In Ethiopia with a Mule

by Dervla Murphy

  As I retreated – rubbing an elbow, where one sharp missile had found its target – dusk was thick in the valley below the settlement; and by the time I had hobbled down to this level stretch of grassland at the foot of the mountain it was dark, but with a promise of moonlight. While I was unloading Jock we had the first rain of the trek – a downpour that continued for twenty minutes, leaving the air deliciously fresh.

  Travelling in this country fosters an abnormal degree of fatalism, doubtless produced by one’s subconscious as a protection against nervous breakdowns. Tonight I’m past caring about untrustworthy locals, shifta, leopards or hyenas. The probability is that Jock and I will survive, and the possibility that either or both might be attacked has ceased to worry me.

  23 February. Debre Tabor

  At some time last night I woke suddenly, to see a sky wonderfully patterned with slowly-sailing, silvered clouds – and among them was the full moon, radiant against a royal blue background. I turned, and lay gazing up for some moments in a curiously disembodied state of enchantment; it seemed that I had ceased to exist as a person and had become only an apprehension of the beauty overhead. Perhaps such a sky may be seen quite often but, unaccountably, there was for me some supreme loveliness, some magical glory in this silent, drifting movement of silver against blue. And the memory of it has strengthened me throughout a painful day.

  My knee was stiff and swollen this morning, and it didn’t improve during our ten-hour walk. Yet not even constant pain can dull one’s enjoyment of these endlessly varied highlands, where our trek has never taken us through the same sort of country for more than half a day.

  I hadn’t hoped to be at Debre Tabor by nightfall, and it is a sheer fluke that we have got here so soon without benefit of map, compass, intelligent peasants or clear tracks. Today I lost count of the mountains we crossed. Until 3 p.m. we passed no settlements, yet occasionally I heard shepherds calling in the distance, so there must have been compounds somewhere. Often the path disappeared, but always I found it again, though at the time I never knew whether it was the right track or not. We forded several rivers and I had three swims – noticing evidence of local inhabitants, who had left their marks along the banks or on flat stones in midstream. It seems odd that the imprudence of using one’s water supply as a latrine is not obvious even to the most backward people. During the morning I almost trod on the tail of a leopard who was asleep under a bush by the path. Momentarily I mistook the tail for a snake; then its owner woke up and streaked into the undergrowth with a snarl of fear – which did slightly upset Jock.

  Soon after 3 we reached a mountain-top where a large church, surrounded by ancient oleasters, indicated that we had left the forested wilds. From here I could see many blue-gums on another, higher mountain-top, beyond a wide valley, and I guessed correctly that these marked Debre Tabor.

  This last lap took three hours and the final tough climb, to 8,500 feet, left me weak with pain.

  In the valley were several settlements and a few flocks of mangy sheep. Below Debre Tabor the mountainside was crudely irrigated, which is unusual, though the early Semitic settlers introduced irrigation to the highlands and in Tigre there are many traces of canals. But this skill, like Semitic architecture, never spread south and has long since been lost in the north.

  From the edge of Debre Tabor delighted children escorted us up a long, rough ‘street’, between stalls displaying the usual limited array of goods, to the main ‘square’ where two Peace Corps boys promptly appeared and invited me to be their guest. Debre Tabor is the most isolated Peace Corps post in Ethiopia, so I didn’t hesitate to accept this invitation – though in general I am against sponging on volunteer workers.

  However, I soon discovered that my acceptance had created an International Situation. Days ago the Governor-General had telephoned from Gondar and arranged for my entertainment here, and the local Governor was all set to receive me. This really was awkward. I would have preferred to stay with the Governor, and it seemed ungracious not to; but the Americans looked crestfallen at the prospect of losing their faranj guest and to treat their invitation as a ‘second-best’ would seem worse than ungracious. Therefore I compromised, and when my knee had been tightly bandaged I hobbled off to the Governor’s house, split a bottle of tej with him and had supper there. He is a kindly man, who understood my predicament and settled for entertaining Jock instead of me.

