The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  In the late evening the gin-bottle man sent his son to fetch us. His mule contact had turned up. We strolled across to the kiosk and were introduced to Tadesse. He was one of the most evil-looking men I have ever set eyes on. If I’d been told he had just chopped up his children and danced on their graves, I wouldn’t have been the least surprised. He had wicked, shifty eyes, high cheekbones, and a long waxy tongue which emerged from his mouth between sentences, like that of a tree frog catching flies. The gin-bottle man spoke highly of the muleteer, saying he was the only man who knew the mountain.

  I asked Samson what he thought.

  “We don’t have to climb Tullu Wallel to find the Devil,” he said. “He’s standing right here.”

  The muleteer’s eyes flickered from side to side. He was waiting for our answer.

  “Where are the mules?”

  He said he would take us to them once they had been rounded up. I asked how long that would take.

  “One or two days.”

  “That seems like a very long time.”

  Tadesse looked at me hard.

  “Ethiopian mules are very wild,” he said.

  We arranged to inspect the animals at first light. If they still hadn’t been caught, I would view them through my binoculars. Business turned to the mountain itself. When I inquired if Tadesse was afraid of Tullu Wallel, he didn’t say anything; he just laughed manically.

  “He is a good man,” said the gin-bottle man. “You will grow to like him.”

  “Are his mules strong?”

  The gin-bottle man rubbed the hole where his nose ought to have been.

  “They’re as strong as the mountain,” he said.

  We thanked him for the introduction and turned on our heels to go. But I couldn’t leave yet. There was something I had to know. Unable to contain myself, I made Samson find out how he’d lost his nose. The gin-bottle man glanced down at the table, and I felt embarrassed at having asked.

  “A long time ago,” he said, “I had an argument with my wife. She bit it off and ran away.”

  On the way to the mules I bragged about my equestrian experience. I told Tadesse and Samson that my Pushtun ancestors prided themselves on their skill at buz-kashi, the Afghan national sport played on horseback with a headless goat. Polo is said to have developed from the game. The horses get so charged up that they bite each other if they get the chance. I went on about how I myself had been raised with horses. The animals were in my blood, I said.

  Of course it was all a lie. As children we did have a pair of vicious donkeys called Boney and Claude, but they rolled under the fence one day and were never seen again. Anyone mad enough to try saddling them up would have been torn to pieces.

  Everything I know about horses was passed on by an old family friend. An indomitable Swiss, he had decided that he’d trek with horses from Ulan Batur, in Outer Mongolia, to Vienna. He bought a pair of ponies from a horse-dealer in a suburb of the Mongolian capital. They were wild animals with sores all over their backs. The locals told him to pee on the sores. He soon found this was no easy feat. But when he did manage it they reared up and ran away, leaving him stranded in the frozen wastes of Mongolia. When, after many adventures, he arrived back home, I asked for his advice.

  “Always pick your animals very carefully,” he said.

  Those words rang in my mind as we walked the three miles to where the mules were grazing. There were eight of them, and Tadesse still hadn’t managed to catch them. However, their backs were covered in saddle sores, which meant that they must have been ridden at some point.

  I asked the price.

  Tadesse pointed out the high quality of the saddles and the harnesses.

  “There’s not a finer mule for a hundred miles,” he said. “I’m only charging ten birr a day for each.”

  That was about eight pounds a day for all eight. It sounded like a bargain, so we took the lot.

  Samson didn’t understand why we needed so many animals but I justified the decision by saying that I expected injuries. It was going to be a long, hard trip. There were sure to be fatalities. In fact my reasons were different. There’s nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.

  The night before we left Begi with the mules, I re-read Frank Hayter’s description of finding the mine-shafts at Tullu Wallel. A dejazmacth, a nobleman, had told him of a legend. It said that the ancient kings of Ethiopia had obtained their gold from two places in the west of the country. The first was Beni Shangul, and the second was at the base of Tullu Wallel. Both sets of mines were, he warned, “guarded by the spirits of the old rulers of this country”. The tip-off sent Hayter’s head spinning. He left at dawn the next day and, after days of trekking, he finally reached the twin peaks of Tullu Wallel, which he called Sheba’s Breasts.

