The Chinese Road is indeed a better road, even if it is only gravel. For the first time since they left Addis they’re able to travel at fifty miles an hour. But it too curves precipitously as they climb higher and higher. In places they’re so high and the drop-off on one side or the other is so deep, she’s reminded of driving between Banff and Jasper, although the mountains here aren’t as high or as craggy, nor are their peaks snow-covered. In the distance, though, she can see a rugged blue range which Giyorgis tells her is the Simien Mountains where Ras Dashan, the highest mountain in Ethiopia, is. “Over four thousand metres, the fourth highest mountain in Africa.” The Simiens look like the Rockies.
This road is a little easier on Iris’s posterior and she loses herself in the constant surprises of the landscape that open to viewing around each of the bends and spread out below each rise. The lower hillsides all look as if they were once tree-covered, but nothing is left now but low green shrubs here and there, and as for grass, there’s very little of it. At one point they come upon two men on foot driving a herd of more than fifty young camels, and she wishes she had a camera. They arrive at a fork in the road and Giyorgis says, “From here seventy-seven kilometres to Lalibela.”
The track they turn onto from the splendour of the Chinese Road is a narrow, dusty trail that reminds her of the road at home that runs through the back of Cypress Hills Park to Fort Walsh, bearing the sign Impassable When Wet. Giyorgis tells her that soon, during the rainy season, Lalibela will be unreachable by road. She isn’t surprised. This hardly deserves the name “road,” dusty, rocky, and unmaintained as it is. But although they’ve had to slow to about twenty-five or fewer miles per hour and more than once in low spots they drive through streams that have spread across the track, Iris doesn’t worry. She’s used to roads like this, and she keeps reminding herself that under the mud holes and the long stretches of loose dirt, unlike at home, here the bottom is rock, so that getting stuck is unlikely, even if they weren’t in a four-wheel drive. And she trusts her careful driver Giyorgis.
As they leave behind all vestiges of cities or towns or even large villages, the countryside appears wilder, the mountains closer and more rugged. It initially appears empty of people. Yet even without villages or people on the road now, it quickly becomes evident that the countryside is populated. Every hundred yards or so they see above on the mountainside or along the sides of the road another child herding the family’s five or six cows, or few stunted goats and sheep. She thinks how at home, around where she lives, she could drive for two hours or more and not see another living soul, not even meet or pass another vehicle.
The children all wave and shout and grin when Iris waves back. Some of them run to keep abreast of the car for a little way. Iris wonders where they live, and now and then she sees high above them on the sloping mountainside a cluster of two or three of the thatched-roof, conical houses. The walls seem to be made of some sturdy but narrow vertical poles which must somehow be woven together and then plastered with mud.
“Sometimes they build with sorghum stalks,” Giyorgis explains. “That is why they grow very tall sorghum. And, also, it is firewood.” The huts blend so completely into the low shrubbery and stony earth of the hillside that she really has to look to find them.
And the children! When they slow to go around a rocky, rising curve, she gets a close look at a little girl standing about ten feet above their vehicle. She is barefoot and filthy, but then, who wouldn’t be in this dirt, Iris reminds herself, and she’s wearing what was once a dress, but is now better described as a rag, faded to a no-colour, torn or worn through in places. Worst of all, the child is perhaps four years old.
“They don’t go to school?” she whispers, meaning, Don’t they play? Don’t they have childhoods?
“No, too poor,” he says. “Or, there is no school.” He keeps both hands on the wheel and looks straight ahead so she knows he’s upset by this too, maybe ashamed or sorrowful for the state his country is in, or for his own helplessness. She even thinks this would be bearable if it were only one child, or only one four-year-old child, but the children are everywhere she looks. A four-year-old herder is commonplace.
Two hours have passed since they started out on this road and Iris’s back is beginning to ache from the constant jolting, and her tailbone is sore from two days of sitting. She would complain, but it wouldn’t do any good, so she keeps silent.
