There is no state school in Aedat and Giorgis is employed by the church school as a writing teacher at a monthly salary of £6 – as compared with the £22 which a state school writing teacher would receive.* Yet the Church is estimated to own at least 15 per cent of Ethiopia’s arable land, so Giorgis’ bitterly anti-clerical sentiments seem understandable.
As we were walking back to the Governor’s compound I was surprised to hear the alien cry of a muezzin: then Dawit pointed out an inconspicuous ‘mosque’ hut, with an unsteady little ‘minaret’ built on to one gable, and told me that Aedat has a community of native Muslim traders – known as Jabartis.
Soon after we had joined Ato Gabre Mariam and his cronies at their evening talla session a pretty, fair-skinned girl was escorted into the hut by two gunmen. She was wearing a white, full-skirted dress and a thick shamma, both with skilfully embroidered, brightly-coloured fringes, and she was carrying a bottle labelled ‘Haig’ but containing excellent tej. Dawit explained that she is the seventeen-year-old daughter-in-law of a village headman and that on hearing of my arrival in Aedat she had got her husband’s permission to ride over the mountains to meet her first white woman – bringing as a gift this valuable bottle of tej. (In these parts the bottle itself is no less valuable than the contents.) Her enterprising curiosity must be uncommon among highland women, but when actually confronted with a faranj the poor girl was so overcome that she could only sit beside me staring at her toes. However, by suppertime she had relaxed somewhat (we had been co-operating well as tej-drinkers) and I then asked her – through Dawit – how long she had been married and how many children she had. My last question was a most unfortunate one; though married four years she is childless, and as she admitted this her smooth young face was suddenly haggard with misery.
Apart from the Italian occupation this region has never been in touch with the outside world: and I should think that after their war-time experiences the older generation cherish isolation. Today Giorgis pointed out a network of caves in a nearby escarpment and told me that during the occupation most of the villagers had hidden in these almost inaccessible rock-chambers, which centuries ago were used as hermitages.
8 January. A Tukul on a Hillside
I had planned to leave Aedat at dawn, but Ato Gabre Mariam insisted on my waiting for a ceremonial farewell breakfast – and this being Sunday all the women went to church, so the feast was not served until nine o’clock. Such a waste of the day’s best trekking hours irked me, yet a rejection of this final flourish of hospitality would have given great offence. A very appetising flourish it was, too – an enormous round tin tray piled with sheep’s kidneys, hearts and livers, and with huge lumps of mutton fat, all roasted on a spit over a wood-fire. Together my host and I attacked this mountain of meat, he dissecting the various organs with a sinister-looking knife – it had a razor-sharp, backward-curving tip – and then handing me the choicest titbits.
Half-way through the meal Dawit appeared, and to my consternation announced that he would be accompanying me on my way to the Takazze, as he had decided to visit his paternal grandfather – whom he had never met. However, for the moment his servant could not be found, so we must wait a little. I then accepted the fact that this was One of Those Days – acceptance being made easier by such a bellyful of meat that I felt disinclined even to walk across the room. The Governor immediately ordered an early lunch for the travellers; and, in case I might feel peckish in the interval, a small tin kettle of sweet boiled milk was produced to keep me going. (Normally sugar is not used in this region, but my host had brought some with him from Aksum.)
We eventually got away at 12.30 – Dawit on a borrowed mule, with his armed servant and two other youths trotting beside him, Jock following, and myself in the rear. For a couple of miles the Governor – accompanied by five attendants – rode with us, as is the custom when a guest departs.
Beyond Aedat our track ran level between low mountains and on either side cattle were grazing the richest-looking pasture that I have seen in this country. Then we came to the edge of a deep crater-like depression, thickly lined with green shrubs, and on a hill in its centre, far below the track, stood a church, surrounded by the usual trees, which is greatly revered because during Mohammed Gragn’s invasion it is believed to have been miraculously made invisible, and thus saved from destruction. (The church is so improbably situated, even by highland standards, and so naturally camouflaged that I would never have noticed it had I been alone.)
Here we sat on the edge of the crater while Dawit’s servant took part in a fascinating ‘long-distance call’, which started when a minute figure on a hill-top far above us demanded information about the faranj. This figure proved to be the headman of a nearby village and, on hearing that I was a protégée of the Tigreans’ beloved Leilt Aida, he at once invited us to have talla some miles further along the track. Then the hills and valleys began to echo and re-echo with haunting, disembodied cries, as his orders for our entertainment were relayed to the village by invisible shepherds. When using this rather public but very effective method of communication the highlanders employ a high-pitched voice and a peculiar rhythmic chant that carries for miles through the still, thin air of the mountains.
