson an immense bowl of spaghetti topped with chicken livers. It was on the house, she said, massaging her fingertips flirtatiously into his shoulders.
The village was near Asosa, virtually on the border with Sudan,
and it was flooded with refugees, some of them maimed and missing limbs. Although the Ethiopian population were sensitive to the plight of their Sudanese cousins, there was tension between them. The refugees were eligible for handouts from aid organizations, whereas the local Ethiopians were given nothing.
In the West we have little concept of poverty. But on Ethiopia’s border with Sudan, its full meaning is all too apparent. These people are stranded in limbo, from one generation to the next. They have barely enough food to survive, and never enough to escape. They cannot afford to buy rags to clothe themselves, to send their children to school or to buy medicine if they fall sick.
“Now you can understand why gold is so alluring to these people,” said Samson. “They have nothing else to hope for.”
In the afternoon a blind woman was led up to the bar’s veranda where we were sitting. The child leading her took her hand and placed it on my shoulder. Her arms were emaciated, her face haggard, her mouth empty of its teeth. The dress she was wearing was ripped down the sides and the back. She spoke in a voice so loud that we assumed she was deaf.
“She’s saying that she’s heard there is a faranji here,” said Samson. “She has something to sell for the right price.”
“What?”
The woman shouted something.
“Some coins.”
“Can she show us?”
The woman untied a pouch tucked into her dress and handed it to me. Somehow I knew what was in the pouch even before I opened it. There were twenty of them – large silver coins, all bearing the same date, 1780. I had bought a bag of identical coins years before while living in Kenya as a student. They are known as Maria Theresa dollars or thalers (the word from which “dollar” is derived) because they were first minted during the reign of the Austrian Empress, between 1740 and 1780. For decades the coins were the currency of Ethiopia, where the image of the Empress was believed to be that of the Virgin Mary. What was strange, however, was the fact that though the coins were minted in many different years, Ethiopians only trusted the ones stamped with the date 1780 and considered all the rest to be fakes. So all later versions were marked with the same date. The Austrian mint has recently started to produce the coins again. They are still dated 1780.
Bahru needed to get the Jeep’s chassis welded, so we were forced to spend a second night in Mengay. When we told Christmas, she quivered with delight.
Evenings in remote Ethiopian villages tend to be quiet. No one has much money to spend on carousing, although Bahru always managed to find a card game in which to use his special deck. I never stopped him, for if I condemned what was his only source of revenue, he’d have turned to me for funds.
Samson and I went for a walk. He was desperate to get away from Christmas, who was busily preparing him yet another vast meal. We passed a row of run-down shops — a baker”s, a tailor’s and a kiosk selling soap and wire wool, mosquito coils and matches — and then a bar, marked in the usual way by an upturned cup on a stick. A little further on, towards the end of the village street, we saw a crowd gathering. Samson asked what was going on.
“A miracle man,” said a passer-by.
The villagers lined up in an arc, waiting for the miracle man to begin, the atmosphere electric with anticipation. “He’s from Sudan,” said one man. “He can do miracles,” said another.
I’ve been interested in illusion for a long time but I’d never heard of any miracle workers plying their trade south of the Sahara, so I persuaded Samson to stay and watch.
The magician lit a pair of paraffin lamps dangling from the lowest branches of a tree and then laid out a striped blanket, removed his shoes and welcomed the crowd. As he stepped into the pool of light cast by the lamps I got a better view of his face. Very dark and softened with age, it was friendly and trustworthy. Samson said the man, whose name was Petros, didn’t speak very good Oromo. His native tongue was Arabic.
Petros said he would perform four miracles. First he would throw ordinary water on to the ground to make a fire. He poured a cup of clear liquid on to a patch of soil near one corner of the blanket. A stream of smoke spiralled up, and then the ground burst into flames. The crowd cheered and clapped and Samson nudged me in the ribs.
“A miracle!” he exclaimed.
Next Petros declared that he would stop his own pulse. A woman from the front row put her fingers on the miracle man’s wrist and announced that his pulse had faded and then disappeared altogether. Again the audience went wild, slapping their hands on their thighs and laughing out loud.
For the third miracle Petros said he would eat glass. He broke a clear light-bulb with his shoe, placed a shard of glass on his tongue and then crunched it up and swallowed it. Samson slapped me on the back.
“Isn’t this incredible?!” he shouted, as all around us the villagers clamoured for more.