At last they see a village ahead. Village is perhaps too grandiose a word for this collection of eight or ten of those conical African huts with the thatched roofs, but as they draw closer they see a crowd of people gathered on the dusty track running between the huts their Land Rover is travelling down. Iris is apprehensive as Giyorgis slows their vehicle and, just short of the crowd, pulls to a stop at the side of the track. There are perhaps twenty people, nearly all adults, the men wearing what she guesses must be traditional garb, a short-skirted — well above the knees — togalike garment of natural-colour cotton, one long end brought up from the back to hang loosely down over one shoulder, the women wearing layered, dresslike garments, worn and dirty, and held together at the waist with cords.
One of the women who must not have seen their approach is still wailing loudly and turning in circles in a movement that is like, but seems not to be quite, a dance. As their vehicle stops, she stops too, her wailing cut off in mid-cry.
So quickly Iris doesn’t see it happen, their vehicle is surrounded by villagers. They press up against the car, their faces within inches of hers and Giyorgis’s, she couldn’t open the door if she wanted to for their bodies, and Iris, aware of her rudeness, hastily rolls up the window she’d just rolled down. She feels acutely that there is only one thin layer of glass between her and these strangers. What puzzles her even as it frightens her is that all those faces three and four deep crowding in on her, staring at her, are not threatening. They are, instead, blank. Just, it seems to her, carefully, wilfully, blank.
Iris’s heart is pounding, her mouth has gone dry. Is this where she’s going to meet her death? Here, in this godforsaken corner of the earth, far from home and family and people who speak her own language? Will they soon drag her from the car and — she’s trembling through and through, about to say — no, to order — Giyorgis to put the vehicle in gear, his foot on the gas, they can at least try to escape, when she glances quickly at him. He’s speaking to one of the villagers, a man dressed in the traditional garment carrying a tall staff who towers over the others. Giyorgis turns to her and says calmly, “It is a funeral.”
“What? Where?” Now she sees at the far side of the crowd, a half-dozen men lifting a long, narrow pallet to their shoulders. Whatever is on the pallet is shrouded in cotton, but it takes Iris only a second to realize that the cotton covers a body.
“It is him,” Giyorgis says. When he gestures and she turns her head quickly to look, the people pushing up against her side of the car turn their heads to look too. Giyorgis says quietly to her, “It is only that they wonder. They are curious.” She recognizes that he understands how frightened she has been.
Now, from behind the huts two horses and their riders come into view, moving slowly to the track behind the Land Rover, going in the direction Iris and Giyorgis have just come from. The riders are men wearing robes and wide white turbans; Iris notices the horses are small but strong-looking, and both are covered to their knees in gold-trimmed, green brocade ceremonial blankets that fasten at their chests and from which their tails protrude. Even while Iris is trying desperately to see everything, her heart still pounding from the fright she has had, the splendour of the horses’ blankets beside the people’s rags is not lost on her.
At the appearance of the horses and riders the people who’ve been crowding around the Land Rover move slowly away without looking back. The men bearing the body move into place behind the horses, the villagers crowd around the pallet-bearers, and the procession begins to recede slowly. At once the wailing starts up again, although Iris can’
t see the women making the noise. As Giyorgis puts their vehicle in gear and they drive on slowly past the rest of the huts, the keening fades away behind them. They drive on around a rising curve and a mountainside imposes itself between them and the procession.
“I was afraid,” Iris admits.
“Few strangers go down this road,” he says, explaining the villagers’ reaction to her. But what puzzles Iris most is that blankness on the people’s faces. She has seen enough Ethiopians now to know that they are normally as vivacious as any Canadians. She can’t think why they would wipe away all expression — the crowding she can understand if they were merely curious — but — could it be that mixed in with their curiosity was fear? Fear that she and Giyorgis were police or maybe government officials who might cause them trouble? Wouldn’t they just run away instead? She would like to ask Giyorgis what he thinks about this, but when she reflects, she remembers that he seemed not even to notice it. And he has had to explain the peculiarities of his country to her so many times since she got into his vehicle, more than once she felt her questions about the sad and ugly things she has observed have humiliated him, that she feels she will let this one pass.
