The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  The next morning, Thursday 10 January, Ed and I took a taxi to the offices of the Relief Society of Tigray, where the TPLF in London had told us to report to make the final arrangements for our trip. Our names, we noticed, were scrawled in chalk on a blackboard in an upstairs room; however no one there seemed to know anything else about us. Neither was it immediately possible to make contact with Haile Kiros, TPLF head of mission in Khartoum: always unreliable, the city’s telephone system appeared to have broken down entirely that morning.

  ‘Can’t we just drive over to the TPLF office?’ I asked one of the REST officials.

  ‘No. Better you stay here. We will find Haile Kiros for you.’

  By mid-morning there was no news. We decided that I should stay put to wait for Haile Kiros and that Ed should go to the airport in the taxi to collect his passport. He did this. Two hours later, however, he had failed to return and there was still no sign of the TPLF official, or indeed of anyone who appeared to be even remotely interested in me or my plans to get to Axum.

  The silver lining to this particular cloud, I reflected, was that such a laid-back attitude did not lend credibility to my paranoid fancies that I might be murdered in Tigray. Indeed, a much more realistic prospect was beginning to suggest itself to me, namely that all concerned could turn out to be too comatose and slow-moving to get me to Tigray at all.

  I looked at my watch and found that it was after one o’clock. In less than an hour, I remembered, all offices in Khartoum would close down for the day, probably including those of REST and the TPLF. Tomorrow, Friday, was the Islamic sabbath. It was therefore clear that nothing very much was going to happen before Saturday 12 January.

  And where was Ed? Perhaps he had gone directly back to the Hilton. I tried to telephone the hotel but of course could not get through. Feeling increasingly irritated I wrote a note for Haile Kiros giving him my room number and asking him to contact me. I then handed this note to one of the friendly young people manning the REST office and walked out on to the street in search of a taxi.

  First I went back to the Hilton, but Ed was not there. Then, just in case, I went to REST again, but he was not there either. Finally I ordered my driver to take me to the airport – where, with much patient inquiry, I managed to establish that my colleague had been detained and was being ‘interviewed’ by the police.

  Could I go in and see him?

  No.

  Could I get any further information at all?

  No.

  When might he reappear?

  ‘Today, tomorrow, maybe Saturday,’ explained the English-speaking businessman who had kindly assisted me. ‘Nobody knows. Nobody will say. It is the National Security Police who are holding him. Very bad men. Very impossible for you to do anything.’

  By now genuinely concerned, I hurried over to the airport information kiosk which – amazingly – was open. There, not without some difficulty, I obtained the telephone number of the British Embassy. Then I found a public telephone which actually worked and, moreover, was free of charge. Unfortunately, however, no one answered at the other end.

  Two minutes later I was in my taxi again. The driver did not know where the Embassy was – although he had claimed otherwise – and eventually located it by a curious process of trial and error which took slightly more than an hour.

  I spent what was left of the afternoon back at the airport with two British diplomats whom I had found drinking illegal substances at the Embassy club. These officials, however, were no more successful than I had been in establishing why – or even where – Ed was being held. Their efforts, moreover, were complicated by the fact that Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had just arrived in a Libyan jet to discuss the Gulf crisis with Sudan’s military dictator, General Omar el-Bashir. Bristling with automatic weapons, platoons of soldiers roamed around giving vent to patriotic anti-Western feelings and generally making life unpleasant for everyone. Neither were my two diplomats in a particularly good mood. ‘All British citizens have been warned to stay away from this bloody country,’ one of them reminded me with a faint note of accusation in his voice. ‘Now perhaps you can see why.’

  Around nine that evening, with Ed still not rescued, I was dropped back at the Hilton for dinner. Then, just after ten, to my great relief he appeared in the lobby looking a little grimy and tired but otherwise none the worse for wear.

  He held up his hands as he sat down at my table. They were covered with black ink. ‘I’ve been finger-printed,’ he explained. He then attempted – fruitlessly – to order a large gin and tonic. Finally, with only minimal disgruntlement, he settled for a warm non-alcoholic beer.