For the next hour we were crossing an arid grey-brown plateau towards a formidable amba of sheer red rock that overlooks a broad gorge, dark with tangled vegetation. On the edge of this gorge a score of villagers greeted us and we sat on enormous, smooth boulders beneath a huge, gnarled tree and were given hunks of dabo and wooden tankards brimming with talla that had been carried from the village in an earthen jar on a woman’s back. These men were considerably agitated about my crossing of the Takazze Gorge. They affirmed that many shifta are now encamped there, lying in wait for Christmas traffic, and they tried hard to persuade me to turn back. I know that shifta do patrol the gorge, but I doubt if many of them lie in wait on this particular track, which is rarely used, even at Christmas time. (The depth of the gorge here has always restricted traffic between the two sides.) When I declined to turn back because of shifta the despairing villagers tried the deterrent-value of snakes, leopards, malaria and extreme heat. Then they gave up, and their gloomy farewells would have been appropriate to a death-bed scene.
‘Precipitous’ is going to be an overworked adjective in this diary; but that can’t be helped, for unless a highland track is crossing a plateau it usually is precipitous. Our descent after the talla-halt was very precipitous indeed – a slithering scramble on loose soil around vast rocks between thorny bushes … When we finally reached the bottom Dawit remarked feelingly that had he known what the route was like his grandfather would have been left unvisited.
Another two miles brought us to our destination, an isolated compound on a wide hillside that was prickly with stubble and already cool beneath a dove-grey dusk. Half-way up its slope this hill becomes an amba, and beyond the immense, regular block of its summit lies the Takazze Gorge.
There are four tukuls here and we are being entertained in the largest – a well-built stone hut about forty feet in circumference, with a high, conical thatched roof (unsupported by any pole) and two mud double-beds. One of these is built into an alcove in the thick wall, which is unusual. As I write, amidst a throng of Dawit’s welcoming relatives, we are almost awash in talla, and outside the door three cooking fires are blazing rosily against the dark mountain. Oddly enough no fire has been lit in here and the only light – apart from my candle – is an oil-wick hung high on the wall and now glinting on the many rifles stacked beneath it.
This evening Adua and Aksum – not to mention Asmara, Cairo and London – seem to belong to another planet.
9 January. A Cattle Shelter on a Mountainside
Last evening the word shifta recurred often in my companions’ conversation and I could sense a crisis simmering. Then this morning Dawit’s grandfather – a vigorously authoritative old man – said bluntly that unless the last settlement in Tigre (beyond the amba) would pr
ovide a bodyguard Dawit must bring me back here. For our different reasons (laziness and pig-headedness) Dawit and I were equally opposed to this plan. But now I am a world away from visas, government permits and amenable princesses. In theory I am free to travel how and where I please, yet in practice I have become a responsibility of the locals and am caught firm in a web of centuries-old traditions. So for the moment I must accept my loss of freedom. To have defied tradition this morning would have been futile, since I can’t load Jock. It would also have been ungracious, because these people were greatly inconveniencing themselves for my sake, and it might have been unwise. Instinct told me that beneath their dutiful solicitude lay a basic distrust of the unprecedented lone faranj, and I suspected that were I to inflame this by incomprehensible non-conformity I might see a very different aspect of the highland character. For me such a situation is new. I have never before travelled among people who inspired sufficient fear to make me abandon my aim of the moment.
The morning air was penetratingly cold as we stood in the compound while Dawit wrote – on paper provided by me – a message from his grandfather to be read to the relevant village headman. I would have thought a verbal message sufficient, but evidently my protector considered the solemnity of the written word better suited to the occasion.
At seven o’clock we set off, full of hot milk and hard dabo. Dawit, his attendants, a local man and myself went straight up, across and down the amba, but four of Dawit’s armed cousins led Jock a long way round. Not even highland mules can cope with this escarpment, for which ‘precipitous’ is utterly inadequate.
The top of the amba was about a mile wide and two miles long; low scrub dotted its stony, uncultivable flatness and the slanting sunlight showed up fresh leopard spoor in the dust of our faint path. Yet near the southern edge is another ‘famous church’ – how inaccessible can you make your famous churches! – which, as usual, was locked. Even here the roof was of tin: but the past fortnight has inured me to this disfigurement and I have come to accept, as an integral part of the highland scene, these circles of pale grey amidst a grove of trees on a height. Around the eaves hung hundreds of bells, crudely fashioned from bits of left-over tin, and at each touch of the wind these sent gentle, lonely little melodies far across the plateau. Here I also saw a stone bell, such as was noticed by Francisco Alvarez, the Portugese priest who visited the highlands for six years from 1520. This slim granite slab, some four feet by one and a half, was suspended at waist-level between two stunted wild fig-trees – and when I struck it with my dula, on the dent worn by centuries of strikings, it produced what Alvarez well described as ‘a sound like cracked bells heard at a distance’.
Near the church a gigantic wedge of rock has split away from the amba and stands alone, with surprisingly green vegetation covering its boat-shaped top. Such wedges are not uncommon in the highlands, but legend says that a miracle caused this split. Once a saintly monk was accused by malicious villagers of keeping a mistress, so he announced that he would pray to the Virgin Mary to prove his innocence by splitting the amba – and next morning this wedge was seen to have broken away.
