In Ethiopia with a Mule

by Dervla Murphy

  * This egoism is consistent with highland traditions. Dr Levine writes that ‘the Amhara have virtually no sense of “community” at all, for the concept can scarcely be rendered in idiomatic Amharic … In virtually every instance of a consideration of communal projects or needs that the author observed or heard of, the dominant characteristic of the discussion was a vigorous and uncompromising assertion of individual claims.’

  7

  Tribulations around Lake Tana

  31 January. A Compound on a Plain

  OUR DEPARTURE FROM Gondar was delayed by Jock’s new saddle. Slowly I sorted out the tangle of straps, buckles and chains and got it securely in place, but the loading defeated me. My struggle was being watched by a score of men, and eventually I sent one of them to fetch help from Police Headquarters. An hour later an elderly sergeant came sauntering down the road. Once upon a time the Italians had taught him how to load their mules – but his technique had gone rusty, so another hour passed before we were on our way. However, this last hour was well spent, because now I, too, have learned the technique.

  Beyond Gondar our track ran for eight miles between gentle hills on which royal ruins could occasionally be glimpsed amidst blue-gums. Then we rejoined the motor-road, passed an ugly village and came to a junction beside Gondar’s airstrip. There was no signpost, but according to my map the secondary road led to Gorgora.

  Now, for the first time since leaving Massawah, I was walking through an undramatic landscape that might have been in Europe. To the west lay homely wooded ridges: to the east and north low hills and a heat haze concealed the mighty mountains: and to the south our road ran level between fields of atar, teff, barley, wheat, millet and maize. Small settlements were numerous and hundreds of thin cattle grazed in the charge of shepherd-boys who wore blue cotton shorts – for we are still in a ‘civilised’ area. There were no horses or mules, since for them the Lake Tana region is notoriously unhealthy, but I saw two tall, strong Sudanese donkeys grazing with the cattle. To improve the local breed of diminutive donkeys and mules, highlanders sometimes buy sires from Sennar and these are used only as stud-animals. They cost five or six times as much as the best native donkeys, so their owners charge high stud fees, which may be paid in cash or grain.

  Many of the men we met were carrying rifles, and several expressed strong disapproval of a faranj travelling alone around Lake Tana. Towards sunset we were joined by a skinny young man who was driving a donkey loaded with atar. The faranj with the buccolo fascinated him, so he invited me to his settlement for talla – and soon found that he had a guest for the night. He and his family seemed delighted, though astonished, when I settled down in their compound; and now – despite the proximity of Gondar’s foreign colony – I am surrounded by dozens of interested men, women and children.

  This fertile region should be prosperous, yet nowhere else have I seen such poverty and disease. Most of the children are pot-bellied, covered with infected scabies and suffering from either conjunctivitis or trachoma, and many of the adults are coughing tubercularly or trembling malariously. Six people have shown me festering wounds because everyone imagines that faranjs carry unlimited medical supplies.

  When I unpacked my insecticide spray one mother begged me to use it on her half-blind daughter, and unhappily she refused to believe that it was not a medicine. While my back was turned she sprayed the infected eyes and the child’s screams of agony might have been heard in Khartoum.

  No doubt much of this ill-health is caused by the comparatively low altitude and the nearness of Lake Tana. Today, for the first time since leaving Tembien, I found the noon sun a little too hot; but at least one can sleep out here, so now I’m going to spread my flea-bag on silky teff straw beneath the stars. I notice that some of the family also intend to sleep out, rolled in their shammas.

  1 February. Gorgora

  When I woke this morning I lay still for a moment, feeling absurdly surprised to think that by evening I should be on the shores of Lake Tana. At school geography bored me numb, but I had a list of places I longed to go to because of their names – and Lake Tana followed on Roncesvalles and the Kara Korum.

