By ten o’clock they are in their beds in rooms side by side. Iris is so tired that the night passes rapidly, dreamlessly; she doesn’t even have hot flashes, or if she does, she doesn’t wake during them. At dawn she is up in order to take advantage of the water supply, which comes gurgling and banging, and after a quick, light breakfast, which she and her driver have alone in the empty dining room — real tourists apparently sleep later than this — they head out in the Land Rover to visit, at last, the churches they’ve come so far to see.
They hire a guide, a slender, handsome young man, whose grasp of English is better than Giyorgis’s. He turns out to be not a professional guide but a friend of Giyorgis’s, who got to know him during his trips to Lalibela during the famine years of the late eighties. When Iris wonders if they shouldn’t have a professional guide, one is waiting eagerly at the hotel gate, Giyorgis explains to her in a careful way, as if it is important that she understand this, that Yared, who is seventeen or eighteen years old, is a student. He wants to go to university in Addis, but he is very poor, he needs to earn money. He’s neatly dressed in a clean, short-sleeved white shirt and navy trousers, although he’s wearing the leather sandals of the poor on his bare feet. He smiles tensely at her, and reluctantly Iris agrees to hire him. Delighted, he jumps quickly into the back seat.
The churches, Yared explains as they drive, are in three separate clusters short distances apart, although the third location has only one church, St. George’s, the famous cross-shaped church. He seems to think Iris already knows at least this much about them, when actually, although she doesn’t say so, she heard of them for the first time in her life only last night. It might be as much as a mile from the hotel gate to the first cluster of churches, none of which can be seen from a distance.
Yared leads them through the rituals necessary to get them past the courtyard of the first and main church. This involves courteously asking the beggars, both children and adults in their colourless rags, to move back, and trying to shield Iris without appearing to, from the emaciated young men selling handcrafted items and crosses which they claim are solid silver, but which, by the men’s very surreptitiousness Iris suspects aren’t, and further, might be stolen. Or maybe it’s just that they don’t want the handful of priests seated on a stone bench across the courtyard to see what they’re up to. He shields her too from the children, who merely want to get close to stare, giggle, and possibly touch the ferenji. She has to pay a hundred-birr entrance fee, about twenty dollars, which seems high to Iris, but in a country so poor, how can she complain?
Two old beggar women follow her as she descends the stone steps following Yared and Giyorgis into the courtyard of the first group of churches. The steps are so old that their contours are worn to smooth concavity.
“Christos, Christos,” the beggar women say, or, “Sela Selassie,” and although “Christos” is plain enough, and she knows they’re asking for alms, she has to ask Yared for a translation of the other.
“Selassie is the trinity,” he explains. “Haile Selassie is the power of the trinity.” She gives them each a birr.
These two old women are so thin that they might well be dying of starvation. At the bottom of the stairs, when she turns to look back, she has to look twice before she can separate them from the stone walls they lean against. Their skin colour from a lifetime out of doors, and the stony grey-beige of their aged, dirty rags, are the same colour as the rocks. It is as if they are wraiths, rock-ghosts, that detach themselves from the walls at sunrise and at nightfall meld silently back into them. She has never seen human beings this destitute. In an undertone she asks Yared how old he thinks the women might be. He says, “Maybe in their forties.”
Before they enter the first church Yared lectures her, and she has to stifle a smile because he is so grave and intent and yet so young. He tells heer there are eleven churches and names them with a mixture of pride and care, in case he forgets or gets the list wrong: “Beta Madhane Alam, that is in English, House of the Redeemer of the World; Beta Maryam — ‘beta’ is ‘house’; Church of Emmanuel, Church of Mercurious, Church of Abba Libanos — is a saint; Church of the Archangel — that is, St. Gabriel’s; St. George’s, St. Michael’s, Golgotha, the Cross — that is Maskal; and Denaghel — the House of the Virgins.” They are seamless, he tells her, like giant sculptures which can be lived in and used, and are to this very day. She nods politely, smiles her encouragement. Yared goes on, lifting an arm to gesture, spreading his hands, pointing, shifting his weight, doing his best to convey with his entire body the miracle of the churches’ construction.