There were a few stone hovels between the church and the escarpment, but we saw no one as we passed; on these exposed heights people prefer not to get up until the sun has warmed the air. Now I was overlooking the Takazze Gorge, though it was still invisible – lying 5,500 feet below, lost amidst an intricate convulsion of mountains through which the river has been carving a deeper and deeper channel during aeons of time. Before we descended Dawit pointed to another amba, level with ours, that rose beyond the gorge and was almost overshadowed by the Semiens. He said that there I would spend the night, in the first settlement of the province of Begemdir and Semien. But as it happened he was wrong.
The last Tigrean settlement is huddled on a sloping natural terrace immediately below the amba. Its women and children fled the moment they saw me, but a score of grim-faced men soon gathered round us and for the next forty-five minutes I sat on a pile of smooth rocks enjoying the morning sun while watching for Jock, but not enjoying Dawit’s angry argument with the locals. His grandfather’s message made no impression whatever – in spite of being written – and he was obviously aggravating things by adopting an officious ‘urban’ attitude towards these benighted savages who had never before seen a white woman. To me this attitude seemed as reckless as it was tactless, for the slim Dawit is about five foot three and any of his muscular opponents could have picked him up between two fingers and dropped him over the nearest precipice – which at a certain point I thought someone would do. By then his attitude had antagonised me too, and perhaps this was an advantage. I intervened to point out that no one was under any obligation to endure a gruelling two-day trek on behalf of a wandering stranger: and, as I spoke, the locals seemed to realise that I was on their side. Then Dawit changed his tactics and I heard frequent mentions of Leilt Aida and Ras Mangasha, followed by repeated references to the Emperor and gestures in my direction which made me suspect that I was now being presented as a close personal friend of Haile Selassie. At all events this litany of Imperial names worked, and when Jock’s green bucket appeared in the distance I was being entertained with cow-warm milk, and a surly bodyguard had begun reluctantly to assemble. Considering this surliness and reluctance I wondered if there was much to choose between being escorted by these men and being waylaid by shifta.
Dawit was now suffering from conflict – feeling both relieved at having rid himself of responsibility and doleful at the thought of snapping his last link with Western civilisation. (For me it was indeed a novelty to be regarded as a link with any form of civilisation.) However, two people amongst us were completely happy – the small sons (aged twelve and ten) of an Aedat Muslim trader. For six days these boys had been camping on the terrace, with three donkey-loads of salt, hoping for the arrival of an armed party to protect them during their crossing of the gorge.
I was conscience-stricken on seeing the size of my escort – fourteen men, eight of them armed – but Dawit said that this was considered the minimum force for a safe passage through shifta territory. My would-be-unpretentious one-woman expedition had now got completely out of hand, and it seemed iniquitous to drag so many men into the dreaded depths of the Takazze Gorge. The malaria that I am protected against could bring endless misery to people who are beyond reach of medical aid, so before we left I asked Dawit to instruct my companions in the use of malaria tablets, which I promised to distribute at the end of the day when Jock was unloaded.
At 9.30 we set off – accompanied by the local priest – towards the terrace from which the descent begins. To me our path was indistinguishable from the rest of the rough mountainside so, looking ahead to the time when I will have eluded all guides, I tried to learn how to detect such trails.
On the level starting-point terrace – which was about forty yards wide and scattered with boulders and old, twisted, creeper-hung trees – the men paused and began what sounded like (but may not have been) a serious quarrel. Apparently some of them were trying to back out, now that the influence of the Imperial litany had waned, and two were glancing at me rather nastily. One of these was the priest, an elderly man with a hard mouth and cunning eyes, and the other was a youth whom I had noticed speculatively feeling Jock’s load before we left the village. Amidst the mountain stillness angry shouts were soon reverberating like a series of explosions, and then the two factions began to threaten each other with dulas and rifle-butts. I felt that it would merely heighten the tension were I to show any impatience, suspicion or fear – all of which I was feeling in varying degrees – so I sat impassively on a rock, while the animals grazed nearby on long, burnt-up grass. Then the two little boys joined me, looking apprehensive; and – despite their adult task and hitherto manly demeanour – when the shouting became more enraged they moved closer to the presumably soothing female presence. Luckily I have an irrational faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature. I can never take the bad
ness very seriously until it is operating, so throughout such crises as this my fear remains embryonic.
Then, suddenly and inexplicably, the quarrel was over, the priest turned back to the village – irritably twitching his horse-hair fly-whisk – and the rest of us walked silently towards the gorge.
This was the toughest descent I have ever experienced. I tend to accuse the highlanders of exaggerating the difficulties of my trek, but they certainly have not exaggerated the difficulty of crossing the Takazze Gorge here; if it were even a degree more difficult it would be impassable to humans. The best way to describe our progress is to say that for the next two and a half hours we were slowly falling down a mountain. Even my nimble companions frequently slipped, and over some stretches I had to toboggan on my behind, while all the time clouds of yellow dust were filling my mouth, eyes and nostrils and becoming mud on my sweat-drenched body.
The upper slopes of this mountain are forested, but the lower are naked and desert-hot and have been deeply scored by torrents cascading to the Takazze, which rises about fifteen feet during the wet season. We followed one of these water-courses for the last few hundred yards – and then were within the gorge, on almost level ground. But still the river remained hidden.
In Ethiopia with a Mule Page 9