They drive on in silence a few more miles, and Iris notices that the countryside is not only far more rugged than that which she saw farther to the south yesterday, but that there is also much less vegetation and what there is appears parched, in need of rain. And the dust! The farther they go into the mountains and north toward the famous town of Lalibela, the drier and dustier it gets. On curves rising up a mountainside once or twice Giyorgis, having to drive very slowly because of the extruding rocks on the road, actually spins out, the layer of dry, loose dirt is so thick. He has to back up a little until his wheels find a place to grip, and then inch slowly upward again. Were it not for a lifetime as a country girl driving at least once a year somewhere in conditions like this — and don’t forget driving through blizzards in winter, she reminds herself — Iris would be alarmed, might even want to turn back.
Suddenly they round another curve and there it is: on the flat top of a mountain two mountains beyond, shining white in the afternoon sun, sits the magical town, Lalibela. Giyorgis, smiling proudly and with a touch of wonder of his own, slows so she can take a good look.
She has come all this way to Africa, braved this godforsaken road to ride for days by herself with only a stranger for a companion and, just when she’s afraid she’s approaching the limits of her endurance, there is her destination shining in the sun like some magnificent, lost, mythical city.
The child herders, the beggars, the armed gatekeeper, the funeral, her fear at the people crowding around the car pale and disappear. She has begun to tremble. She’s a voyageur, an Indiana Jones, and now, at last, after a cautious and smug lifetime, she understands what drives such people — the Henry Kelseys, Alexander Mackenzies, even the Irish soldier, Palliser, of her home landscape. Surely it is for moments like this that they yearn, that repay them a thousand times over for the hardships of the journey, for the terrors, for the suffering, for even the loved ones left behind — yes, the love abandoned, done without. Barney should be here too, but the thought vanishes as quickly as it comes. It is enough to be here herself.
They keep advancing, still climbing, the town appearing and disappearing with the twists in the road, and just when Iris thinks Lalibela is surely just over the next rise, instead of climbing they drop a long way to cross a wide valley. They’re just in time to see a large silver plane circling above them — a plane? Here? Who on earth could be on board?
Then she sees that far to their left there is a wide landing strip, and next to it, another, apparently even bigger one being built. Iris keeps her eyes on the shining dot that is the circling plane, half thinking she’s imagining it, even though she knows she’s not. It’s just that a plane, especially one of such size and modernity breaks her reverie of being intrepid, trail-blazing, struggling into wilderness and beyond it into the land of the mythical. Abruptly, the ordinary world she has forgotten intrudes, breaking the spell.
They slow to a crawl. Iris sees a couple of yellow bulldozers, but mostly the work appears to be being done with pick and shovel in clouds of dust by a legion of tall, extremely slender men wearing that long piece of discoloured cotton that they wrap around themselves to make a shawl and headcovering — Giyorgis finally tells her it’s a shamma — which they wear over their worn jackets and shirts, and below that, trousers or shorts or a sort of skirt formed with another length of cotton. On their feet they wear leather-thong sandals. The incongruity of the malnourished, inadequately clad men with their picks and shovels and the airplane circling above drives her into silence.
They begin to climb again as Iris catches a glimpse of the plane descending to land, while on their right a rickety, aged bus leaves the parking area, lumbers across the road behind them and, kicking up a trail of dust, heads down a track toward the landing strip.
“Tourists,” Giyorgis says.
“What?” Iris says, although she has heard him perfectly well. She thinks of the two days of driving she has endured, today especially over nearly impassable trails, when she might have flown to the very doorstep of the rock churches. She finds she wouldn’t have missed the drive; it has made Lalibela only more precious.
