In Ethiopia with a Mule

by Dervla Murphy

  Jock and I continued with the two men and their donkeys and half-an-hour later we were overtaken by another caravan of five men, four horses, twelve donkeys and a mule. This party was returning home from Dessie market so most of the animals were unladen; only a few donkeys carried blocks of salt or sacks of raw cotton.

  The track fell steeply into a narrow valley, before climbing to a windy pass strewn with drifts of unmelted hail. Here we must have been at about 11,500 feet and we got little heat from the bright sun. On this Semienesque plateau only giant lobelias grew on the level turf, yet there was no Semien atmosphere of desolation and we met several heavily-laden caravans coming towards Dessie. The view from the edge of the plateau was overwhelming; but my appreciation of Ethiopia’s unique magnificence is now tinged with sadness for in less than two weeks I will have come to the end of the road.

  As we descended a few compounds appeared, amidst broad strips of ploughland and green pastures. Then the track switchbacked over mountain after mountain and at each ascent Jock moved more and more slowly – until at last, near the provincial border of Wollo and Shoa, he stopped at the foot of a hill, hung his head and could go no further.

  By now I had established the usual comradeship of the track with my companions and immediately an agreeable man named Haile Malakot, who seemed to be in a position of some authority, ordered a youth to transfer my sack to one of the free donkeys. Jock then continued wearily and I followed with a heavy heart. Obviously he is so out of condition that he needs a month’s rest, with top-quality feeding.

  We arrived here soon after five o’clock and, judging by the temperature and vegetation, I should think we must be at about 9,000 feet. This settlement stands in the middle of a circular, undulating, fertile plateau, bounded on three sides by high mountains, and Haile Malakot’s compound is by far the biggest for it contains three dwellings, two stables and two well-filled granaries. My host is the local headman, yet even so his tukul is shared with horses, calves, sheep and a mule.

  Every local detail interests me as I have decided to leave Jock here and to take a donkey instead. Haile Malakot will gain about £12 on the exchange but he is welcome to it, for I feel sure that he will treat Jock properly. I have carefully inspected his horses and donkeys, who are in good condition, with not a sore among them. Another encouraging sign was the welcome given him by his dog as we approached the compound. This big, black, woolly creature (an uncommon type) came bounding and tail-wagging to greet his master, though most highland dogs cower and tremble when their owners appear.

  The return of the travellers occasioned much kissing and many elaborate greetings all round, especially between Haile Malakot and his five small children. Instead of those children’s presents which would have been brought from the city in a more affluent society, the youngsters got hunks of stale dabo, left uneaten by their father on his way, which were received with delighted grins and low bows. Their mother was given a present of several cheap, gaudy glass bangles, imported from Czechoslovakia.

  Haile Malakot’s family is one of the nicest I have stayed with; depressed as I am tonight, I do realise how lucky we were to meet him on this crucial day. At supper-time it became apparent that he has a total of nine children, four of whom are large, and it’s difficult now to imagine everyone finding sleeping space in this tukul. But no doubt we’ll eventually get huddled down somehow.

  22 March. Worra Ilu

  We did eventually get huddled down somehow and I slept quite well, though children were packed so closely around me that I could hardly wriggle my toes. When nature called me to the compound during the small hours it was impossible not to waken everyone. The exit was blocked by a complicated web of hide thongs, devised to keep the horses from moving into our compartment, and as I hesitated Haile Malakot impatiently pointed to the animal compartment, where I had earlier heard several human urinations in progress. Obediently manoeuvring under the thongs I added my mite.

  At 5.30 my hostess and her eldest daughter rose to begin the day’s grain-grinding in one corner of the dark tukul. Inevitably they walked on me en route, so I lay awake wondering how many hours a highland woman spends each day at this task. It is strenuous work, but this morning mother and daughter were singing softly and happily, as they settled down to it. The rubbing of stone on stone, with grain between, and the calls of shepherd boys in the mountains are the two sounds of Ethiopia that I shall never forget.

