In Ethiopia with a Mule

by Dervla Murphy

  It is almost thirteen months since I last stayed in a peasant’s hut. That was in Nepal, and now it is somehow reassuring to be in similar surroundings on another continent, following the old routine of writing by firelight with wood-smoke in my eyes and sleepy hens clucking beside me and a variety of footloose vermin swarming over my body.

  30 December. Migua Selassie

  Bug-wise, last night was hell. My insecticide powder proved unequal to the occasion and repeatedly I woke from a restless doze to scratch. These African devils seem even more vicious than their Asian cousins and my body is now covered with inflamed lumps.

  I was on the trail by 6.30, without sleep or breakfast, but full of the joys of life – as who wouldn’t be, in cool, clear air, amidst a silent wilderness of mountains, with a companionable mule following to heel and twelve sunny hours ahead. All day our track went up and down and round and down and up and round again. On every side the mountains lay in long, smooth lines, and the midday heat haze gave a familiar look to their lower slopes, whose mixture of red clay and green scrub produced a heathery tinge. We passed one very beautiful teff-harvesting scene. This cereal has grain and straw of the palest gold and for miles the whole countryside was glowing against the strong blue of the sky or the faint powder-blue of distant mountains. After the straw has been threshed by bullocks the women winnow the grain by tossing it on huge wicker trays.

  For two hours this morning we accompanied a donkey-caravan on its way to a market-village on a mountain-top. The five men and boys registered the usual unsmiling astonishment when they first saw us, but I soon realised that despite their silence and inscrutability they had ‘taken charge’ of me – obviously as a duty rather than as a pleasure. If I stopped to examine a shrub or try to identify a bird they also stopped and waited politely for me to continue – which was very nice of them, though I would have preferred being left to dawdle uninhibitedly at my own pace. However, I soon had reason to feel genuinely grateful. Jock had been clumsily loaded by Marcos and on one steep slope everything suddenly fell off. Without even glancing at me, two of my escort went into action and professionally reloaded in a matter of moments; but had I been alone I might have spent hours sitting by the wayside waiting for help.

  Today also taught me that it is less tiring to drive a pack-animal with a caravan. Even the nicest mules have definite personal opinions and Jock feels that there is something undignified about a single animal walking over one and a half miles an hour when loose, or two and a half miles when being led; and this go-slow policy causes a certain amount of frustration as my average speed is three and a half miles an hour. However, when we are with trotting donkeys he imagines the honour of muledom to be at stake, so he canters into the lead and effortlessly averages four miles per hour. This morning he sometimes went so far ahead that I could only distinguish him by the bouncing green bucket.

  At half-past eleven, after a steep climb, we reached the village of Enda Mikael Tukul – a long straggle of round huts and rectangular stone shacks. Most highland towns and villages are marked by tall groves of the quick-growing Australian eucalyptus (or blue-gum), which was imported into Ethiopia by Menelik II, on French advice; now this is by far the commonest tree in the north and at midday its shade is welcome, despite the altitude.

  When I stopped to rest, on the outskirts of the village, my companions characteristically continued towards the market-place without any word or gesture of farewell. They had done their duty by me and were doubtless relieved to be rid of the responsibility of escorting an inexplicable female faranj.

  Beneath the aromatic blue-gums I ate the remains of a Palace fruit-cake while Jock grazed on next-to-nothing with every appearance of satisfaction. Already we’re such good buddies that when I turn him loose he never moves far away, though in Makalle I was warned never to leave him untethered.

  Beyond the village – where everyone stared curiously at us, showing neither hostility nor friendliness – our path plunged down a precipice – and here I acquired the knack of allowing Jock to help me on steep, rough, slithery slopes. Instead of sending him ahead I continued to lead him, hanging on to the halter with one hand and leaning on my dula with the other. If he were at all unreliable this could be a dangerous technique, but he seemed to understand exactly what was required of him.