  On the road

  As it turned out, Ed had not been held by the dreaded National Security Police but by the Sudanese branch of Interpol. Apparently the name ‘John Edward’ was one of the half dozen or so aliases used by an internationally wanted drugs dealer. Ed’s fate had been sealed when the investigating officers had noticed that his passport contained a visa stamp for Colombia, the cocaine capital of the world. The fact that he had been there to film a news story for Channel 4 had not impressed the Sudanese detectives at all, nor had his distinct non-resemblance to the photograph of the wanted man that had been wired by Interpol. Fortunately a set of fingerprints had been sent as well and, rather late in the evening, someone had the bright idea of comparing Ed’s fingerprints with these. His release had followed shortly afterwards.

  The next day we told the story to Haile Kiros, the TPLF representative, who turned up at the Hilton in the middle of the afternoon. Though it had been rather worrying at the time, it was risible in retrospect and the three of us had a good laugh about it.

  We then began to discuss the logistics of the trip to Axum and, as we did so, I found myself watching Haile Kiros closely. I could detect absolutely nothing in his demeanour, however, to suggest that he might wish me any harm whatsoever. On the contrary, he was an affable, easy-going, sophisticated individual who was clearly devoted to the cause of overthrowing the Ethiopian government but otherwise appeared to be entirely without malice. As we talked it began to dawn on me just how badly I might have got things out of perspective in the preceding months. Confronted with the friendly reality of Haile Kiros, all the fears and anxieties that I had suffered at the prospect of putting myself into the hands of the rebels looked unwarranted and all the dark imaginings that I had admitted into my life seemed absurd.

  On the morning of Saturday 12 January we were joined by a TPLF official whom I was only ever to know by the single name of ‘Hagos’. Lean and slightly built, with a complexion scarred by childhood smallpox, he explained that he had been assigned to accompany us to Axum – where he had been born – and to return with us from there when our work was complete. Meanwhile, here in Khartoum, he would facilitate our travel warrants to the border and would also help us to hire a vehicle for the journey.

  By noon we had completed the paperwork and by the early evening we had done a deal with an Eritrean businessman resident in the Sudan who agreed to provide us with a sturdy Toyota Landcruiser, an even sturdier driver named Tesfaye, and six jerry-cans for spare fuel. At US$200 per day the rental seemed to me a bargain: I knew, you see, that much of our journey would have to be made by night on precarious mountain tracks so as to avoid the unwelcome attentions of the Ethiopian government aircraft that still patrolled the daytime skies above the rebel province of Tigray.

  The next morning, Sunday 13 January, we left Khartoum just before dawn. Ahead of us lay hundreds of kilometres of Sudanese desert into which we now motored at high speed. Tesfaye, our driver, was a piratical-looking character with woolly hair, tobacco-yellow teeth, and a wandering eye; he handled the Landcruiser with masterful confidence, however, and clearly knew the route well. Beside him in the front of the vehicle, keeping his own counsel, sat Hagos. Ed and I occupied the rear bench and said little to each other as the sun of a white-hot day gradually rose to greet us.

  We were aim
ing for the frontier town of Kassala where, that evening, a convoy of lorries operated by the Relief Society of Tigray would be marshalling to cross the border. Our plan was to join that convoy and ride with it as far as we could in the direction of Axum. ‘It is safer to travel in a large group,’ Hagos explained, ‘in case anything goes wrong.’

  The journey from Khartoum to Kassala helped me to realize just how drear and empty the landscapes of the Sudan really were. All around us, in all directions, an arid plain stretched away towards the horizon, making me aware, as I had never been before, of the soft relentless curve of the planet’s surface.

  Then, as the day soared towards noon, we began to pass the desiccated corpses of sheep, goats, cattle and – finally and alarmingly – of camels as well. These were the first casualties of a great famine in which people, too, would soon perish – but which the government of the Sudan had thus far refused even to acknowledge, let alone to seek to remedy. This, I thought, was surely an act of fatal arrogance on its part – the callous folly of yet another African dictatorship obsessed with maintaining its own prestige and power at the price of immense human suffering.