  24 February

  Today my knee needed so much rest that I have seen little of Debre Tabor. I lunched with the Governor and his interpreter, whose English is not much more fluent than my Amharinya. Having listened to this language during so many long evenings, and been forced sometimes to struggle seriously with it, I find that even my linguistic blockage is now giving way a little.

  Debre Tabor was an Italian outpost, so the Governor’s quarters, the police barracks and the school are ugly, one-storey concrete buildings at the edge of the town. The Italians also built a motor-road from Gondar through Debre Tabor to Dessie, but many of the twenty bridges between Gondar and here were blown up by the Italian army as it retreated before the British liberators, and the rest have been allowed to collapse – as has the road itself. It seems that the Government is as casual about roads as the local chieftains are about tracks. In Nepal, where in most areas communication is also confined to mountain tracks, the village headmen co-operate to organise track maintenance; but here such a communal effort would be unthinkable. If a highland track becomes impassable it is usually repaired by the merchants who are most dependent on it, otherwise maintenance is carried out only if the Emperor or a Governor-General is to visit a particular area, and then the work is so inefficiently done that the track soon relapses into its natural ‘state of chassis’.

  On my way back from the Governor’s house I called at the Seventh-Day Adventist Mission, which was established here in the 1930s and runs a large school and a hospital. It is illegal for missionaries to proselytise Ethiopian Christians and the few Falasha or Muslim converts to Catholicism or Protestantism are not regarded as true Christians by the highlanders. However, to qualify for all the advantages offered by this school a number of locals do become temporary Seventh-Day Adventists.

  I don’t expect to find twin souls in missionary compounds, but the ideals of this contingent completely unnerved me. After listening for some fifteen minutes to an earnest young woman I took out my cigarettes and said automatically ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ The air froze. My hostess looked at me as though I had uttered an obscenity. Then she said, ‘We never permit habit-forming drugs here’ – and went on to explain that tea is a sinful stimulant. Whereupon I looked at my watch, muttered wildly about an improbable urgent appointment and retreated in disorder.

  My Peace Corps hosts have now been here long enough to realise that at present the education of young highlanders is 95 per cent farce and 5 per cent achievement. Most of Debre Tabor’s twenty-five Ethiopian teachers are themselves poorly educated and have had little or no training for their job. Many of the 1,050 pupils come from settlements or villages two to six days’ walk away, as is usual, and they live with relatives or in rented tukuls or rooms shared by six or eight children. About one-fifth are girls – a surprisingly large proportion – and everyone’s ambition is to qualify for Gondar Secondary School. Yet the few who do qualify rarely achieve much in competition with city-born pupils – unless they are Muslims, whose average intelligence is higher than that of the Christian majority. However, this superiority increases their unpopularity with the local authorities, so the winning of scholarships can be even more difficult for them than for the others.

  25 February

  This morning I did a test walk to the local ‘famous church’. It stands on a high mountain, overlooking the (comparative) lowlands that we crossed on our way from Bahar Dar, and to the north-east I could see the towering barrier of rough ranges which lies between here and Lalibela.

  The church was locked and in the nearby settlement no one would v
olunteer to open it. Situations like this repeatedly reveal an ingrained unhelpfulness in the highland character. Beside the enclosure, on the highest point of the broad summit, stand the overgrown ruins of one of those Italian stone forts which were constructed on many hilltops to repel Patriot raids. Climbing up, I sat there for more than an hour, gazing over the vastness and thinking of the nineteenth-century Englishmen who made their way to Debre Tabor.

  Early in the nineteenth century, when Gondar was still the nominal capital, Ras Gugsa, the most powerful noble of the day, chose this town as his headquarters; and he was succeeded by Ras Ali, to whose court Lord Palmerston sent Walter Plowden as consul in 1848. Plowden was accompanied by John Bell, who had been with him on his first visit to Abyssinia in 1843 and who was to become a close friend of the Emperor Theodore. On arrival Plowden wrote, ‘Debre Tabor … is cold and healthy, but there is no stone house in it but that of the Ras.’ Three years of negotiation led to a trade treaty, which was signed in Ras Ali’s inner tent where the nobleman and the consul sat on carpets laid over the bare earth. Plowden wrote, ‘After the Abyssinian manner he (Ras Ali) kept talking … about a horse that was tied in the tent, and that was nearly treading me underfoot a dozen times.’ A few months later Ras Ali was conquered by Kassa (Theodore to be) and after his coronation Kassa also made Debre Tabor his headquarters because he despised Gondar as a ‘city of merchants’. Then, before moving to Magdala, he burned Debre Tabor to the ground – not a difficult feat, if there was only one stone house among hundreds of tukuls.