  Soon afterwards I heard an extraordinary zooming sound overhead and looked up to see an enormous eagle dive-bombing towards a little brown civet-cat – which heard the zoom too and swerved to safety under a rock. The disappointed eagle then resumed its slow gliding over the valley; once the first surprise attack has failed a bird of prey has no hope of capturing any nimble animal and within moments the civet-cat emerged from his air-raid shelter and strolled on casually through the boulders.

  At two o’clock we approached a settlement set among junipers on a slope above a murky stream. Coarse green grass grew thickly on the near bank and when Jock had drunk his fill he settled down to some serious grazing while I topped up my water-bottle and added two more purifying pills. In theory one should only water a pack-animal at the end of the day’s trek: but it would indeed be rash to try to stop a thirsty mule from drinking when and where he gets the chance.

  Thirty yards upstream cattle were standing in ankle-deep water beneath an ancient wild-fig tree. Near them half-a-dozen men sat watching their womenfolk washing clothes in the trickle of discoloured water and soon, to my surprise, these men came towards me, shouting friendly questions. Then the women abandoned their laundrying and came too, and everyone sat around on the grass laughing uproariously. The fact that I don’t understand Tigrinya seems always to be a source of incredulous amusement, but I discovered that in this case my relationship with Jock was the joke. On arriving at the stream I had given him a little well-earned stroking on the neck and murmured a few sweet nothings in his ear – and to the locals this looked as comic as the stroking of a motor-truck would look to us.

  While discussing my eccentricities the men were eating atar – a type of green pea which thrives in dry soil and is planted after the rains. These peas are often dried and stored for use in wat – especially during the long fasts – and they are also ground to make savoury puddings and breads. Two men had gone to pick some for me in an adjacent field, where I had previously noticed the little green bushes – about eighteen inches high – on which the pods are almost invisible among dense, fern-like foliage. Each pod contains two to four seeds and I was stupidly surprised to see these familiar green peas. They taste like our variety, though their shape is less regular.

  This encounter made me feel more at ease in the Tigrean countryside and I set off happily on the next lap, my friends expressing great astonishment at the docility with which Jock allowed himself to be caught.

  Two hours later we came to a bigger settlement, scattered over a hillside. Here the jeep-track went due west, and a well-defined animal-track went north-west towards Abbi Addi and Adua. A consultation with my map merely revealed the map’s limitations, so I approached three harvesters, pointed to the animal-track and said ‘Abbi Addi?’ All three men stared at me blankly, and when I pointed to the jeep-track and repeated ‘Abbi Addi?’ their blankness remained total. I then decided that since Adua lay to the north, and the animal-track went north, and I wanted to get to Adua, we would now leave the jeep-track – though I was aware that in this sort of terrain logical decisions can have dire consequences.

  The men impassively watched us turning off the main track: but we were also being observed from the settlement, and soon five breathless young men overtook us. Their leader, who was dressed in European fashion, at once grabbed Jock’s halter, said ‘Yellum! yellum!’ (‘No! no!’) and released an argumentative spate of Tigrinya, flecked with unenlightening Italian and English phrases. Again I pointed ahead and inquired ‘Abbi Addi? Adua?’ and he replied ‘Yes’ in English, rapidly followed by ‘No’ and an elaborate series of gestures which, despite my fluency in sign language, conveyed nothing to me – except extreme dis
approval of our continuing along this track. I reckoned that his objection might conceivably have a sensible basis, and to ignore such emphatic local advice, when one couldn’t find out what lay behind it, seemed distinctly unwise. So I turned back.

  Ayela proved to be the headman’s son and as he led Jock up the slope he asked ‘American? Italian?’ On hearing that I was ‘Irish – from Ireland’ he nodded cheerfully and carefully pronounced ‘American – you are American. Ethiopian – I am Ethiopian.’ As it happens I find it peculiarly irritating to be mistaken for an American; but it is hardly reasonable to expect Ethiopians to have heard of Ireland, so I let the matter go.