  As soon as it was faintly light I started to pack, crawling over and around various recumbent bodies. Then Haile Malakot rose, to let the animals out and fetch my chosen donkey. I didn’t say goodbye to Jock, who went cantering off with the rest to enjoy a peaceful day on rich pastures.

  Yesterday I had been impressed by the sturdiness and docility of one particular donkey, who now stood meekly while being loaded, and then went trotting briskly before the little boy who led me on to the path for Worra Ilu. However, when the child had turned back disillusion set in. Sturdy this creature certainly is, but nothing less docile can ever have stood on four legs. Very soon I had named him Satan.

  To begin with I tried to lead the devil; but highland donkeys are never led, so he reacted by laying back his ears, rolling his eyes malevolently and riveting himself to Mother Earth. For some moments we remained thus, personifying Immovable Object and Irresistible Force. Naturally, Immovable Object won that round, so Irresistible Force decided to take rear action. Administering a whack on the rump, I uttered a fierce appropriate sound in my best Amharic – whereupon Satan wheeled abruptly and headed for home at a gallop. When I had cut off his retreat another whack sent him trotting – momentarily – in the right direction. What I needed now was one of those mountain paths off which you cannot move; on a plateau Satan held all the trumps for there was nothing to prevent him from going wherever the fancy led him.

  Over the next ten miles I had to pursue Satan repeatedly, as he fled to east, west or north. Oddly, south seemed the one point of the compass to which he could not reconcile himself. Nor did the weather help. It had been heavily overcast when we started out and soon a gale was sweeping sheets of sleety rain across the plateau and turning the ground to slippery, sticky black mud, which meant that every step demanded twice the normal expenditure of energy. Despite my exertions I quickly became so numb that my stiff fingers couldn’t open the buttons of my shirt-pocket. Not even in the Semiens have I experienced such intense cold.

  Instead of adjusting to his new situation Satan became increasingly xenophobic and when we arrived here I felt too demoralised to continue without a donkey-boy – though I guessed that it wouldn’t be easy to find anyone willing to accompany me into Manz.

  Worra Ilu, the birthplace of the Empress Zauditu, is the usual spread-out collection of tin-roofed mud hovels, set among blue-gums. The ‘hotel’ is a tiny doss-house, run by the Amharic wife of a Yemeni trader who settled in Ethiopia fifteen years ago. This man now speaks fluent Amharinya and has successfully adapted himself to the local way of life. These Yemeni small-town traders are more integrated with the highlanders than any other foreigners, yet the moment I met Hussein I was aware of a strong bond between us. He doesn’t speak one word of English, but he and I have established the kind of intuitive understanding that could never exist between me and the local English-speakers. As I now feel so at ease with the highlanders this is a significant measure of the extraordinary degree of ‘ingrown-ness’ that marks their character.

  I had just changed from my soaked shirt into my slightly less soaked jacket when Worra Ilu’s four hundred schoolchildren, freed for their midday meal, ‘discovered’ me. Not since my arrival at Mai Cheneta have I been so enthusiastically mobbed. Despite this town being only two days’ walk from Dessie few of these children had ever before seen a white person (though their parents must have seen many Italians) and, because education of a sort has made them aware of the faranj world, they were avid to meet a real live European. For seven hours I was submerged by them, often almost to the point of suffocation, a
s scores of bodies seethed around me. When it was time for afternoon classes the eleven teachers found it impossible to reclaim their pupils from my ‘hotel’, where the senior boys were packing the restaurant–kitchen–bedroom, while the juniors rioted outside the door, impatient for their glimpse of the faranj. As the teachers were scarcely less interested than the children I was invited to the new school – a handsome stone building – to make a lecture tour of the classrooms, so my afternoon was even more exhausting than it would have been had I continued towards Manz with Satan.