  The party continued their approach, pushing through a dense bamboo forest, and eventually reached the eastern flank of the mountain. There Hayter claimed to have discovered fourteen stone portals covered in vegetation. “They were the entrances to underground caves,” he wrote, “and not natural entrances either, for the stone uprights and heavy lintels that squared the openings had been fashioned by the hands of man.”

  Hayter’s two books on Ethiopia contain many black and white photographs. There are pictures of gold prospectors and mule caravans, of lepers and encampments and tribal ceremonies, and there are innumerable shots of Hayter himself, dressed in pith helmet and safari suit. The only image missing from his books is the one of the actual mine entrances. However, Hayter’s friend Captain E. J. Bartleet, who retold the tale in his own book In the Land of Sheba, includes an extraordinary photograph. At first glance it looks very ordinary, but on closer inspection you begin to appreciate its significance. At the top right of the picture there is a natural cave opening. But a few yards away, at the bottom of the photograph, there is the upper part of what looks like a man-made stone entrance. It is partly hidden by vegetation but it is unmistakable, and it appears to lead to a mine-shaft.

  That night, before setting off for Tullu Wallel, I sat on my bed in the brothel, shining the beam of my torch on the picture from Bartleet’s book. A man was screaming in the next room. At first I thought it was the cry of passion. Then I remembered that Samson had taken the room next to mine and that he was devoted to his long-suffering girlfriend. So I got off my bed and knocked gently on the door, irritated that Samson should be making so much noise. The screams turned to a long, low groan. I pushed the door open. Samson was lying on the floor, sweating profusely and clutching his abdomen. I asked what all the fuss was about. From what I could understand, he claimed to be in a great deal of pain. I hoped it wasn’t a burst appendix. I remembered reading a book about climbing Everest. It had said that top climbers always have their appendix out before starting the ascent. I kicked myself for not thinking of it before. We were a man down and our assault on Tullu Wallel hadn’t even begun.

  Unsure of what to do, I went and asked the Tigrayan whores. They spoke no English, so I clutched my stomach, stuck out my tongue and pointed to Samson’s room. The girls looked puzzled, and one of them nodded and stuck out her tongue. Then they walked off into another room, and a great deal of muffled shouting followed. I went back to Samson. A moment later there was a thump on the door. A tall, athletic-looking man wearing nothing but underwear was standing in the door frame. He said in English that he was a doctor. I pointed to my traveling companion. The doctor jabbed a finger into Samson’s belly.

  “Probably the appendix,” I said knowledgeably.

  “No,” he said, “it is intestinal worms.”

  I asked how much we owed for the diagnosis.

  “Fifty birr!

  The doctor said he would send one of the prostitutes to get medicine. Then he returned to his room. He clearly had unfinished business to attend to.

  After the disturbance I went back to Bartleet’s book and ran over the facts again. The story seemed to fit. My American tactical pilotage chart indicated that Tullu
Wallel did indeed have two peaks, reaching a height of 10,738 feet. The distances Hayter had given from Gambela and Gore were about right too. And, more importantly, like Beni Shangul just to the north, the area was well known as an ancient source of gold. But the question that haunted me was why Hayter hadn’t published the photograph of the cave entrance in his own book. Bartleet had scooped him, publishing the account of the find in 1934, a year before Hayter’s book appeared. In his account, Bartleet explained that he was supposed to go on the adventure but fell ill and had to stay behind in Addis Ababa. So Hayter went alone, and Bartleet never got to see the fourteen portals or the mine-shafts for himself. I assumed that Hayter must therefore have taken the picture but chose not to publish it himself. Perhaps he feared it would help others identity the place.

  I had insisted we leave Begi at dawn. An early start on the first day keeps untested men and mules on their toes. Moreover, I didn’t want Tadesse to think I was a walkover, even though I’d agreed to pay his opening rate for the pack animals.