  The headman’s round, stone, tin-roofed tukul is unusual, being both white-washed and two-storeyed, with an outside stairway of uneven rocks leading up to the granary, where I’m now writing by the light of a smoky oil-lamp, leaning on a shaky wooden table and sitting on a disintegrating iron chair. Downstairs is the all-purpose living room and there are three smaller huts in the compound – one a kitchen, the others the homes of married sons. The headman and his wife and sister-in-law are splendid old people – gracious and warm-hearted – and on meeting them I was glad that we had been forced to stop here. Faranjs are obviously a rarity in their lives but these elders have an air of dignified assurance, though the younger people (except for the Adua-educated Ayela) are timid enough. Highland society has always been organised on strictly hierarchical lines and each headman wields considerable power within his own little realm.

  When I arrived my host ordered this table and chair (status symbols of the first magnitude) to be brought up to the granary, which is also the guest-room, and soon we were being served with cups of freshly-ground coffee and roasted whole barley – a palatable combination. Crowds of children came to stare and were periodically shooed away by Ayela – only to return to squat around the doorway a moment later, having been emboldened by my distribution of Palace toffees.

  Then my host raised the question of where I was to sleep. In sign-language he said, ‘Downstairs, with the family,’ and in the same language I firmly replied, ‘No! Up here on the floor.’ (Undoubtedly bed-bugs are my Achilles’ heel.) But, as everyone was appalled at the idea of my sleeping alone, the headman announced that his sister-in-law would sleep here too, to ‘protect’ me. At once I foresaw her importing bug-laden hides into this possibly bug-free granary, so at the risk of seeming rude I again said ‘No!’ – and eventually my obstinacy was accepted as a strange faranj fetish. However, half-an-hour later I saw, to my horror, an iron bedstead and a hair mattress being carried across the mountainside from the priest’s compound. At the very sight of the mattress I felt itchy and frantically explained that I had my own bed to put on the floor: whereupon Ayela shouted through the doorway and the generous little procession went into reverse and disappeared.

  I haven’t yet discovered why we were prevented from continuing and I’m not even speculating about whether or not it will be in order for us to go north-west tomorrow. The first essential for the enjoyment of this sort of trek is to take each day as it comes.

  31 December. Workhsegeh

  Mercifully my liquid insecticide proved effective last night and I slept soundly until an odd message was shouted through the door, in warped English, at 5 a.m. At first I thought I must be dreaming, it all sounded so improbable – something about two policemen having arrived to escort me to Abbi Addi on Leilt Aida’s instructions, because yesterday shifta had been observed in the intervening mountains. Crawling out of my flea-bag I opened the door and saw by moonlight two armed policemen smartly coming to attention – and they were accompanied by the Chief Clerk of the Governor of Abbi Addi.

  The senior policeman was the linguist; he said urgently – ‘Hurry! Quick! Big hurry! Much quick!’ I had no idea why the hurry was big, but since these unfortunates had apparently been walking all night on my behalf I felt obliged to be much quick. So I hurled everything into those confounded sacks and when Jock had been loaded, in the odd, ‘stagey’ glow of mingled moonlight and dawnlight, we turned towards the north-west trail.

  Our party was led by a tall, handsome police lieutenant, carrying his rifle at the ready and followed by me. Next came the Chief Clerk’s armed servant, leading Jock, then a group of five armed local men, on their way to an animal-market at Abbi Addi, then the portly Chief Clerk on his riding mule (which he had gallantly offered to me) and finally the junior policeman. The locals take shifta* very seriously and were delighted to have police protection this morning. It seems odd that most Asians, and apparently most highland Ethiopians, are so much more jittery than we are about dangers of this sort; if they lived in Europe they would probably refuse to drive trucks after dark lest they should be hijacked.

  Our walk was extremely frustrating; had I been alone I could have spent a day on this stretch, but we kept going non-stop until 10.30 a.m.

  For a few miles we were crossing recently harvested, level fields. Then came a gradual descent, followed by a steep climb up a forested ridge, with a gloriously deep valley on our right and beyond it an array of jagged, tumbled mountains. (A ‘forest’ in the highlands usually means an area covered not with tall, green, shady trees, but with thick, thorny bush and scrub and low acacia trees.)