  An hour ago the headmaster produced a twenty-year-old schoolboy, fittingly named Assefa, who will drive Satan to the bus terminus at Sali Dingai if I pay his bus fare north to Dessie. He doesn’t mind walking alone from Dessie to Worra Ilu, but he says that it would be ‘dangerous’ for him to return alone through Manz, where the people are ‘very wild’. The fact that he will miss a week’s schooling seems not to worry anyone, and I gather that many of these pupils attend classes only irregularly.

  23 March. A Compound on a High Plateau

  On our way out of Worra Ilu I stopped at the school to say goodbye just as that familiar ceremony, which marks the start of each highland schoolday, was about to begin. Every morning all the pupils line up in military formation around a tall flagstaff to sing the National Anthem while Ethiopia’s flag is being raised, and this attempt to foster nationalism in a tribal society is followed by a prayer for the Emperor. One boy faces the assembly, bent double, and gives out the prayer – to which everyone else, also bent double, vigorously responds. Today, however, the Worra Ilu assembly didn’t bend very far, most eyes remaining on me.

  Satan’s mood was no less satanic this morning. He tried to bite my leg as he was being loaded, and for the first five miles Assefa and I were fully occupied keeping him on the right track. Crowds were coming to market, many carrying balls of wool measuring at least two feet in circumference, for we are now in Ethiopia’s only wool-producing area. Elsewhere, highland sheep are rarely sheared and the idea of breeding sheep to sell their wool is unknown.

  Here Satan allowed little leisure for admiring the landscape, but occasionally I paused to gaze over the rain-freshened miles of boulder-strewn turf that swept to the horizon on our right, or to peer into the chasm that separated this plateau from the next. Then our path temporarily left the edge of the chasm and wound across a few miles of pasture and ploughland, scattered with compounds enclosed by solid, shoulder-high walls. Some of the stone tukuls were two-storeyed and all seemed to have been built with unusual skill.

  Soon we were again overlooking the gorge, from the point where our track began a four-hour descent. Visually, this was among the most dramatic moments of the whole trek. Standing on the edge of the escarpment I had an unimpeded view of the floor of the gorge 4,000 feet below, and the Uacit river was barely visible though it is now a considerable torrent. Beyond the gorge another long, level tableland rose sheer and to the south-east stretched a third, which was Manz.

  The descent took us gradually south, on a giants’ stepladder formed by three flat, wide ledges. An almost vertical rock stairway led down the escarpment but from its base the gradient was easier and sometimes we were walking on level ground, through thick forest above tremendous drops, as the path sought another point from which it could continue the descent.

  On each ledge were a few impoverished compounds and once we stopped to ask for talla. Approaching the tukuls, I saw a sight that briefly curdled my blood. In a stubble-field, beside a pile of red embers, an old man was hacking the head of a hideously human-looking form. When I came nearer, and realised that the corpse was a roasted baboon, I felt quite weak with relief. In this area baboons do enormous damage to crops so they are sometimes pursued by men and dogs and clubbed to death when cornered. The victim is then roasted and fed to the dogs to increase their enthusiasm for the chase.

  In this compound we were warmly welcomed by two old men and three old women. They gave us many pints of rough talla, many cups of weak coffee, an unfamiliar kind of chocolate-coloured dabo which was surprisingly palatable though it had a strange consistency (perhaps half-set cement would be similar), and cold stewed beans which both looked and tasted repulsive. The squalor of the tukul was extreme and the old people were grief-stricken because yesterday their only cow – due to calve soon – and their only ox died of some disease which has dysentery as its chief symptom. The magnitude of this disaster is hard for us to grasp. These animals were their most valuable possessions – worth at least two hundred dollars – and they have no hope of replacing them. The women wept as they told us, the men sat gazing dully at the floor. Now they are without an ox to pull the plough and the neighbours are too poor to lend them one. Yet when we left, full of their food and drink, they refused to accept any money.

