The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  The woman ran from one hole to the next, crying down each tunnel. All the other children had scurried to the surface. They said that Adi had been digging in a separate tunnel, away from the others, when the earth above had collapsed. The mother screamed, her features locked in an ecstasy of pain. Nothing is so agonizing as to see the face of a mother who has lost her child. I couldn’t bear to watch. The miners crowded round, comforting her. I wanted someone to reassure the woman that there was hope, that children have been pulled from rubble days after an earthquake. But like everyone else, she knew that her son was already dead.

  Adi’s body was eventually found a few minutes before sunset. The time that it took to dig the boy out was testimony to the depth at which he had been working. The camp’s wild, carefree atmosphere had evaporated. That evening none of the miners joked or boasted, and there was no talk of Tigrayan whores. Instead they banded together like brothers, and for the first time I felt respect for them. One of their own had died. He may have been a child of nine or ten, but he was a miner who’d perished in the line of duty. In silence the corpse was carried at shoulder height down the muddy track into the village. The mother walked beside her son, resting her hand gently on his head. Her eyes were swollen with grief.

  The sordid carnival of the previous night was nothing but a memory. No one drank in the bar. The few clients who couldn’t stay away simply sat there staring into space, consoling each other. In the back room, the fire under the still was starved of fuel. The drip, drip, drip of transparent liquid had ceased. The whores sat about plaiting their hair, ready for a night without trade.

  Adi’s crushed body was wrapped in a clean white shawl and laid out in his parents’ home. Samson and I stopped there to pay our respects. The hut was already filled with people.

  Samson recited Psalm 23 as softly as I’ve ever heard it spoken:

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

  He maketh me lie down in green pastures:

  He leadeth me beside the still waters.

  He restoreth my soul...

  Samson’s eyes were closed as he spoke. Perhaps he was remembering past friends and enemies whose lives had ended under the ground. When we left the hut, he looked up to Heaven and rebuked God. Then he held his Bible to his face and wept.

  Next morning, long before the mining had begun, the villagers rose and filed from the camp. Most were wrapped against the early chill in their shammas. Their heads were bent towards the ground, their faces long and drawn. Noah led the procession which snaked for a mile or so south of the mine. We walked near him. Behind us Adi’s body was carried at waist height, with his mother and father, and their closest friends following behind.

  A grave had been carved out of the brick-red soil in an area away from the gold seam. The body was placed in the hole and, with little ceremony, it was covered over. Then the first light of dawn turned the sky steel blue.

  By seven o’clock the mine was burgeoning with activity again. The pans of golden earth were wending their way up from the bottom of the pit, and the dark, cramped network of tunnels was busy with infant workers. A young miner had been lost, but hardly anyone stopped to reflect. Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.

  In the late afternoon a vehicle could be seen negotiating the jagged track leading to the mining community. We could hear its engine revving for a mile or more before it arrived. The miners didn’t have to look: they knew the car. It was the property of a local government bureaucrat. Somehow he’d heard that there had been a death and he had come to get the details down on paper.

  Noah told me to go into his thatched hut as quickly as I could. The only thing the bureaucrat would like more than a dead miner was a foreigner to torment. So I hid in Noah’s shack while Samson hastened back and forth, filling me in on what was happening. The administrator, he said, was questioning Adi’s parents, telling them to go to Shakiso to help with an official report. That was the last thing they intended to do.

  “If the government knows about this and other illegal mines,” I asked, “then why don’t they close them down?”

  Samson winked.

  “They’re in it for the money,” he said. “They buy most of the gold, and they sell it at a big profit. Unless they send the army down here they’re never going to be able to stop all the mining, and this way at least they get the lion’s share of the profits.”

  Despite this, I found that the miners had a pretty accurate idea of international gold prices. For this reason they only sold part of their haul to the officials.

  “If they let on just how much gold’s coming from this seam,” said Samson, “then the government would have no choice but to nationalize the place. Then they might have a rebellion on their hands.”

  There was already insurrection in the air. Samson reported that hundreds of miners had left the pit and were massing around the official. I could make out loud voices, then shouting, and finally the rumble of an engine as it sparked to life.

  “How did he find out that someone had died?” I asked Noah later when he returned from the mine-shaft.

  “There are spies, lots of them,” he replied. “In fact it is strange that they haven’t handed you in.”

  Now that he mentioned it, I realized that the miners had been friendly towards me. They had welcomed me as courteously as they knew how, and some had offered to show me the surrounding area at night or to feed me.

  “You’d better watch out,” said Noah, “they’re probably planning to rob you or kill you.”

  “America,” added Samson.

  “The market stall?”

  Noah frowned.

  “No, the country America,” he said. “They see you as their way out of here and over there.”

  Like all Ethiopians, the miners had a grand plan which culminated with their arrival in the United States. No other country was good enough – none had the cachet of America. I hadn’t been in Ethiopia long, but dozens of people had already asked me how to get a visa for America. I’d even heard of agents who, for a steep fee, could prescribe the best route across the Atlantic.

  Noah pointed to a man outside one of the huts lolling back on a home-made chair.

