In Ethiopia with a Mule

by Dervla Murphy

  By nine o’clock this evening the whole of Derasghie was en fête. In most compounds drums were being beaten strongly beside huge bonfires around which dancers were still bounding high, keeping up their monotonous, self-hypnotic chanting. Also much song and laughter issued from tukuls, where women, children and older men were sitting drinking around smaller fires; and between compounds bands of young men, accompanied by drummers, were singing and swaggering, followed by groups of cheering, giggling young women – whose virtue is, I assume, uncertain. As I write the sounds of gaiety are becoming louder on every side: but this is a happy, friendly noise and it won’t keep me awake.

  20 January. A Compound on a Plateau

  Usually highlanders rise at dawn, but this morning I could find no one to load Jock until 8.30. A small boy accompanied us to the edge of the town and pointed out the track to Dabat – which expired within a mile, amidst acres of volcanic rock. So all day we’ve been going north-west instead of due west.

  After crossing several low, grey-brown hills we came to broad, bright grasslands where boys were herding sheep and cattle. Here another track appeared, and thinking that it might be the right one I optimistically appealed to the boys for guidance, but at the sound of my voice they fled to the shelter of a forested hillock and then peered fearfully at me through the bushes.

  Ten minutes later we were on the brink of a valley whose floor looked so remote that one might have been viewing it from an aeroplane. The descent took two and a quarter hours, on a very precipitous path of loose clay, scattered with round pebbles on which my feet slithered uncontrollably. I fell eight times, acquired three open cuts and twice had to go tobogganing on my behind – a slightly painful procedure, when one is wearing thin shorts. Meanwhile Jock was methodically picking his way down – though even he stumbled occasionally – and at intervals he paused to graze while waiting for me to catch up. Luckily there were a few narrow ledges, on which the path ran level for thirty or forty yards, and I stopped on these to apply nicotine to my nerves while enjoying the spectacular view and admiring the most varied selection of shrubs and wild-flowers that I have yet seen in the highlands. Dense growth covers this mountain and though it is now autumn here a glorious array of blossoms remain – blue, yellow, white and pink.

  Soon after reaching comparatively level ground a few compounds appeared and our path degenerated into a criss-cross of faint pathlets. The descent had loosened Jock’s load, so when we came near a compound I reluctantly decided to look for help. (As husbands and wives are left alone in their tukuls only during the daytime, unexpected callers can be a nuisance.) I shouted from a tactful distance and a young man appeared, looking rather grumpy, but he securely re-roped Jock and we were soon on our undecided way – my enquiries about the route having elicited the inevitable vague ‘Mado’.

  This region was bewildering. Here I could see that what had seemed to be the valley floor was merely a gigantic, sloping ledge, which hid the true, narrow valley – now about 600 feet below us. The descent to river-level was gradual, but I doubted if we should descend at this point, for no track could possibly climb the tremendous north–south barrier beyond the river. Our faint path also ran north-south, and logically we should here have turned south, but an intimidating chaos of massive mountains and (presumably) deep gorges lay in that direction, so I decided to follow the northern line of least resistance.

  After about a mile our pathlet became a clear, level track, which for two hours wound round a succession of golden-grassed spurs. We passed a few women – carrying enormous loads of firewood – who greeted me with shy friendliness.

  When the track suddenly dropped to river-level I saw four vividly green fields lying by the water’s edge like displaced scraps of Ireland. This was an unfamiliar crop, and only then did I realise how much one misses fresh growth. While Jock was drinking I stood entranced – to gaze on that tender, bright greenness felt like the quenching of a visual thirst.

  On the opposite bank our track faded away amidst plough-land, but I continued north, towards a break in the mountain-wall, hoping that it would reappear – which it did, and took us from 7,800 feet to this plateau at 10,600 feet.

  I felt dazed by beauty during the ascent. Four uninhabited mountains led up one from another, with short, level walks over each summit but never a downward step; and as we climbed through dark green forests, or across red-gold, rock-strewn grasslands, or up rough black escarpments, every turn of the path revealed new, immeasurable heights and depths. By 6.30 we were at 10,500 feet and the deep valley on our right was full of dusk and shrieking baboons. From here I could see the path going over yet another escarpment, some 200 yards ahead, and that final climb brought us on to a wide plateau, where a settlement lay only fifteen minutes’ walk away.

  Already the sun had set and two minute pink cloudlets were poised above the south-western horizon. I would have hugged them had they been a little nearer; cloudless skies are delightful in theory, but after living beneath their perfection for five weeks an Irishwoman feels that something is missing.