  During the rest of the descent it got hotter every moment and on the floor of the gorge the temperature must have been about 90ºF. When I looked up at the plateau from which we had come it seemed utterly inaccessible: and when I looked up at the plateau to which we were going that seemed equally inaccessible. Here we stood at the confluence of two rivers, both about two hundred yards wide. A week ago they would have been almost dry and even today they were hardly one-third full, but several streams of new flood-water (the colour of strong milky tea) went racing over boulders from between which little shrubs were being uprooted and swept away towards the Blue Nile, the White Nile and the Mediterranean.

  Having crossed the Uacit we turned west up the tributary gorge. At the foot of each colossal mountain-wall strips of rich arable land were being ploughed and irrigated by men from invisible settlements on the plateaux, and twelve times we had to cross branches of the river. As we ascended, the ravine narrowed and the streams became deeper and faster, until we found it difficult to keep our feet on the stony bed against the powerful, waist-deep current. Here a slip would have been unfortunate, for no one could possibly swim in this swirling, boulderous torrent. Satan tackled these fordings gamely – give the devil his due. Half-way up the gorge we had been joined by a young priest riding a white horse and by two men driving donkeys. Undoubtedly this asinine company heartened Satan, who has probably never before travelled alone.

  Even between wadings the going was tiring – over deep, fine sand or across stretches of big, loose stones. The discomfort of these stones was compensated for by their variety of tints – pale pink, primrose yellow, dark and light green, mauve, silver flecked with white, dark red, and a few chunks of what looked like Connemara marble.

  The gorge had narrowed to about fifty yards when we came to the start of a two-hour climb as severe as any Semien ascent. Before going up we paused to rest and I offered the wilting Assefa some dabo, which Hussein had given me as a farewell present. Knowing it to have been baked by Muslims he sniffed at it suspiciously and asked if it contained milk, which would break his Lenten fasting laws. I took a chance and said ‘No milk – water’, and at once he ate it ravenously.

  At 5.45 we began to climb and by 6.45 daylight had become bright moonlight, without any perceptible dusk. The exhilaration of such an ascent is so tremendous that I enjoyed every sweating step, though we were at the end of a long day. There was only one brief, unpleasant stretch, where the moon was hidden by an immeasurably high cliff. My torch didn’t help much and on one side of the rough rock stairs lay a deep ravine.

  Then I heard a sound that took me back to the Semiens – the barking of hundreds of Gelada baboons. From every side they were abusing us and their shrieks, yells and screams, amplified and distorted by echoes, created an unearthly effect on this moonlit mountain, where previously the immense silence had been broken only by our footsteps.

  I paused to wait for the others at the base of the escarpment and never shall I forget the beauty of that scene. Around me jagged escarpments rose sheer, and beyond the gorge lay the symmetrical, ebony line of the opposite plateau, and beneath a brilliant moon the strange splendour of this landscape seemed utterly unreal, with
every abyss a well of blackness and every rocky pinnacle a monstrous tower of silver.

  When we reached the top of the 10,000-foot Manz escarpment my shirt was sodden, for the normal highland evaporation had been unequal to the sweat produced by this climb. Here, to heighten the other-worldly feeling of my arrival at Manz, lightning such as I have never seen before went spurting in quivering flares of red and orange along the cloudy north-eastern horizon. I had expected an easy walk at this stage but several steep hills lay ahead and when the priest had remounted he led us towards them. During that last half-hour I exulted in the simple romance of our little procession, as we climbed a high ploughed hill towards the tall black trees on its summit, following by moonlight the white horse with his white-robed, white-turbaned rider.

  In this large compound the circular top storey of a stable is the guest-room. Within moments of our arrival a big fire had been lit so I took off my drenched shirt and sat close to the flames, eating new-baked dabo and curds. The local talla (karakee) is the best of all the highland beers – dark, slightly thick, bitter as unsweetened lemon-juice and miraculously restoring.

  Our host and his sons are delightful, though very shy of the faranj. Oddly enough, no women have yet appeared. I asked if the locals often go to Addis – the capital is less than a week’s walk away – but none of the company had ever been there.