Petros said that he would do one last miracle. The piece de resistance would be to turn a rod into a snake. Samson’s eyes lit up. He knew the miracle well. It was first performed by Aaron at the court of the Pharaohs. The miracle man turned his back for a moment and drew a rod from a cloth bag. It was about three feet long and the color of black olives. He asked the crowd what they saw.
“It’s a stick,” they said in unison.
The magician tossed the stick on to the blanket. At first nothing happened. But then, slowly, it began to move and eventually it slithered away. I can hardly begin to describe the effect this had on the crowd. Men, women and children leapt up and ran about in awe, unable to believe what they had seen.
I made the mistake of bragging that I knew how the tricks were done. Samson thought I was demeaning the miracle man.
“Explain the miracles to me,” he said.
“All right. For the first trick he made a fire without any matches.”
“Fire with water,” said Samson, nodding.
“Well, I think you’ll find he sprinkled some potassium permanganate on the ground and poured glycerine on to it.”
“What about the second miracle, stopping the pulse?”
“You put a walnut or something small and hard in your armpit and squeeze. It stops the blood’s circulation in your arm.”
Samson scratched his head.
“Okay, but he ate glass.”
“If you eat a banana first and then grind up the glass with your back teeth, it gets embedded in the banana and passes through the intestines harmlessly.”
We had come to the last trick. I knew this would be sensitive because Aaron’s miracle had been recorded in the Bible, and Samson took the Bible very seriously indeed.
“Turning a rod into a snake,” I said, “is sometimes regarded as the oldest piece of conjuring in existence.”
“Aaron did it himself,” said Samson, “it’s recounted in Exodus,” and he gave me chapter and verse.
“It’s easier than it looks,” I said. “The trick is that there is no rod, just a snake. If you stretch the snake out and press down hard on its pituitary gland, the poor thing thinks that an enormous predator is standing on top of it. So it goes into shock. But when you let it go, it comes to and wriggles away.”
“You think you know all the answers, don’t you?” said Samson bitterly.
Feroze, the conjurer who taught me magical illusion, advised me always to carry a few simple tricks on my travels. He said they would alleviate boredom and might help get me out of a sticky situation. In the West we tend to underestimate the effect of magic tricks. We all know they’re just that – tricks. But transplant the same illusions into a small village off the beaten track and you can drive people wild.
In the early years of the last century an indefatigable Englishman called John Boyes set out for East Africa. An old friend of Frank Hayter, he had been inspired by Rider Haggard’s Allan Quartermain. In the book, which is a sequel to King Solomon’s Mines, the hero goes in search of a lost white race north of Mount Kenya. Boyes intended to follow Quartermain’s own route down into the Rift Valley. Very few white men h
ad ever been accepted into the indigenous Kikuyu tribe before, and a number had recently been massacred.
When Boyes arrived at the first Kikuyu stronghold, he audaciously declared that he was a god, and he told the locals that he could not be killed. Such a claim might seem suicidal, but Boyes had a plan. Before the first spear could be hurled in his direction, he told the villagers that he would prove his power by drinking boiling water. He poured some water into a cup containing effervescent liver salts. The water bubbled furiously, and Boyes gulped it down, to the amazement of the tribesmen. Then he pulled out his phonograph, wound it up and played a record. That, he said, was an evil spirit trapped in a box.
In his book King of the Wa Kikuyu, Boyes claimed that tribal people from miles around came to pay homage to him as a result. Eventually he became their monarch, with five hundred thousand warriors under his command.
As we continued our journey, the rains grew heavier. In places the mud was so deep that it came up to the door handles, and traversing it with treadless tires was a vile experience. Still, despite his enthusiasm for trapping wildlife under the wheels, and his constant qat-chewing, Bahru proved himself a skilled driver. While Samson would fall into a gloom of despondency, Bahru never complained. He was a man who lived from one minute to the next. Nothing fazed him. Sometimes we’d turn a bend to see a seemingly impassable stretch of track before us: a battlefield landscape of holes, mud and quicksand. Then, stuffing some qat leaves in his cheek, his eyes lighting up in delight, he’d stamp on the accelerator and charge through the quagmire and out the other side.
On the way to Nejo, our next stop, dense forest gave way to a patchwork of fields. The ground was clearly full of minerals, for each rocky outcrop gleamed with iron and quartz. The soil was fertile too. Samson said that if you planted a walking-stick here it would grow into a tree a hundred feet tall. Then he reminded me that, as all Ethiopians know, this was where the Garden of Eden had been.