  An hour after leaving the settlement we turned off the motor-road on to an animal track that went due south through ploughland, and fields of ripe grain, and mile after mile of long, yellow, tough grass. Sometimes patches of scarlet peppers lay like bloodstains among the usual crops, and I saw a few new birds and a variety of unfamiliar trees. Often the track multiplied confusingly or disappeared completely, but Lake Tana covers an area of 2,000 square miles, so it seemed unlikely that we would miss it. Then, at 4.15, came the first distant shimmer of a sheet of blue, wide as the sea – and an hour later Jock was drinking from the lake.

  Here we were alone, and an immense peace enfolded this placid expanse of water – now colourless beneath a pale evening sky. Broad pastures and stubblefields sloped quietly down to the flat, marshy shore, a holy, wooded islet rose nearby from the calmness, and away to the hazy east there were faint, high shadows – the mere ghosts of mountains. All the beauty of this place was subtle and tranquil. Nothing could have been further from my childhood vision of a remote, sullen lake, hidden at the heart of Abyssinia amidst darkly tangled jungle.

  My bilharzia-minded guidebook says ‘Caution: Lake Tana is not safe for swimming. The visitor should only admire – not swim, wade, drink or fall in.’ But it was plain that on our way to Bahar Dar this visitor would at least have to wade, sooner or later, so as Jock greedily cropped the moist grass I stripped and paddled through warm ooze and then was swimming joyously in deep, tepid water. A flock of startled Egyptian geese flew honking from a reed-bed and I floated to watch their pattern of loveliness against the sky. Further out I glimpsed Gorgora in its cove, and beyond stretched rough, forested cliffs – but the west shore remained invisible. Turning back I saw two men driving a donkey in the distance; luckily they were not coming in our direction, so there were no witnesses to a rather aged Venus rising from the lake.

  Walking along the shore I counted six extravagantly-coloured varieties of water-birds, but my book only listed one of them – the Goliath Heron, which is nearly five feet tall. A couple of High-Crested Cranes were so engrossed in an intricate mating-dance that I might have captured them had I tried. Less pleasing were the clouds of mosquitoes and other tiresome flies that rose from the sour-smelling marsh as we squelched through.

  On the outskirts of Gorgora schoolboys rushed to greet the faranj and led us to this doss-house. It is owned by a handsome, friendly young couple and behind the bar, across a narrow yard, are the bedrooms – converted Italianbuilt stables. I’m now sitting in the earth-floored bar, writing on a rough table by the light of a petrol-lamp. As the owners pride themselves on being urbanised only bottled beer is sold here, so I sent out for a kettle of talla. A brand-new transistor radio stands screaming on the counter and every few minutes my host self-consciously twiddles the knobs, glancing sideways at me to make sure that his mechanical skill is being observed. Five minutes ago his wife came from the kitchen and sat in a corner to chat with the customers while feeding her baby out of a filthy plastic bottle. She is a plump, vibrantly healthy young woman who could probably nurse triplets with ease, but recently feeding-bottles – introduced by Arab traders – have become status symbols. These are rarely washed, much less sterilised, so their use is a form of infanticide and WHO workers are trying to persuade Gondar merchants not to sell them.

  My plans are causing some consternation here. Two English-speaking teachers have been helping me to empty the talla kettle and they insist that it is impossible to reach the west shore unless one follows the track from Gondar to Delghie. In this country, as in India, people frequently inflate difficulties into impossibilities.

  2 & 3 February. Dengel

  Yesterday I discovered that the shores of Lake Tana are not as tranquil as they seem, and last night conditions were against diary-writing.

  This country often gives one an O
rlando-like illusion of living through different centuries and within an hour of leaving Gorgora the ‘motor-road world’ seemed a thousand years away. North of the town I found a path that took us west over steep hills, where a few fields lay between acres of high, aromatic shrubs and the compounds were guarded by curs whose owners made no attempt to restrain them for our benefit. Then all cultivation was left behind, the path vanished, and I began to feel slightly like an Intrepid Traveller as we forced our way through a dark, dense forest where thorny scrub pulled persistently at my shirt and tore long scratches on my bare limbs. Jock, too, was in trouble, for powerful, pliable branches repeatedly gripped his protruding-on-each-side load and I had to free him several times. Once he became firmly wedged between two trees and a sack had to be removed. Without our new pack-saddle Lake Tana’s north shore certainly would have been ‘impossible’.