  “That man there,” he said, “he’s an expert on America.”

  Dawit’s head was round, like a small watermelon, and it appeared to balance on his wide shoulders without any trace of a neck. His palms were as soft as a beauty queen’s cheeks. They’d obviously never been down the mines. Dawit laughed riotously at the slightest opportunity, and I asked him why he was always so cheerful.

  “We Amhara are very happy people,” he replied.

  “What’s the best way to get to America then?”

  Dawit stopped laughing and lowered his head. The only thing he never joked about was business.

  “These days it’s harder to get an asylum visa,” he said, “but there are lots of other ways in. You can go through another country, like Germany, France or Britain. You can say you’re a priest and get a Christian foundation to sponsor you, or pretend to be a Jew and go via Israel. Or, if you can get to Mexico, you can jump across the river...” He paused for a moment, trying to remember its name. “The Río Grande, they call it the Río Grande, and the water’s very low at the moment. But the best way to get to America,” he said, flexing his shoulders, “is to get yourself a foreigner’s passport.”

  I was struck by how much Dawit knew and the more we spoke, the more impressed I became. There were very few questions he could not answer. At last I asked him which was his favourite American city.

  Dawit looked blank and then burst out laughing, and Noah and Samson collapsed in hysterics. When eventually they stopped, the three of them stared at me as if I were mad.

  “He’s never been to America,” said Noah.

  After meeting Dawit, I tiptoed around the village, gripped by paranoia. If I disappeared and my passport was taken by a swarthy young Ethiopian, it could be months or years before the crime was discovered. I
told Samson of my worry and forbade him to leave my side even when I was asleep — in fact especially when I was asleep. That night my dreams were filled with gangs of miners creeping into the hut, snatching my passport and slitting my throat. Then they fought with each other to see who would win my passport for the journey to America.

  The next morning I awoke to find Dawit at the foot of my sleeping-bag. He’d had an idea in the night, he said. I was to give a short informal talk about America to the miners. As someone who’d passed through US Immigration several times I had inside knowledge that I could pass on. It sounded like an easy way to please the community, so I agreed to talk in the open space that evening.

  Life at the gold mine was pleasant so long as you didn’t have to do any mining. There was a perpetual sense of risk, balanced by the lure of instant wealth. The place was like a grand casino. Money raised by communal mining was shared out, but anyone who found a large nugget was permitted by the others to keep it. Whether anyone realized it or not, the system encouraged industriousness. The big problem though was that all of them were unable to stop mining, regardless of how much gold they found.

  Everyone I spoke to said they would leave if they found a big enough nugget, but I knew that that was a lie. The miners had become addicted to the gambler’s lifestyle. Nothing, except possibly religion, could prize them away. And in any case, anyone cashing in on a big find had debts to pay, and what was left would be blown in an instant.

  “If you look at this place,” said Samson as we sat together in the late morning sun, “you’d think there wouldn’t be much in the way of expense. But you’d be wrong. Miners make good money, much more than any other Ethiopians. But they have to pay back the money they owe to other miners, they have to buy clothes and food, and they have to send money home to their families. Then there are illegitimate children to care for, there’s araki to buy, and Tigrayan girls to employ.” Samson stared at the baked earth as he remembered the corrosive existence. “The most expensive thing of all,” he added, “is treating others to luxuries – women and drink.”

  “But why pay for others if you can’t afford to?”

  Samson smiled from the corner of his mouth.

  “Just in case one of them finds a big nugget,” he said. “If you don’t help them when they’re poor, they won’t remember you when they’re rich.”

  Life must have been much the same for prospectors working in the Klondike, in California, or in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century. The first great gold rush took place near the Sacramento River in northern California in 1848. A carpenter working at a sawmill there found a sizeable gold nugget. Try as he might to keep his find quiet, word soon got out. Within days there were tens of thousands of would-be miners camped out nearby, and within four years more than 250,000 miners had descended on California. Living in the most terrible conditions and blinded by greed, they were risking everything for the sake of gold.

  I met an Italian recently whose great-great-grandfather had set out from his native Milan in search of a fortune in California. He saw the prospectors living like dogs, eating rotten supplies and using lousy equipment. The Italian had intended to search for gold like the rest of them. But as soon as he saw the conditions in which they lived, he changed tack. Instead of thinking about gold, he turned his hand to bringing in supplies. Within weeks he’d made a fortune selling saddles and clothes, pans, chemicals, tents and food.

  Look at the map and you can see traces of those pioneering days in the names – Bonanza Creek, Gold Hill, Gold Creek, Eureka. But the name which crops up again and again is Ophir. Christian miners were certain that they’d discovered the Old Testament land. In Bedakaysa no one apart from Samson and Noah had ever heard of Ophir. They had no interest in Bible readings. They had been residents of Hell for far too long. Samson called them “The Children of the Devil”.

