by Tahir Shah
“Tullu Wallel,” I said after some time.
I was expecting more giggles, more smiles, more nods. But Jambo and his family looked alarmed.
“A bad mountain,” said Jambo sternly.
“The Devil...”
“He lives there!” he shouted, pointing away to the distance.
“Have you ever been there?”
Sara looked nervous.
“Of course not!”
“They kill animals in honor of the mountain,” said Samson gently.
I asked if this was true.
Jambo nodded. “Yes, sometimes we kill animals.”
“Does it keep the Devil happy?”
“Yes, when we kill animals, the Devil is happy.”
“What if he is not happy?”
Jambo fell silent for a while and then spoke.
“It is not good when the Devil is angry.”
I asked Jambo when he was planning the next sacrifice. He passed me some more berries.
“No money to buy chickens.”
“If you had money would you make a sacrifice?”
Jambo leapt up from his seat. Yes, they’d make a sacrifice immediately, he said. He had remembered that the mountain required an offering urgently.
“What happens if no sacrifice is made?”
Jambo shook his head.
“Trouble.”
I fished out a wad of low-denomination notes. Explaining that we were missionaries, I said we had come to kick the Devil back to the farthest reaches of Hell. But before we routed him, we would give him one last meal.
Jambo grabbed the cash, passed half of it to his wife, and barked at her as gruffly as he could. She returned a few minutes later with a rather mangy pair of chickens. Within moments Jambo had broken their necks, hacked off their heads and plucked them. The children crowded round. I sent Samson to bring Tadesse and his sons. We would spend a night camping out at Jambo’s place.
It wasn’t long before a watery stew had been prepared. Tadesse, his sons, Samson and Jambo’s family all dug in.
“Don’t you have to hold the meat up to the mountain and say a prayer?”
Jambo gnawed at a bone.
“We have already done that,” he said.
“Eat, eat!” said Sara.
“I’ve made a vow not to eat anything until the Devil has run away from Tullu Wallel.”
With that I got up and walked off into the darkness. I had an appointment with a tin of corned beef.
When the watery stew had been eaten, I asked Jambo to take a look at the photograph of the mine entrance in Bartleet’s book. He held the red binding up to his nose, and his family clustered around.
“It’s the entrance to a shaft,” I said. “Can you see the stone doorway?”
“The shaft,” said Jambo, “that is the place where the Devil lives. You must not go there.”
“But I told you, we’re missionaries. It’s our job to get rid of the Devil so that you can live in peace.”
The farmer threw a chicken bone to one of his dogs.
“The Devil will bite off your heads,” he said.
“We know there is danger,” I replied. “But God will protect us.”
Jambo stood up and walked over to one of the huts. A few minutes later he returned and sat down beside me. There was something cupped in his hands. It was made from leather and was the size and shape of a film canister.
“Tie this amulet around your neck,” he said. “Inside there is a spell written on paper. It is written in Ge’ez, and it will give you extra protection.”
Jambo wiped his face with his hand. Then he stared into the fire, as if he was looking into the future.
“Remember one thing,” he added, “the Devil is very clever. Missionaries have been to Tullu Wallel before. Like you they said they were very strong but...” “But what?”
“But they never came down from the mountain.”
FOURTEEN
Tullu Wallel
“A good traveler has no fixed plan and is not intent on arriving.”
Lao Tzu
Frank Hayter said the mine-shafts were located at the base of the eastern flank of Tullu Wallel. By this I assumed he meant the east breast of the mountain. All the next day we walked through fields in which ripe ears of wheat reflected the sun. The land was almost empty of people. Samson thought that most locals preferred to farm other land.
“Many of them won’t even eat this wheat,” he said. “They think it’s poisonous, so they sell it to people down in Gambela.”
We took regular breaks to let the mules rest. I was sure that the climb up the mountain wouldn’t have improved much since Hayter’s day. The animals would need their strength. Tadesse didn’t approve of my reluctance to work the mules hard. He said that if we were too kind, they would become even lazier and wilder than they already were. As it was, he said, they weren’t carrying enough on their backs.
“If people see that I’m walking with half-laden mules,” he said, “they’ll laugh at me.”
“Why?”
“They’ll say that my mules are weak.”
Until late that afternoon none of us bothered to ride. While the ground was far from flat, it wasn’t a great strain to walk. Only on the last stretch towards a village did I decide my legs needed a rest. All eyes were on me as I struggled to mount the most docile of the animals. I’d chosen her because her eyes lacked the glint of savagery present in those of the males. When I asked what her name was, Tadesse shook his head.
“These are animals,” he said, “they are not people; they don’t have names.”
So I called her Clarissa.
Tadesse, his sons and Samson had listened intently to my tales of ancestral horsemanship. With my usual flair for hyperbole I’d gone a bit far. In the end I had just about claimed to have been born on the back of a horse. They longed to see the great equestrian in action. But riding a mule in the wilds of western Ethiopia called for special training, training I didn’t have. I couldn’t get my balance at first and blamed it on the saddle, the uneven stirrups, the terrain, and then on Clarissa. More than once I ended up on my back on the ground, wounded and humiliated, to the delight of the muleteers. But with time I learned the basics of balance, and that Clarissa would protect me if I just clung on.