The early builders simply stood on the top of the rock, he tells her, the way she had been a moment before, and started carving downward, hacking each church out from the top down, sculpting the exteriors to look as they would if they’d been constructed of stone blocks and wood, and then chipping out the interiors to make rooms. “All had to be planned ahead, every window, every decoration. It is truly wonderful.” Especially, he says, when the biggest have three storeys of rooms, and stand perhaps forty feet from bottom to top. Then he points out that the churches within each group are built successively lower, so that when she comes out of one into its courtyard, she’ll be standing on the roof of the next.
“You see, they had to think of drainage for keremt, the main rainy season.” He stops, his face lit from the interior, his expression full of pride. “All the churches, the roofs, the ledges, the courtyards, slant precisely so for drainage.”
When Iris asks for a date, he says, “Their age is not known. Some used to think they go back to 1000 B.C., to when the Queen of Sheba visited Jerusalem. But others say that after the Muslims made it impossible for Christians to go on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, these were built to make a New Jerusalem. That was in the thirteenth century. So — at least eight hundred years old.”
Iris looks slowly around her. Off to her left, thirty feet or so away, three or four of the inevitable young men in tidy Western clothes, their hands in their pockets, lounge against a rock wall silently watching her. To her right and slightly behind her the two old beggar women stand shyly beside some stairs, not speaking or moving, looking as if they might take flight if one of the men so much as glances at them. Behind them a few child beggars have appeared — boys, she sees. They watch her, too, in grave silence.
How quiet it is, she thinks, unnaturally so, and lifts her head to the pale blue African sky, and the white sun casting its rays down over this centuries-old courtyard hewn of living rock. She listens. There is no sound, not of wind, nor motors, nor distant voices, nor airplanes, barking dogs, nor anything else. Just this hush, this stillness, as if here the whole world comes to a stop. Slowly she turns back to Yared, to find him watching her with what she interprets as an apprehensive or a puzzled frown. She smiles, lifts a hand, palm up.
“Please, go on.”
“Ahhh, now, listen,” he says, lifting a finger to emphasize the seriousness of what comes next. His voice alters slightly, goes lower and is softer. “It was prophesied when he was born that Lalibela would be king, so his half-brother, who was king, tried many times to kill him. On one of these occasions when Lalibela was a young man, an attempt to poison him caused him to lie unconscious for three days. During those days Lalibela went to heaven and there God spoke to him. God told him he would rule one day, and that when he came to power he must build these churches. Then God gave him the dimensions of the churches and told him how to build them.” He pauses, lifts his head and gazes up at the walls soaring upward around them as if he hasn’t seen them before either. “It is not known how long it took — maybe twenty years — or how many people worked at it, although it is said that angels worked alongside the builders during the day and then alone at night.”
He lowers his eyes to hers. She can’t tell if he believes this story or not, but his expression is serious, so she controls her face carefully, making sure not a twitch gives away her desire to smile, not that the smile she’s stiflin
g would be of disbelief as much as it would be of delight.
But he is finished at last with his orientation lecture. He leads her toward the first church, with Giyorgis following Iris. Walking down the stone passages Iris exclaims over the beauty of the worn pink rock faces with their many shades from black through wines, browns, and corals to red, and at the doves cooing softly as she passes from their nests in the cracks and fissures of the rock walls. She sees too, that the tool marks from eight hundred years earlier are still visible on them. She can touch them with her fingers.
She is thinking how, when she approached Lalibela, if she hadn’t known the churches were here she would not have guessed it, as they are hidden from view, have to be discovered — a secret world of precious stone structures beneath this African town. She finds herself wondering, Is there something in the Ethiopian character that made them choose to carve the churches out of standing stone, downward into the earth, rather than to quarry the stone and build their churches upward, reaching for the sky, as the Europeans did? Or was it history that made them do it this way? If they were hidden, it would keep them safe from those who would destroy them.