  Tadesse had roped in his two sons, whom he said would work for free. The boys grinned wickedly. They had their father’s genes. The younger one carried a sharp bamboo stave which he used to poke the poor mules’ behinds. When he wasn’t poking, he was sharpening the stick. The other boy didn’t have any interest in being a muleteer, despite his father’s hopes. He had heard of a place called America, he said, where he could get money for free.

  After taking a couple of sachets of yellow powder prescribed by the doctor, Samson said his symptoms had gone away. I felt rather guilty about not delaying our departure, but he exclaimed that he was fighting fit again. I think he was embarrassed that he had worms.

  Tadesse herded the mules to the front of the bar. They huddled together, eyes staring and hooves stamping. Despite this feigned fear, I could tell they were longing to escape. They were wild animals and resented laboring for humans. I had seen the same deranged look in our donkeys’ eyes the day before they ran away.

  The kit bags were soon strapped into position with leather thongs, and then the younger boy shaved a sliver off his bamboo shaft and plunged it into one of the mule’s backsides as if to let them know who was boss. I looked over to see if the gin-bottle man was up but, like everyone else in the small town, he must have been fast asleep.

  There is something about walking with mules that stirs me. I’ve traveled with camels and yaks, and even llamas, but mules are quite different. I’ve been bitten by a llama and spat at by more than one angry camel. Donkeys are less hostile but you always get the feeling that you’re doing them an injustice. Mules on the other hand are built for rough work and thrive on hardship.

  Samson was pleased to be heading for the mountain. He kept dropping hints about his new role as a preacher. I took him aside and said that we weren’t really missionaries. In case he hadn’t realized, I said, I wasn’t even a Christian.

  The track from Begi veered to the east and skirted a hill called Gimi. We were very close to the border with Sudan, which lay on the other side of the hill. I was worried that we might be arrested as spies, for border areas in Africa tend to be patrolled by secret police. If we were arrested, I told Samson to hold his Bible high in the air and declare that we were working for God. If interrogated, I planned to pretend I was a recent convert to Christianity. Everyone knows that converts are the most fanatical followers of a faith.

  We continued walking well into the afternoon. The saddles were in poor shape, but at least they kept the flies off the mules’ sores. The animals took every opportunity to stop and eat, and I knew they were all on the lookout for an escape route. As we trudged along, the humidity rose until finally, in the afternoon, it began to rain. We sought refuge under a bank of trees and waited for it to pass.

  Tadesse asked me if I was really a missionary.

  “Of course I am,” I replied firmly.

  “Then why do you talk about treasure so much?”

  “The Bible,” I said, “that is the treasure that we are talking about.”

  The muleteer narrowed his eyes and gave the order to move on.

  “The Devil will be waiting for us,” he said.

  We slept the night at Gidami. My feet were sore and Samson’s arm ached from carrying the Bible all day. We’d walked for almost twenty miles. However, the mules seemed to be in high spirits. Samson took Tadesse and his sons to get some food and asked me if I would join them but I declined. An old English explorer whom I had once met near Hunza, in the Karakoram range, had passed on a valuable tip. He said that you have to turn yourself into a mythical figure early on in a journey: that is the only way of establishing your authority. The explorer’s method was simple. He told me not to eat, at least not in public.

  “I never chow with the natives,” he explained, “not because I think I’m above them or because I don’t like the food. They see me going on day after day without anything in my stomach, and they think I’m superhuman. Try it out some time, old boy.”

  I’d been waiting to put this into practice for years. I unpacked my kit bags. In them I still had eight of the tins I’d bought in Axum. Samson couldn’t understand why my luggage was so heavy and I’d let him assume it was full of books. That night I gorged myself on a can of corned beef. It’s an explorer’s staple. Count Byron de Prorok and many other travelers in Africa all swore by their inexhaustible supply of “bully beef.

  During the night a spider wove an enormous sticky web over my face. As a die-hard arachnophobe I was very disturbed by the event. None of the others could understand why I was so alarmed. Unable to convince them of my horror of spiders, I decided to bolster my spirits with another surreptitious tin of corned beef.