  In 1879 General Gordon arrived at Debre Tabor from Egypt, to make peace on the Khedive’s behalf. The rebuilt town had become Yohannes IV’s capital and Gordon was not impressed by the highland nobles. He wrote, ‘I have seen many peoples, but I never met with a more fierce, savage set than these. The peasantry are good enough.’ At that time there were several foreigners at the court. Gordon mentions meeting the Greek consul from Suez and three Italians – and this afternoon, in a tej-beit, I met an English-speaking local merchant who told me that his great-grandfather was ‘an Egyptian Greek’. Yohannes IV and General Gordon did not get on well. The only thing they had in common was their destiny, for both were soon to be killed by followers of the Mahdi.

  Returning to the town, I spent a few hours drinking in tej-beits and walking along rough laneways beneath tall blue-gums between solid houses of stone and mud. The population is now about 7,000 and the people are polite and friendly; as this is one of the province’s most important market-centres 3,000 outsiders sometimes attend the Saturday market. Debre Tabor is also renowned for the number of its hyenas, the largeness of its donkeys and the potency of its araki – which is sold in Gondar, and sometimes even in Addis.

  At 5.30 I returned to the Governor’s house to eat strips of fried dried beef and drink more high-class talla and tej. The highlanders must be among the world’s heaviest drinkers; several teachers have told me that children often roll in to school in a semi-inebriated condition, or give total inebriation as their reason for non-attendance. Yet I have never seen a drunken adult Ethiopian; and talla and tej are such healthy drinks that they cannot produce a hangover.

  My knee doesn’t feel quite as painless tonight as it did this morning; but tomorrow we leave for Lalibela.

  10

  Mapless in Lasta

  26 February, Kummerdingai

  TODAY’S LANDSCAPE was a complete contrast to last week’s hot, silent world of golden-brown hills and valleys. Here we are on wide, cool uplands, where cattle and horses graze off sweeping yellow-green pastures, and the new-ploughed fields are grey-flecked with stones, and each hilltop has its tree-shaded settlement and streams sparkle every few miles.

  Soon after midday we came to a compound where the menfolk were sitting drinking. One of them asked our destination, told me that we had gone astray and invited me to stop for talla before being guided back to the right track. Then, as I sat on a goatskin brought from a tukul in my honour, and felt kindliness lapping round me, I had to admit to myself that the locals’ attitude is important – though one may pretend at the time that it doesn’t much matter if most people glare and some people throw stones. Loneliness never touches me in uninhabited country, where my solitude is complete: but I do feel twinges of it where people are particularly unresponsive.

  By four o’clock I was limping so badly that I received much incomprehensible medical advice from a group of men driving five spavined horses, piled high with hides, to Debre Tabor. Soon after we were overtaken by a tall, thin, elderly man with bright, deep-set eyes. He looked at my knee – now swelling again – muttered ‘Metfo!’ firmly took Jock’s halter, led us to this big village, installed me in his square, bug-infested hut and ordered his wife to scramble eggs for the faranj. He, too, had walked from Debre Tabor, and soon his young daughter appeared with a tin of warm water and a wooden bowl, to give us both a foot-wash and thorough massage from toes to knees. She paid special and rather painful attention to my right knee, and ended the ceremony by respectfully kissing my left big toe.

  Kummerdingai is on a flat, windswept plateau, overlooked from the north by a range of rounded mountains. All day we had been climbing gradually and now the night air is so cold that I reckon we must be at about 9,000 feet. This seems a prosperous area, but my host’s family is very poor. They have no talla, and for Sunday supper they ate only injara and berberie paste; yet fifteen minutes ago the guest was given a second meal of injara and scrambled eggs.