As they’re about to enter the first church, Giyorgis touches her arm and points to her shoes.
“You must take them off,” he says, doing so himself. When she looks questioningly at him, he says, smiling, “It is said because such holy places have many angels in them and you might tread on them.” She bends and slips out of her walking sandals, leaving them at the door, next to Yared’s flimsy sandals and Giyorgis’s neatly polished, worn, black oxfords.
Madhane Alam, at roughly one hundred feet long and sixty feet wide, is the largest of all the churches. Here the carvers left stone behind to form four rows of widely spaced pillars as might be found in the interior of a traditionally built cathedral. Narrow bars of light streaming in through the high, small windows show this church’s lack of decoration — only a few designs carved at the top of the pillars, as if the builders thought that the church’s size was impressive enough in itself. Large rugs in brown, cream, and black, characteristic Ethiopian rugs, Yared informs her, are spread on its stone floors.
Four or five drums of various sizes and shapes — Iris guesses they’re made out of animal hides because of their natural brown and beige tones — sit on one of the rugs in the centre of the church. The priest whose church this is, noticing Iris looking at them, goes to them and strikes a large, conical one, not hard, with his hand. The sound the light, flat-palmed blow produces is deep and loud, so unexpectedly resonant she’s startled. It bounces off the rock walls and ceiling in such a marvellous way that it jars something loose inside Iris, an odd sensation that starts at her womb and floods upward through her body. What if the priests played all these drums at once? How the different tones would reverberate off the stone interior, the echoes themselves repeating the drums’ different timbres and rhythms, the very church would become a musical instrument, dissolving the rock walls, the shadows under the ceiling, setting the angels Giyorgis told her of dancing. Transfixed, she imagines the doves flying up out of their niches, adding the whirr of their pale wings to the sound. Such a noise would jar people’s very souls into their mouths, and they would dance and sing, for who could resist such music?
The priest has gone. Yared is moving toward the entrance where Iris sees a pair of beggars, one on each side of the rectangle of intense bright light, peering into the darkness where she and Giyorgis stand.
“Come,” Giyorgis says gently, touching her arm. As they move together to the door, the beggars slowly retreat and Iris sees that behind the women a few more adult beggars have gathered.
One of the churches — is it St. George’s, the cross-shaped church? — has a wider courtyard than most of the others, and she walks the short length of it. And when in one of the many cavelike openings in the courtyard walls, whether natural or man-made, she doesn’t know, a face appears, she stops abruptly and, thinking it a trick of light, an illusion, looks again. The cave’s diameter is maybe four feet, and half sitting, half lying in it is a man who appears to be very old, simply skin and bone. He’s wrapped in a shawl-like garment of a dazzling white, and he stares, curious and innocent-eyed, back at her.
“He is a hermit,” her guide explains, amused at the look on her face. When Iris’s heart stops pounding so hard, she nods politely at the hermit, although she doesn’t say anything, not sure if you should speak to a hermit, nor does he speak to her. He simply looks, bright-eyed, back at her.
She walks on a few feet farther to the next cave, preparing herself to see another face staring out at her. But instead, her horror growing as she makes sense of what she sees, she recognizes a partly mummified corpse, the skull resting crookedly on one of the lean, golden-brown, leathery shins, its grin tipped lopsided. Her hand goes up to cover her mouth, she swivels, and then, before Yared or Giyorgis notice how upset she is by what they seem to take for granted — not even warning her — she scurries back the length of the courtyard and leans against the church wall, shading her eyes from the sun that’s suddenly dazzling.
Yared comes up to her and peers carefully into her face.
“You are well?” he asks.