  But I had supported just such dictatorships in the past, hadn’t I? And even now I could hardly be said to have severed all my links with them. So who was I to judge? Who was I to feel regret? And by what right did I seek now to empathize with the dispossessed?

  Kassala

  Shortly before two that afternoon we crossed the silt-laden stream of the Atbara river near its confluence with the Takazze and I realized, almost with a sense of shock, how rapidly and how remorselessly the great distance that had once separated me from Axum was now being narrowed. Only a month before, that distance had looked impossible to bridge – a chasm deep and wide raging with nameless dreads. It therefore seemed almost a miracle that I was here and that I had been allowed to set my eyes upon the very rivers that I felt sure the Hebrew migrants had followed when they had brought the Ark of the Covenant into Ethiopia – the mighty rivers that scoured the land shadowing with wings, that poured down into the thirsty deserts of the Sudan, that merged with the Nile, and that flowed on past Elephantine and Luxor, past Abydos and Cairo, to spend themselves at last in the Mediterranean Sea.

  Soon after three p.m. we arrived in Kassala, which was built around an oasis of date palms and dominated by a weird granite outcropping which reared up more than 2,500 feet above the surrounding plain. That red and withered hill, I realized, though it appeared to be isolated, was in fact the first harbinger of the great highlands of Ethiopia.

  I felt a thrill of excitement at the knowledge that the border was now so close – just a few kilometres away – and looked around with renewed interest at the turbulent frontier town through which we were driving. Everywhere, oblivious to the enervating heat, crowds of people milled about, filling the dusty streets with bright colours and loud sounds. Here a group of quick and subtle Highlanders, down from Abyssinia to barter the trade of the mountains for the trade of the desert, stood arguing with a stall-keeper; there a fuzzy-haired nomad sat astride his grumbling camel and gazed at the world with arrogant eyes; here a Muslim holy man, dressed in rags, bestowed benedictions upon those who would pay him and curses upon those who would not; there a child, squealing with glee, pursued a makeshift hoop with an outstretched stick …

  Hagos directed Tesfaye to drive us to a small, flat-roofed house on the outskirts of town. ‘You have to stay here,’ he explained, ‘until it is time for us to cross the border. The Sudanese authorities are a little unpredictable at the moment. So it’s better that you keep your heads down and remain indoors. That way there will be no chance of any problem.’

  ‘Who lives here?’ I asked as we climbed down from the Landcruiser.

  ‘This is a TPLF house,’ Hagos explained, showing us into a clean courtyard around which a number of rooms were arranged. ‘Rest, get a little sleep if you can. It’s going to be a long night.’

  Across the border

  At five that evening we were driven to a huge, open, dusty expanse of ground littered with the bones of slaughtered quadrupeds. Swarms of blowflies buzzed around and here and there, amongst the mouldering vertebrae and the fusty shoulder-blades, lay little piles of stinking human faeces. To my right, thoughtfully arranging itself between Kassala’s great granite butte and the town itself, the sun descended the sky in a surreal extravaganza of tangerine and magenta. The whole collage, I thought, looked like some existentialist vision of the end of all flesh.

  ‘Where exactly are we?’ I asked Hagos.

  ‘Oh … this is where the convoy assembles before crossing the border,’ explained the TPLF official. ‘We will wait maybe half an hour, maybe an hour. Then we will go.’

  Ed immediately climbed down out of the Landcruiser and went off with his tripod and video camera to find a vantage point from which to film the lorries arriving. His story for Channel 4 would focus not only on religious issues, as I had told the TPLF, but also on the burgeoning famine in Tigray.

  While he was making his preparations I wandered pensively about, warding off flies and looking for somewhere to sit down and complete my notes for the day. The charnel house atmosphere, however, had thoroughly disconcerted me. Besides, with the sun now resting on the horizon, the gloaming was already too deep to write in.