  At the top of this ridge we were on the edge of a thousand-foot drop, overlooking miles of volcanic chaos – harsh, magnificent, unreal – and all around were violent colours and unbelievable contours. From the base of the escarpment savagely broken land fell away for another thousand feet and in the distance Abbi Addi’s tin roofs glinted on the plain. Even the highlanders, born and bred amidst geological dramas, paused here for a moment and smiled wryly at me, making gestures to indicate that they considered this a bloody awful stretch of country.

  I would have thought it impossible for any non-mountaineer to tackle such a precipice; yet down we plunged, Jock and the riding-mule leading the party, lest they should concuss us with dislodged rocks, and myself thinking how much more dangerous this was than any shifta attack. Deep grey or red dust concealed round stones and pebbles that moved beneath our feet at every step and never before has my sense of balance – or power of regaining balance – been so severely tested. The locals, who are accustomed to this route, leaped down like baboons; but the police were perceptibly apprehensive and the Chief Clerk was soon a nervous wreck. Thorny scrub reaches out over the path – which, understandably, is not much used – and I was too busy avoiding a lethal slip to avoid the thorns, so this evening my painfully sunburnt legs are badly torn. Yet these barbs give only surface scratches to the highlanders’ tough skins.

  At the base we waited for the Chief Clerk and the junior policeman, who were holding hands like a pair of frightened children as they came slowly slithering down in a cloud of dust. A moment before the sun had reached the top of the escarpment, and I gazed up with joy at those grotesquely eroded pinnacles, now looking as though freshly drenched in burgundy.

  During the next half-hour we were crossing an already-too-hot area of black lava-beds, interspersed with deep, powdery, white ash and bluish chunks of rock which made a tinkling cinder-sound beneath our feet. Then came a steep descent, through an unexpected tangle of lush greenery, into the shadowed, narrow ravine of a dry river bed. Here walking was made difficult by unsteady stones lying hidden beneath fine, pale dust; but occasionally I paused to look up at the serrated tops of gold and crimson cliffs that were rising gloriously against a deep blue sky.

  We passed many pools of scummy water – the breeding sites of malarial mosquitos – and now it was the mules’ turn to feel frustrated. They paused often to sniff at these pools, but had too much sense ever to drink from them.

  Within the past few hours we had descended from 8,000 to 6,000 feet and, as the ravine widened, I began to suffer from the strong rays of this equatorial sun; but soon we turned up a cul-de-sac side-valley and came to a grotto where sparkling spring water dripped from the rock into a deep pool. The object of this detour was to water the a
nimals and give everyone an opportunity to wash all over.

  Abbi Addi is the administrative centre of the Tembien district, yet it is misleading to refer to the place as a ‘town’. Walking through its laneways one has to negotiate small boulders and minor gorges, and all the houses are single-storey, roughly-constructed shacks. The headquarters of the district administration is an extraordinary building, made of iron-sheeting, even to the floors; and because many sheets are missing one has to jump over six-foot-deep holes, half filled with chunks of rock.

  When we reached the Governor’s office a pleasant man of about forty, dressed in a dark lounge suit, respectfully received me. He was sitting behind a paperless desk on which stood an antique winding telephone, and he looked so pitifully perplexed by my presence that I wanted to pat him on the head and tell him not to worry – though this wouldn’t have done much good, as he spoke not a word of English. There is no post office here, but an Italian-initiated telephone link of uncertain temper is maintained with Adua and Makalle, so I pointed to the machine and said loudly and clearly, ‘Leilt Aida’.

  It took an hour to get my call through and while I was waiting the policemen, who had been standing to attention in the background, were signed off duty and eagerly came towards me to request a written testimonial for presentation to their superior officer. The possibility of any Ethiopian ever being able to decipher my handwriting – even if he could read English – is incalculably remote, but here the collection of such chits has become an obsession, which again indicates a deep-rooted lack of trust. Subordinates feel it necessary always to prove that they have done their duty well, where in our society this would be taken for granted.

  After a brief argument with Leilt Aida, on the subject of bodyguards, she relented and spoke reassuringly to the perplexed Governor – though it was obvious that even her permission did not quite reconcile him to the idea of a lone faranj wandering around his district.