“Oh, yes, certainly,” Iris says quickly, dropping her hand, pushing herself away from the wall and smiling. Yared gazes an instant longer, then, satisfied, eager to continue, he explains to her that there are tombs in all the walls, that the caves often are burial sites, that there are places in this labyrinth no non-Ethiopian has ever been allowed to enter, or even knows are there.
“Even many of the priests may not enter Selassie Chapel. It is by Golgotha Church, where the tomb of King Lalibela is,” he adds. He pauses, scuffs the ground with his toe, considering. “It is said, too, that Adam’s tomb is in Golgotha.” He doesn’t look up to see how she’s taking this. For a second she can’t think who Adam is; the fact that all of this is Christian, as she is, dumbfounds her.
“Wait!” she says. “Isn’t Ethiopia the place where they dug up Lucy? The first woman, I mean? Or was it Kenya?” Yared is grinning delightedly at her.
“Yes, yes,” he says. “It was here, in Ethiopia. She is in National Archeological Museum in Addis. Ethiopians call her Dinkinesh — it means, ‘it is wonderful.’ She is three and half million years. But,” he says, solemn again, “It is another kind of history.” He looks at his sandalled feet, troubled, as if he knows he’ll never be able to explain this to her, or else it’s that he doesn’t understand it himself.
Iris looks down the length of the roughly hewn stone courtyard to the faces peering back at her from around corners or from shadowy niches, or from those who lean against the walls flattened by the clear white light. Nobody moves, all those dark eyes, so full of intelligence, watching her. She’s slowly comprehending that Ethiopians believe Ethiopia is the first nation in the world, the cradle of humanity, in more than merely one way.
She catches a glimpse of how, just maybe, the history she learned in school shades off too at its thinning edges into mystery and myth and — the holy — like these stone churches — into a place where fact is no longer separable from fiction, or the separation even relevant to truth. It isn’t just suffering, as she’d thought at first, that has made these people as they are. It is history — they are anchored by the weight of history. Ethiopia is the only African nation that has never been wholly conquered and occupied, Giyorgis told her, and she had said nothing, not understanding what he so plainly took as a matter of great pride.
What happens to a people when somebody tries to destroy their history as Ahmad Ibn Gran tried to do? she asks herself. Isn’t that the first thing that all conquerors do? A people whose history is destroyed don’t know who they are any more; they get lost, they wander, they can be pushed whatever way by others, because they don’t have a sense of their own relevance and — and they can’t see a future because they have no past.
She thinks of the Great Plains of North America. We have no history to
anchor us. She tries to see how this has shaped her own people. All that comes to mind are the protests about clear-cutting the forests in B.C., the ploughing up all the grass and driving all the country people off their land and into poverty in the cities, as if all of this never happened anywhere else before. All land means to us is money. But surely it’s something more than that? We lack awe, she thinks. We don’t approve of it. That’s because we lack a sense of the past — we really believe we’re in control, when all around us all the time is evidence that we aren’t.
But the Indians — she thinks of the stone circles on her land, of her grandfather destroying them, her father wanting to, and Barney also, and she and her mother stopping them, but only when there was nothing but a bare reminder left of the civilization that was once there.
She is growing confused, her mind can’t absorb all this, and the contrast between the sun’s brightness and heat when she steps outside and the chilly darkness in the churches, sounds deepened and magnified by the stone, intensifies her confusion.
Yared shows her the cave in which the church beggars spend the night. Iris goes to the entrance, hesitates, then steps inside. It is completely empty. There is not a pack of any kind, not a bedroll, not a tin pot or a lamp. And she’s seen the beggars — none of them carry anything but a walking staff. She comes back out, stunned further into a heavy silence.
As they’ve walked, climbed stairs and once a ladder, crouched to go through tunnels and low stone doorways, twice finding the Land Rover and driving a few hundred feet to the next set of churches, Iris has become more and more disoriented. She no longer has any idea how the churches relate geographically to each other, or to their parked vehicle, or to the hotel — if there really is a hotel somewhere outside this rocky universe.
Garden of Eden Page 29