  We often discussed the idea of Ophir. Samson felt sure that Solomon’s gold had come from ancient Ethiopian mines. He pointed out that the Israelites had probably acquired the metal from many mines in one region rather than from a single glorious pit. He said that a giant mine only existed in the minds of novelists and Hollywood, and he reminded me that an entire region, or country, can get mined out, especially where the gold veins are close to the surface, as they are in Ethiopia. Modern industrial mining processes can sift through thousands of tonnes of ore each day. But mining was no less thorough before the days of heavy machinery. Hundreds of thousands of prospectors at the Klondike River did the work of the machines, as they do today in mines like Bedakaysa.

  In London I had managed to buy a handful of books written at the turn of the last century which told of Great Zimbabwe, the ruins which the Victorians thought were once Ophir. One of the volumes had been published in 1899 and was written by an eccentric German professor called Carl Peters. The book was entitled King Solomon’s Golden Ophir: A Research into the Most Ancient Gold Production in History. Peters tackled the subject with Teutonic thoroughness and came up with an interesting theory. The Old Testament writers were usually very precise in giving details. Why then did they give no indication as to the whereabouts of Ophir? They seemed to assume, says Peters, that everyone knew where it might be found. If Ophir was remote there would have been a need to supply the curious with details. Africa was a land known to the ancients, though they knew little of its interior or overall geography. Might not Africa and Ophir be one and the same? In support of his theory, he looked at the etymology of the word “Africa”. The original root of the name, according to him, was Afer, probably meaning “Red” or “Red Land”, as in the common color of the continent’s soil. Afri were its people, and African the adjective which described them.

  In the century since Peters’ book was published, it has been proved that the Great Zimbabwe ruins are not connected with the ancient Israelite kingdom, the land of Solomon. Even so, Peters’ theory seems plausible. Ophir might well have been Africa, and Solomon’s gold might well have come from a region of the continent that lay close to his kingdom, the mountainous hinterland of Ethiopia.

  In the late afternoon I paddled at the edge of the panning pool. The miners were hard at work, ferrying their pans of earth from the bottom of the crater. Children darted about selling sticks of roasted maize, sugar cubes and knitted hats. From time to time women and children came up from the mine where they had been digging and swapped places with the panners. Panning was back-breaking work but it meant that you could at least wade in the thigh-deep water and keep cool.

  The male miners were proud of their profession and keen for their sons to follow them. Noah told me that mining gold was considered the most macho thing a man could do. Miners scoffed at farmers and laughed uncontrollably if one mentioned people who did office work. They rated the value of a job by the thickness of the calluses it gave their hands.

  Noah was an exception. He had two young sons but he shuddered at the thought of them entering the mine.

  “They’re having an education,” he said. “The only way I can pay for it, though, is by mining. I pray that I’ll find a big nugget. Why do you think I spend such long hours in the tunnels risking my life?”

  “Where are your family?”

  “Back in Kebra Mengist,” he replied. “I won’t let them even come to the mine. I’m not ashamed of the work, but I don’t want my wife or my two boys to see the savage people I live with.”

  Dawit came over and said it was time for my talk. He’d spread the word through his network of contacts and he expected a bumper audience. We made our way to a flat patch of land to the west of the main mine. Young men would sometimes play football there. Others used it for their ablutions, and the place was running with rats and stank of human excrement. Despite the stench, dozens of miners had already arrived. More were turning up every minute. Most of them knew that a foreigner had been staying in the village, but until that moment they had regarded me as of little use. That was about to change. Dawit had billed me as the man who could put an end to all
their problems – he had declared somewhat fictitiously that I was the missing link between them and America.

  Samson grew nervous when he saw the extent of the crowd. He said there was a danger of the local official closing the event down and arresting us. Having been in big gatherings in India and Africa before, I was more worried by another danger. At a right-wing rally in Nigeria, given by a fanatical Christian preacher from Germany, I’d seen dozens of people trampled to death. The pastor claimed to have the power to heal the sick. He told hundreds of cripples to make a pyre from their crutches and wheelchairs. When they’d done this, the preacher claimed to have healed everyone, and with that he drove off in his stretch Mercedes. Of course no one was cured. Instead, tempers boiled over and the crowd stampeded. The saddest thing was to see all the disabled left lying on the ground without their crutches and wheelchairs, unable to get home.

  Dawit assured me that there would be no stampede. Everyone present, he said, had paid one birr entrance fee, or at least had promised to pay later. The children sat at the front, wriggling in the dirt, a little unsure of why they had been coaxed to attend. Their parents and the general population of miners stood behind them. There must have been about five hundred people. The Tigrayan girls had donned their best dresses and vinyl high heels, and were sitting with the children. The entire congregation was united by their interest in the title of my talk, “Getting to America”.

  When they were quiet, and we were sure that there were no stragglers still to come, Dawit introduced me, speaking in Amharic, while Samson translated.

  “Mr Tahir has come from faraway America,” said Dawit, “to tell you about his wonderful country and how to get there.”

  After a prolonged greeting, I began my talk. Whenever I said the word “America”, the gathering drew a deep breath.

  “America is an amazing country,” I said, waiting for Dawit to finish translating my words. “It’s sometimes known as “The Land of the Free” because everyone has rights.”

  One of the young men began to heckle me, demanding to know what people in America thought of Ethiopians there.