  A coolness also had filled the air, an unexpected chill after the heat of the afternoon, and a keen wind sang amongst the derelict buildings that ringed the marshalling ground. People walked to and fro – shadowy figures of men and women who seemed to have come here from nowhere with nowhere to go. Meanwhile small groups of ragged children had gathered to play amidst the rubbish and the bones, their high-pitched giggles mingled with the lowing of a passing herd of cattle.

  And then I heard the rumble of approaching vehicles accompanied by a crashing of gears. Looking back in the direction from which these sounds were coming I saw a glimmer of headlights, then a dazzling beam. Finally, out of the murk, the mammoth shapes of perhaps twenty Mercedes lorries materialized. As they rolled past me I could see that each one was loaded up with hundreds of sacks of grain, loaded so heavily that the suspension sagged and the chassis groaned.

  The trucks pulled to a halt in parallel files in the centre of the open ground and there, in twos and threes, their number was augmented by others snaking out from town. Soon the evening air was filled with billowing clouds of dust and the sounds of revving engines. And then, as though on a signal – though none was given – the whole convoy started to move.

  I ran back to the Landcruiser where Ed, helped by Hagos, was hurriedly stowing his camera equipment. Then we all jumped into the vehicle and set off in pursuit of the lorries’ tail-lights. The trail that we were following, I could see, was deeply rutted and grooved and I wondered how many convoys over how many years had passed this way bearing food for people made hungry by the folly and wickedness of their own government.

  In our faster car we soon overtook the last of the trucks, and we passed perhaps a dozen more before Tesfaye – who was clearly enjoying the role of safari-rally driver – slotted us into position in the middle of the convoy. All around us now the dust and sand that the vehicles were throwing up created a wild and turbulent agitation, sometimes reducing the visibility to just a few feet. Straining my eyes to peer out of the windows at the night as it rushed by, I experienced a sensation of tremendous momentum coupled with a feeling of inevitability. I was on my way, going wherever I would go, to get whatever Fate would send. And I thought: this is where I want to be; this is what I want to do.

  Shortly before seven we arrived at the border and halted at a Sudanese army check-point – just a collection of mud huts in the middle of a bleak and furrowed plain. Carrying hurricane lanterns, a few uniformed men emerged out of the darkness and began to check documents and identities. Then, one by one, the lorries ahead of us were waved through.

  When our turn came Hagos was ordered out of the car by an officer who questioned him closely, maki
ng frequent gestures towards the back seat – where Ed and I were doing our best not to look conspicuous. At one point our passports were produced and minutely examined under the headlights. Then suddenly the officer seemed to lose interest in us and walked off to harass the occupants of the next lorry in the queue.

  Hagos climbed back into the Landcruiser and slammed the door.

  ‘Any problems?’ I asked nervously.

  ‘No. None at all,’ replied the TPLF official. He turned and gave me a broad smile: ‘Don’t worry. They are not going to arrest Ed again. Everything is in order. We can go.’

  He said something in Tigrigna to Tesfaye who happily released the handbrake and gunned the engine. Then we rolled forward across the border and on into Ethiopia – though not yet into Tigray. Our route, I knew, would take us first through territory controlled by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, a guerilla movement older than the TPLF which had been fighting for the independence of Eritrea for almost thirty years and which now, in early 1991, was nearer than ever before to achieving its objective. As we drove I asked Hagos about the links between the two rebel groups.

  ‘We co-operate closely,’ he explained. ‘But the EPLF is campaigning to create a separate Eritrean state whereas we in the TPLF do not seek to secede but only to make it possible for a democratic government to be elected in Ethiopia.’

  ‘And to do that you have to overthrow Mengistu?’

  ‘Certainly. He and his Workers’ Party are the main obstacles to freedom in our country.’

  We drove on for about half an hour, during which we saw no sign of the rest of the convoy. Then suddenly lights appeared in front of us and we pulled to a halt amongst parked lorries in what seemed to be a broad valley surrounded by low hills.

  ‘Why are we stopping?’ I asked Hagos.

  ‘We will wait for the other vehicles behind us to catch up. Also we will collect some TPLF fighters who will travel with us as guards for the convoy.’