  Until noon we were going steeply up or down hill, making no progress in the required direction. This was not unlike the ‘tangled jungle’ of my childhood dreams and I soon decided that dream jungles are preferable to the real thing. When at last we escaped on to sunny grasslands every attempt to go west was thwarted by deep, narrow gullies. So I went towards the lake, hoping to find a way along the water’s edge, but treacherous swamps soon forced us north again – at a lucky spot, for ten minutes later a faint, westward path appeared. Eagerly I followed it across level grassland between towering wild fig-trees, and it led to a surprising pocket of cultivated land where a family was harvesting teff. Their compound must have been far away, because a woman was cooking injara beneath a straw shelter while her menfolk urged a yoke of oxen round the threshing circle. Everyone stopped work when we appeared and gathered about us in astonishment – which soon changed to friendly concern when they saw my deep scratches, now marked by lines of flies. Several talla-jars lay under a tree and I was given as much as I could drink and fed with roasted atar while the woman tried to persuade me to return to Gorgora and the men argued amongst themselves about the route to Dengel.

  Finally they indicated that we must go north for some distance before turning west, so we followed a shallow valley, making our own path through high, tawny grass and flowering shrubs, with gold-tinted, wooded ridges on either side. Here the hot silence was broken only by an incessant, plaintive bird-call, and the only movement was an occasional flash of jewelled feathers amidst the bushes. Some strange, soothing melancholy hung over this bright valley: it seemed a secret, special place, lost between mountains and lake.

  An hour later we met a vague east–west track which climbed to a narrow plateau, dotted with thorny scrub, and then expired. Now the lake was hidden by a long, forested ridge and, having investigated the impossible west side of the plateau, I realised that we must turn south again and descend into the ravine between plateau and ridge. Eventually I found a path that plunged through a gloom of gnarled trees and led us – after more load-trouble – on to the floor of the ravine. Here steep, wooded cliffs created a premature twilight and giant grey rocks thrust jaggedly through the jungle grass and sometimes ancient trees writhed beside the path. But soon we were again in sunlight, and I saw that the level land to the west was patchily cultivated.

  Ten minutes later seven or eight tukuls appeared to the left of the path, in one big compound at the base of a cliff, and as we walked towards them I began to think hopefully about talla. Then a group of men, who had been watching our approach, came to the edge of the compound and invited me to stop for a drink. They were led by a priest – a small, slender man of perhaps thirty-five, with remarkably regular Semitic features, an effeminate voice, intelligent eyes and the cruellest mouth I have ever seen. This face so unnerved me that I declined the insistently repeated invitations and quickened my pace past the compound, hardly knowing whether to try to look friendly or formidable. For a few moments I could hear voices raised in excited argument behind us; then we rounded an outcrop of rock and were beyond sight and sound of the tukuls.

  Topographical worries occupied the next twenty minutes. Lake Tana was again stretching ahead, beyond a sweep of jungle grass and a grove of wild fig-trees, and it seemed that one could easily walk round by the shore to the north side of a high ridge that rose from the plain half-a-mile away on our right. But when we got to the water’s edge I discovered two barriers – a muddy inlet, thick with reeds, and a narrow channel that made what had appeared to be a walkable part of the shore into a low, rocky islet.

  It was now four o’clock and I felt tired, hungry and rather inclined to agree that the north shore of Lake Tana is impossible. As the bank was three feet above the still depths of the lake I watered Jock from his bucket before sitting down to eat dried apricots and contemplate this impasse.