Behind the flat mountaintop on which the town sits glinting in the sunshine is a distant, high, blue mountain range, and further ranges disappear into the blue of the sky behind it, as if for all the rest of the world, to its faraway, mythical edge, there are only uninhabited, rugged mountains. Giyorgis points to a distinctive, high mountain with a flat-topped mountain in front of it to the northeast of the town and says, “Is called Abuna Yosef. Is more than four thousand metres. Lalibela is twenty-five hundred metres.” Automatically, she converts to feet, more than eight thousand.
The loose dirt and dust they’re driving through has taken on a red hue, and as they drive up the final road to the edge of the town meeting ragged, barefoot women bent almost double under enormous loads of firewood they’re carrying on their backs down the mountain, she sees that the town’s gleaming whiteness was an illusion. This town is red: red stone, red dust, red bricks.
Giyorgis is ready with the facts: “Volcanic rock. Red tufa.”
It’s like a town in the Arizona desert, it’s so dry. There are many dusty green trees but beneath them grows not a blade of grass, not a forb or a sedge or a lovely flowering shrub. Just rose-coloured or pink-tinted dirt, and dust inches thick, everywhere she looks. And what she thought was a city turns out to be only a town, its buildings strewn haphazardly up the sides and on flat spaces of this mountain which, within the general flatness, turns out to have short, but steep rises and narrow, dramatic clefts. She sees too that here the houses, still the familiar conical ones with the thatched roofs, are built of unpolished wine-coloured stone and that some are, surprisingly, two storeys high.
Immediately on their left is a handsome new-looking hotel built of red stone blocks. It occupies its own flat-topped rise, really the top of a cliff, and has the usual wide gate and fence, although here the fence is only barbed wire and shrubbery, not an actual concrete-block wall as she saw in Addis and Kombolcha. A valley inserts itself between this building and the first buildings of the town isolating the hotel. The dusty road dips and rises again, before it curves out of sight behind trees, another small hill, and the town proper.
“This is the Hilton,” Giyorgis tells her, “but the name is called ‘Roha,’” he adds. “Is the name of this town before King Lalibela came and built his churches.”
Iris says, “I wonder what the deal is? That Hilton would build it and the Ethiopian government run it? Or did the government just take it over?” Vaguely, she recognizes this as not the sort of question — having to do with politics and government — that in the past she would have thought to ask. Giyorgis shrugs. They drive past what she now knows are the inevitable guards. It occurs to her to wonder who it is, in a place as re
mote as this, the guards are here to keep out. The poor again, she supposes. Giyorgis greets them and they call back a greeting, he parks their vehicle in the small, empty paved lot — there’s no sign of the bus from the landing strip yet — and, walking stiffly, Iris has trouble straightening up, they go inside to register.
The interior has that tropical-country look that Iris recognizes from the travel channel on television and from magazines: low ceilings, carpeted stone floors, a few wide steps leading to different levels, and Ethiopian rugs, wall hangings, and posters decorating the thick supporting pillars.
With a tentative expression, Giyorgis taps a sign posted on the wall near the desk informing guests that there is running, cold water only, for an hour each evening and each morning, and electricity only from six to eleven in the evenings. Iris is taken aback but then shrugs. A small matter. It will soon be dark, already it’s dusky in the lobby, and she’s famished and tired out and aching in every joint and not about to quibble over niggling matters like running water and electricity.
By the time she and Giyorgis meet in the bar, it is full of the tourists from the plane. Most of them are middle-aged, the men with big stomachs, the women nondescript, grey-haired, tweedy. They all look wealthy though, and are speaking German. In another corner a smaller but louder contingent is speaking French. She and Giyorgis eat dinner in the elegant dining room, served by dignified local waiters, but without choice — there is only one meal being served. On their left at a long banquet table the Germans and their guide talk quietly as they eat and drink, and at another table at the back of the big, high-ceilinged room, laughter from the French tourists rises above the drone of voices. The only other guests are four people sharing a table behind Iris and Giyorgis. In a lull in the general buzz, Iris thinks she hears British accents. Aside from the waiters, Giyorgis is the only Ethiopian in the room.
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