At the next village we passed around the photograph of the mine entrance. The oldest man, who was blind, virtually deaf and hunchbacked, pricked up his ears when he heard the words Tullu Wallel.
“He’s saying that he knows the mountain,” said Samson.
“Has he ever been up there?”
Samson translated the question. The man nodded.
“Yes, he has.”
“When was that?”
“A long time ago.”
“When?”
“It was when the Italians were here.”
“Did he see the mine-shafts?”
“He says he did see a cave,” said Samson, “a big cave.”
“What was inside?”
I was waiting for him to say “the Devil”. But he didn’t.
“There were bats, many bats.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes,” said the man, “there was...”
“What? What else was there?”
“There was gold.”
I smacked my hands together and gave Samson a double thumbs-up. Tadesse looked over at us suspiciously.
“I thought you were missionaries,” he said.
“Yes we are, but the Devil is attracted to gold. So if we find gold, we’ll find him!
“Ask the man if he’ll climb the mountain with us and show us the cave.”
Samson translated.
“He says he’s too old, too frail.”
“But we can strap him to a mule. We’ve got plenty of them.”
The hunchback croaked an answer.
“He says he wouldn’t go back up there for all the money in Ethiopia.”
“Why not?”
“Because of
the curse.”
I am all for curses and superstition, but there’s a point at which they start getting in the way. That point had arrived. I explained we were missionaries, that we were doing God’s work. He remained unmoved. I rustled a large denomination note, but still he wouldn’t budge. He shouted something to Samson.
“He says that anyone who goes up Tullu Wallel is hit with misfortune afterwards. When he came down from the mountain his father died from malaria. Then his brother dropped dead. No one knew why.”
“But that could have happened naturally. There’s a lot of illness here.”
Samson had more information to pass on.
“Yes, but the wives of the two men he climbed the mountain with both died in childbirth.”
I unfolded the map and asked for accurate directions. If the informant wouldn’t accompany us, at least he could advise us how to find the mine. The man’s blindness and inexperience with maps were a severe handicap. He didn’t want to talk about the route, only about the curse. That was the one thing I didn’t want to hear about because I knew it was beginning to worry Tadesse and his sons. Without Tadesse we’d have no mules. And without mules we’d have no entourage.
I gave the order for us to move out. It was unpopular with Samson, who was complaining of blisters. The boys didn’t want to go further either, but they wouldn’t admit that they were afraid.
We took to the path again. Clarissa dug her hooves into the dirt and soldiered on. I rapidly developed a respect for her as she compensated for my pathetic riding skills. The track led up to higher ground. We were all aware that the rains would start in the mid-afternoon, so we were eager to keep going for as long as possible. I kept an eye out for a village where we could spend the night, but there wasn’t any sign of human life.
Samson asked me if I thought Bahru would have left for Addis Ababa. It hadn’t been long since we had parted from him, but it now seemed an age away. We reminisced about him as we moved ahead, recounting the many near-misses and his addiction to qat and marked playing cards. Then my mind turned to the subject of Ophir. Western Ethiopia was as remote as it was possible to be. Solomon’s men might have acquired gold from nearer the coast, but I knew there were trading routes from central Africa to the east coast and that they had been used for centuries. And, of course, western Ethiopia is close to Nubia, from which the Egyptians mined gold long before the time of Solomon.
When it came, the afternoon downpour fell harder than on any other day. The mules didn’t seem to mind very much. The water cooled them, and they could drink from the pools that collected on the path. But torrential rain is a great hindrance to humans. Unlike on the Indian subcontinent or in the Amazon, in Africa the rain seems to cool the air temperature dramatically and soon you find yourself quivering with cold. I put on my army camouflage poncho, spreading it out at the bottom to accommodate Clarissa’s hindquarters. Samson donned his black bin-liner. He resented me having the best equipment. As for Tadesse and his sons, they didn’t have any waterproofs, so they just got soaked.
The worst thing about the rain was that it turned the soil into a quagmire. In some places we were walking up a torrent of dark brown mud and I began to worry that the mules might miss their footing. As it was they tripped and stumbled, and then, quite suddenly, one of them toppled over. With the memory of the lame camel in Afar fresh in my mind, I jumped down to help Tadesse attend to the poor animal. It was in a forlorn state. Tadesse grappled with the harness and managed to inspect its legs. Fortunately, none were broken, but the mule was shaken and the accident unsettled the other animals.
In the late afternoon we took refuge in a grove of wild gum trees a hundred yards from the track. I was concerned that we were nowhere near a village, but Samson pointed up to the high branches of the trees.
“Look at those,” he said, “that means that there are people near here.”
About twenty large wicker baskets were tied to the topmost boughs. Samson said they were for honey The local people hang them in the trees and leave them there for months. Eventually honey bees swarm in some of them. Then the bravest men in the village climb up and harvest the honey. Tadesse boasted that his family had been honey-hunters for generations, but that they had progressed up the social ladder to herding mules.