  Apparently Timkat is still operating here. As we approached the settlement, through a chilly, grey-blue twilight, I heard sounds of revelry and saw scores of men and youths sitting on the hillside drinking talla as they watched ten men dancing to the music of an azmari (wandering minstrel). Our arrival astonished everyone, but I was warmly welcomed and presented with two gourds of talla simultaneously – and after that climb I emptied them almost simultaneously. Then a laughing woman fed me with unfamiliar, delicious bread – wafer-thin, toasted crisp and faintly seasoned with salt and spices. As I sat on a boulder, devouring this delicacy, the azmari came to stand before me, playing his mazenka (a one-stringed fiddle) while improvising a song in my honour. (I could distinguish the words for ‘mule’, ‘high mountains’, ‘shifta’, ‘woman’, ‘cold’, ‘alone’ and I regretted my inability to understand it fully.) By now a golden half-moon had risen and was shining more brightly than a full moon at home; and it seemed to me that a day’s trek could have no happier ending than to sit in moonlight on a high mountain drinking with a friendly crowd and being serenaded by a wandering minstrel.

  However, a day’s trek could quite easily have a more comfortable ending. This tiny, smoky tukul is totally unplastered and already my marrow feels frozen. The colossal local fleas seem preternaturally resistant to insecticide and my bed-to-be is a heap of large stones which serves as a fireside seat during the day and doesn’t even have the merit of adequate length. Nor can I lie on the floor, which will be sardined with children. (Here the adults sleep on wooden shelves attached hammockwise to the support poles and spread with straw instead of hides – possibly because straw is warmer, or cheaper.) The one consolation is a lean and amiable ginger cat, who has decided that I am a twin soul and is weaving around my legs as I write. Highlanders treat their few domestic cats far better than their many dogs – though this is not saying much. Perhaps the principle is that the more savagely dogs are treated the more savagely will they treat intruders.

  And so to bed – with dyspepsia, because this evening’s vegetable-wat was so excruciatingly spicy.

  21 January. Debarak

  Being at Debarak instead of Dabat means that we have joined the Asmara– Gondar motor-road twenty miles further north from Gondar than I had intended; but if one insists on travelling alone in this country one can’t reasonably complain about getting lost.

  Even my insensitive body jibs at a heap of stones as a bed. I slept badly last night and was glad of an early, circulation-restoring start. Today’s track was both clear and easy; for fifteen miles it rose and fell over a succession of yellow-green or grey-brown ridges that were like the immobilised waves of some mighty ocean. After walking for a few hours through this sort of terrain one’s whole being seems soothingly involved in the gentle rhythm of regular climbs and descents.

  On the crest of one ridge I saw my first highland funeral – two men carrying a shamma-wrapped corpse on a simple bier,
followed at a little distance by half-a-dozen women keening professionally. Tears were streaming down their cheeks, but when they saw Jock and me their weeping and wailing stopped and for ten minutes they stood excitedly speculating, while the corpse went on its way unmourned.

  Over the last four or five miles the track seemed crowded, after my fortnight of unpeopled remoteness – and one could see that the ‘civilisation’ of mass-production was at hand. Some men were wearing khaki bush-shirts and blue cotton shorts, instead of home-spun tunics and jodhpurs, a few with-it youths had Wellington boots in their hands – to be put on before reaching the town – and the donkeys were loaded with kerosene tins, or were carrying grain in jute rather than in hide sacks. It seemed inevitable when little boys ran towards me on the outskirts of the town with hands extended, crying ‘Cents! Cents! Gimme cents!’

  Debarak looks attractive at first sight. From the crest of a distant ridge the majority of its tin roofs are concealed by a thick wood of blue-gums, and this wealth of trees is pleasing on the naked plain. However, the reality is a hideous child of the engine-age – a shanty-town born to soothe drivers’ nerves before they begin the northward descent from the Semiens or after they have completed the southward ascent. It is not marked on my map – though it must have been conceived during the Italian occupation – and one wishes that in this case the map were accurate. Recently Debarak was made capital of the Semiens (one of the six districts of the province of Begemdir and Semien) and it has a governor, a police-station, a telephone, a petrol-pump, a Health Centre, several bars and as many brothels, a secondary school – and an American Peace Corps teacher. Some of the houses off the road are square, two-storey wooden buildings – like overgrown log-cabins – which look well beneath the tall blue-gums; but the Piccadilly of this capital is a large market-place, furnished with mechanical weighing-scales and surrounded by talla-beits and scruffy stalls, selling cloth, salt, kerosene, saddlery, rope, kettles, saucepans, glasses, coffee-cups, torches, batteries, gaudy nylon head-scarfs and a few very rusty tins of imported fruit which look as though the Italians had left them behind.

  Jock has apparently forgotten his baptism of diesel fumes. When we reached the main street and saw a moving truck he promptly reared in protest – whereupon the load conveniently fell off on to a hotel doorstep. ‘Hotel’ is of course a courtesy title. This sleazy Italian-built doss-house is blatantly a brothel, where harlots (to use the favourite term of English-speaking highlanders) may be observed partially undressing truck-drivers in the bar. I am now installed in an adjacent bedroom, amidst extreme squalor. The once-blue walls are nastily smeared, the floor tiles are stained with food and candle grease and littered with cigarette ends and dead matches, the broken window is patched with cardboard and the three iron beds are spread with revolting blankets. I intend to sleep on the floor; bed-bugs are an occupational hazard, but the likely result of using these foul beds is not.