  A few moments later I heard voices and looked around to see four men approaching through the long grass. It didn’t greatly surprise me to recognise the priest in the lead, nonchalantly twirling his white horse-hair fly-whisk and reverently carrying his Coptic cross. His companions carried heavy dulas. One of them was an older man, with a narrow, sun-blackened face, restless eyes and a habit of nervously licking his lips. The other two were youths of eighteen or nineteen – one stocky, with unusually coarse features for a highlander, the other slim, mean-looking and clearly apprehensive.

  The quartet sat beside me and for the next ten minutes we chatted as civilly as the language barrier allowed. I handed round my dried apricots, but they were not appreciated. The stocky youth tasted one gingerly, then spat it out with a grimace; the others felt and smelt theirs, before politely returning them to me. Meanwhile I was listening to the remarks being exchanged by the priest and the older man; the words for mule, money, medicine and clothes were disturbingly comprehensible. The priest then declared that I must spend the night in their compound, and his expression was tense as he watched for my reaction. I smiled, bowed gratefully and declined the invitation – which was perhaps a foolish thing to do, but at that stage my nerve was going and I only wanted to get away.

  Standing up, I started to move towards Jock – and at once the four surrounded me. The laymen were holding their dulas rather obviously, no one was smiling any more and I could feel myself going white. As he spoke shrilly to his companions, the priest’s eyes were bright with greed; he used his cross to gesture towards me – and then towards the lake. Immediately an argument started, the stocky youth supporting the priest, the slim youth siding with the older man. I lit a cigarette.

  During those brief, long moments I was reacting on two levels, for beneath the seething terror was a strange, indifferent acceptance – a feeling that gamblers can’t always win and that if this was it, it was it.

  The argument only lasted for the length of a nervously smoked cigarette, but before it ended I had an odd experience – so unfamiliar that it is difficult to describe, yet so real that it cannot honestly be omitted. While the priest was shaking his fly-whisk angrily in the older man’s face, and before it was possible to judge who was winning, I suddenly knew that I was safe – as surely as if a platoon of police had appeared to rescue me. For an instant I was aware of being protected by some mysterious power; and to a person without definite religious convictions this was almost as great a shock as the unpleasant encounter itself.

  A moment later the argument was over. The older man ran to Jock, took up the halter and turned towards the compound. The priest caught me by the arm – he was smiling again, though his eyes remained angry – and pointed after Jock, while the youths stood close behind us. But now I, too, was getting angry. Eluding the priest’s grasp I pursued Jock, grabbed the halter and waved my dula threateningly. At this stage my fear was of being injured, which is quite a different sensation to the fear of death and doesn’t deter one from trying to defend one’s possessions. However, my ridiculous dula-waving was ignored. Within seconds the four were around us again, the youths had seized my arms and the men were unloading Jock.

  They took my sleeping-bag, torch, spare Biros, matches, camera, insecticides, medicines
(including a packet of Tampax, which amused me even at the time), two books (Ethiopian Birds and W. E. Carr’s Poetry of the Middle Ages), Jock’s bridle and a hundred and twenty Ethiopian dollars – about eighteen pounds sterling. My Huskies went unnoticed, being wrapped in the old pack-saddle, and neither cigarettes nor faranj food interested them, though these must be saleable commodities in Gondar. However, their oddest omissions were my watch (which I wear on my wrist, though in Makalle I was advised to carry it in my pocket lest it should tempt thieves) and Jock himself, who is worth another hundred dollars. Possibly they considered that in this region, where mules are uncommon, he would be an imprudently conspicuous acquisition if his owner were still alive.

  When the quartet left us my knees suddenly went soggy, and as I began to reload Jock my hands were so shaky that I could scarcely tie the ropes. However, this was no time or place for indulging in the tremors – I wanted to be far away from that priest by sunset.

  My topographical problem was still unsolved, but now I gave up bothering about the finer points of the compass and turned north. We climbed a high hill, pushing through leafless grey scrub, and from the crest I was overlooking a plain that appeared to be covered in tall jungle grass. It extended north for an indefinite distance, but was bounded to the west by a long, low ridge that looked no more than three miles away. On this ridge clumps of trees stood out against the sky, promising settlements and, presumably, safety.