Samson was right about there being people nearby. As the light began to fade, we came to a settlement. It was much larger than the other villages we had seen since leaving Begi. There was a line of small shops, a market area, a blacksmith and even an official. Within minutes word of our arrival had spread, and the official stepped from the comfort of his shack to confront us. He wanted to know why we had come and he demanded to see our identity papers. When the rain had stopped, he dragged his desk and chair into the central square and interviewed us formally, as the inquisitive villagers clustered round. I said we were missionaries and that we had come in peace. The man said he was going to search our luggage. That was the last thing I wanted. Whenever my kit bags were examined valuable items seemed to disappear. Worse than that, I didn’t want him to find the metal detector.
The official dropped a heavy hint that on his pitiful wages it was hard to afford a quantity of araki befitting a man of his standing. I wondered what that quantity might be. We led him to the bar and plied him with the local brew. He managed to down fifteen glasses. Then he passed out.
That evening we were put up by one of the villagers in his hut. As before, Samson and the muleteers invited me to eat, but I refrained. The Devil still hadn’t been routed, I said, so I could not eat. They didn’t say anything, but I could tell they were moved by my lack of appetite. When he had eaten a monstrous amount of injera and kai wot, spiced goat stew, Samson questioned the villagers about Tullu Wallel. The first man to talk said that a faranji, a white man, used to live up on the mountain. He couldn’t say precisely when, but it was in the days when the Emperor was still in power. Maybe it was Hayter, I thought to myself.
“Did he see the white man himself?”
The informant said it was long before he was born.
Everyone else we spoke to had a tale to tell about the curse. Some of them had ventured up the mountain in their younger days in search of gold. They had all borne terrible misfortune as a result. One man had been stung by a thousand bees, another had been poisoned and had nearly died, and a third told of how his wife had gone mad after gathering sticks there.
After hearing all this, I knew we were going to have trouble getting more people to join our team. For the climb itself we required one man for each mule. I didn’t know how long we would be on the mountain, but I was certain that we would need to take food and extra supplies. Samson broached the subject, asking for volunteers. He said we’d pay generously. The villagers shook their heads, and one woman grabbed her two sons by the ears and marched them back to their hut. We said we were missionaries, and I likened us to St George on his quest to slay the dragon.
“The only difference is that our dragon is much bigger,” I said, “he’s the Devil.”
The villagers were unimpressed. A curse was a curse, and no amount of inducement would make them risk the wrath of the Devil.
That night the Russian corned beef sat heavily in my stomach. I was apprehensive about what we might find on Tullu Wallel. For a long time the mountain had been an obsession, and now at last we were going to ascend it. I found myself thinking about Frank Hayter more and more, and I went over his descriptions of Tullu Wallel yet again.
At dawn we rose and loaded the mules. It was pouring with rain. I slipped on my poncho, and Samson wriggled into his bin-liner. We were just about to head off, when four men approached us. They said that they had decided to come with us.
“Aren’t they frightened?”
The men, all in their early twenties, looked petrified, but one of them spoke for the others.
“It is time for the fear to end,” he said.
They each took the reins of a mule and led the way towards the mountain. The rest of us follow
ed behind. As it was still dark I walked beside Clarissa. After an hour of trudging uphill, the first glint of light brought life to the undergrowth. The mist was low, hanging over Tullu Wallel like a death cloud, but I found myself stirred with new energy. At last, our motley band of mules and men had been transformed into a fully fledged expedition.
We headed straight for the mountain, which seemed to beckon us towards it. The rain didn’t let up for a minute, which made the going very slow. I stayed at the back of the procession. I might have been the inspiration behind the expedition, but I was a novice at muleteering. We crossed fields and forded rivers, but we didn’t seem to get any nearer to Tullu Wallel. I began to wonder if the mountain was a mirage, alluring yet unreachable.
Tadesse stopped three times during the morning to adjust the leather straps that bound the packs and saddles to the mules. In the rain the thongs stretched and had to keep being tightened. Clarissa’s reins were tied to my hand and she battled on beside me. Samson was less appreciative of the experience. His blisters had got worse and I could tell that he was missing his girlfriend and Addis Ababa greatly.
For most of human history, man has walked with animals. Nothing is more natural, but the last century has erased our communal knowledge of that past. Now we think of wheels and tires rather than legs and hooves; we think of miles per gallon and engines overheating, not of hay and animal fatigue. An internal combustion engine may be one of man’s greatest achievements, but it is a noisy, polluting beast of a thing. Spend a few days trekking with pack mules through the forests of western Ethiopia, and you realize there’s no comparison.
The woodland began quite suddenly. We forded a stream and ascended a steep bank, with Tadesse’s sons jabbing their sticks angrily at the mules. Before us stood the forest, like a great curtain on the edge of a stage. I knew straight away that I would emerge the other side a different man.
We entered the forest and the morning sun disappeared. I have been in thick jungle before, but even the Upper Amazon couldn’t compare with this. I stared up at the tops of the trees. They formed an unbroken canopy above us, each tree rising from a snarl of roots and mud, their long vine-covered trunks rearing up into a sea of green.