  After a couple of hours of walking, Samson and the muleteers were ready for breakfast. They sat down to eat some crusts of bread and a few bruised pieces of fruit. Tadesse couldn’t believe I wasn’t hungry.

  “The Lord fills my stomach with His goodness,” I said, looking over at him meekly.

  That day we altered course, heading east, and Tadesse pointed a broken fingernail at the distant horizon.

  “That’s Tullu Wallel,” he said.

  I stopped and took a deep breath, and then glanced over at Samson. He was sucking his lower lip. Tadesse’s eyesight was either remarkably good or remarkably bad. When I looked I couldn’t see anything except for tall razor grass and the tops of trees. Only after another hour of trudging through rain did I see Tullu Wallel. It was fitting that I caught my first glimpse of the Devil’s abode in such horrible weather. Samson and I let the mules go on. We both needed a moment to stare at the mountain. The summit was lost in cloud, brooding and mysterious, but it quite obviously had twin peaks — Sheba’s Breasts, as Hayter had called them. Before we set off again Samson said a prayer. He looked up at the heavens and prayed that God would look after us and deliver us safely from the mountain.

  I asked Tadesse how long it would take to get to Tullu Wallel.

  “Maybe one day, maybe four days,” he replied.

  It was an appropriate answer to a stupid question. Time didn’t matter. We were nearing the mountain and that was all that counted. Above us, in the trees, baboons swung from branch to branch, taunting us. Tadesse picked up some stones and flung them at the animals.

  “They are the Devil’s disciples,” he said. “Beware of baboons.”

  I didn’t tell him of Frank Hayter’s curse, but I was thinking of it as we passed the baboons. Hayter believed completely in the spell that was put on him by an Abyssinian monk, when he’d captured a hundred sacred baboons and shipped them back to London Zoo.

  That was back in 1924. He later wrote: “Let me put my feelings in a nutshell. Ten years ago I was a very fit man indeed, fit enough to enter the ring and defend my title as boxing champion of Herefordshire. Today I am no more capable of flying without wings than of boxing. And I am only thirty-three.”

  During my research I had tried to find some trace of Frank Hayter’s family. He said that he mar
ried his cousin who bore him a son. I did manage to obtain copies of his birth and marriage certificates, but I do not know when he died. His last published book, The Garden of Eden, appeared in 1940. After that the trail goes cold. I wrote to hundreds of people all over the world called Hayter, but none appeared to be related to the explorer. Even so, I am sure that somewhere, in some forgotten attic, his notebooks and journals must survive.

  Tadesse said the mules needed time to graze. We untied their packs and let them chew on the long grass. The muleteer’s sons decided to pass the time by throwing more stones at the baboons. I said it was probably unwise to aggravate them, as they could be cursed.

  “Of course they’re cursed!” exclaimed Tadesse. “That’s why we throw stones at them.”

  I asked Samson to go over to a clutch of low mud huts nearby and see if anyone knew about Tullu Wallel.

  “What should I ask?”

  “Ask them if they fear the mountain.”

  He was gone for an hour and when, eventually, he came back to where we were sitting, he looked rather unnerved.

  “I think you had better meet these people,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Come and see.”

  The seven huts were arranged in a horseshoe, with a fire smoking in the middle. The central yard was shaded by a thorn tree. Under the tree sat a man, a woman and about six children. The man greeted Samson and then stood up when he saw me.

  “You must sit down,” said Samson.

  I sat down. The children giggled, their mother smiled and their father nodded.

  The parents were about thirty but looked sixty. Three decades of village life in western Ethiopia turns the skin to leather and calluses the hands and feet until they are almost unrecognisable. The man said his name was Jambo and that his wife was called Sara. We shook hands and Jambo offered me some berries. They were plum-colored and pippy. I ate a few and praised them. The children giggled again. Sara smiled. Jambo nodded. Then I said how happy I was to have come to their home. We sat in silence. I was waiting for Samson to say something, but he didn’t.