  27 February. Sali

  Beyond Kummerdingai our track switchbacked for three hours over a series of steep, arid, smooth-topped ridges. Then we climbed to a wide, green plateau, where scores of horses were grazing, and from a large settlement two teachers came running towards us, shouting invitations to drink coffee. Settlements don’t normally have schools, but I soon discovered that the local headman is an unusually civic-spirited individual, who went to Gondar and persuaded the authorities to open a school, guaranteeing to organise the building of a schoolhouse by volunteer workers, and to provide for the teachers at his own expense. Happily, he has got the teachers he deserves – two refreshingly idealistic Gondares, who don’t at all resent living in discomfort and isolation.

  Both the headman and his wife are charming, and he is one of the handsomest men I have ever seen – aged about fifty, well over six feet, broad-shouldered, with the head of a lion and the bearing of a king.

  For two hours we sat in a large, clean, high-roofed tukul, drinking talla from glass carafes and coffee from tiny cups. Our conversation flowed with unusual ease, partly because the teachers spoke reasonably good English and partly because my host and hostess asked such intelligent questions. The coffee was being roasted, ground and brewed by a good-looking woman of twenty-eight, who had come from Gondar with the twenty-three-year-old boys as their joint temporary wife; recently her husband divorced her on grounds of infertility, but already she seems happy in her new rôle.

  My dula split this morning, and when I was leaving my hostess noticed this and immediately fetched me a replacement which is much stronger than the original. It was now 11.30 and the sun felt uncomfortably strong, despite a cool, steady breeze. Yesterday the sky had become half-clouded over by eleven o’clock, but today there was no such relief and at this altitude the ultra-violet rays are quite fierce.

  Before long I had again lost the right track, so we descended to a river, failed to receive directions from youths who were watering cattle, climbed a steep, forested mountain, crossed a few barley fields and went wandering over wide, windy slopes of short, golden grass. Here there were no paths and Jock found the slippery turf difficult; but soon I saw a clear stretch of main track, on the flank of the opposite ridge, and for the next two hours we were crossing undulating ploughland – mile after mile of it, sweeping brownly up to the deep blue sky.

  From the edge of this plateau I was suddenly looking down into an enchanting little valley, set deep amidst rough grey peaks. On a floor of red-gold grass tawny
-thatched tukuls were surrounded by slim green trees and each colour glowed pure and soft in the mellow afternoon brilliance.

  These scattered compounds make up the village of Sali, and this morning’s teachers had given me a letter to their two confrères here. When we arrived my hosts were still at school, but their servant – a squat adolescent girl, plain by highland standards – welcomed me warmly, though timidly, and provided a foot-wash and massage, followed by a meal of fried dried meat and cold injara. Then the headman brought gifts of talla for me and fodder for Jock. The locals are more likeable than my singularly unintelligent Debarak-born hosts, who long to give up teaching and get ‘better jobs’, preferably as bank clerks in Asmara or Addis.

  Tomorrow I’m going to the village of Bethlehem, where Thomas Pakenham discovered a well-preserved medieval church in 1955. To get from there to Lalibela I must return to Sali, so Jock will have a day off.

  This two-roomed mud hovel was built three years ago, when the school opened, and it seems to be bugless though it vibrates with fleas. (Compared with what I feel for bugs my feeling for fleas is a tender affection.) The boys want to sacrifice one of their beds in the inner room but, as I have not enough faith in the establishment’s buglessness to risk this, I will share the living-room floor with the servant.

  28 February

  What misery! Last night I woke with a searing pain in my chest, a savage headache and what felt like congestion of the lungs. Groping through my sacks in the dark I found aspirin and antibiotics and then sat with my back to the wall, painfully struggling to breathe – if I lay down I at once experienced a terrifying suffocating sensation. Yet I had gone to sleep at 9.30 feeling perfectly well, so this was no ordinary influenza or bronchitis germ. Presumably it was sunstroke and, as I wheezed agonisingly through four long, dark hours, I tried to forget that sunstroke can cause pneumonia. Dawn was breaking before the suffocating sensation lessened – but an hour after taking the second acromycin I felt so much better that I decided to act on the ‘Fresh Air and Exercise’ principle and stick to my plans for today.