  Tonight I am suffering from what the Americans call ‘Cultural Shock’. This road runs like an infected scratch down the tough, rough, healthy body of the unprogressive highlands and on coming to these towns one knows that they are sick. Contact with our world seems to suppress the best and encourage the worst in the highland character; here it is evident that already the locals have degenerated from an integrated, respect-worthy peasantry into a community of coarse and crafty primitives. Walking around Debarak – or sitting in its bars, watching highlanders in dirty jeans and T-shirts drinking ‘Chianti’ and smoking cigarettes – one sees a much cruder aspect of the highland culture than one would ever see in an isolated settlement. At the foundation of this culture certain indigenous Hamitic–Negroid influences are being forever delicately balanced by Asian–Hebrew–Christian influences; and apparently the lightest touch of Westernisation can tip the balance in favour of the less advanced tradition.

  The High Semiens have left my lips so badly cracked that if I absent-mindedly smile little trickles of blood run down my chin – an inhibiting affliction, when one’s only means of communication is a smile or a frown.

  Since we arrived here at 2 p.m. the sky has been refreshingly obscured by slowly-drifting pale grey cloud.

  22 January. Ciarveta

  Today’s twenty-three miles were unexpectedly enjoyable. For much of the way our track ran close to the motor-road and Jock staged a minor crisis every time a vehicle passed; but sixteen vehicles in eleven hours don’t constitute an intolerable volume of traffic, even for me.

  All day we were crossing what in this context is an undulating plain, though at home one would describe it as ‘hilly country’. In every direction, to the blue ridges along the horizon, charming patterns harmonised with calm contours. Side by side lay sloping expanses of ripe barley, green emmer wheat, brown ploughland, yellow-green atar and pale gold teff; and on level sweeps of golden-brown pasture-land grazed herds of sturdy horses, brown and white fattailed sheep, piebald goats and lean cattle. Many thatched settlements looked cosy amidst groves of blue-gums and the landscape was lively with singing shepherd-boys, chattering women bent double under earthenware water-pots, and chanting, whip-cracking harvesters.

  A fresh breeze had been blowing all morning and at midday clouds again drifted up from the south, adding wonderfully to the beauty of the scene as their shadows slowly passed over these vast widths, gently fading the colours – which then seemed all the brighter as the sun restored them.

  Ciarveta is a recently-built village on the bleak crest of a 9,000 foot ridge and, despite this being the main road, our arrival caused quite a sensation. To the locals faranjs are curious creatures who quickly drive past in Land Rovers, motorcars or – more rarely – buses.

  I was given a friendly welcome in this square, two-roomed shack, where an icy wind cuts through the ‘chimney-gap’ between the tin roof and the tops of the mud walls. There is one iron bed, equipped with two filthy blankets, but most of the family sleep in hides on the floor. For the faranj’s supper my hostess scrambled six tiny eggs – a sophisticated addition to the menu. Her method, however, was not so sophisticated. The eggs were broken into a dirty enamel bowl and beaten thoroughly with very dirty fingers before being slopped into a probably dirty saucepan containing rancid butter and salt. Yet the result was excellent, though having stupidly lost my spoon I soon discovered that it is not easy to eat greasy scrambled eggs with one’s fingers.

  The women of this area are more elaborately tattooed than most, mainly on their necks. Among highlanders a long neck is regarded as a sign of great beauty and attractively designed tattooed ‘necklaces’ are thought to accentuate the length.

  Jock is now amongst those present, because everyone affirmed that if left outside he would probably be stolen. Such a possibility has never been considered elsewhere, so this suggests that mule-stealing proclivities are among the fringe benefits of a motor-road.

  23 January. A Compound on a Mountainside

  Today’s twenty-seven miles took us through placid pastoral country until 3 p.m. Then abruptly we were again amidst rough mountains and the road went curving around high, forested spurs, with shrub-grown cliffs rising sheer above us and deep, broad valleys below.

  Soon after midday I heard market-noises coming from a big plantation of blue-gums above the road so I made a talla-questing detour up the steep slope, past hundreds of animals and through a crowded square surrounded by tin-roofed shacks – where our progress caused some consternation, since Jock found it difficult to avoid the piles of merchandise that lay all over the ground.

  Having refuelled I took a stroll around the square, leaving Jock in the charge of a boy who had politely appointed himself my temporary servant. These weekly markets are the corner-stone of highland trade, and are regularly attended by people who may have come twenty miles to exchange home-produced goods and acquire the imported goods made available by Muslim traders. (Trading as an occupation is despised by the highlanders, who only recognise two honourable ways of life – soldiering and farming. Therefore they ne
ver attempt to compete with the Muslims, many of whom are Yemeni Arabs.) The rural markets have also become centres for the collection, by big-town merchants, of surplus grain, hides and wool, which could not be bought economically from individuals in scattered settlements. This is one reason why I find it so difficult to buy fodder for Jock: highlanders are not used to doing business outside the market-place and are slow to adapt to the unfamiliar.

  Going to market is among the chief pleasures of highland life. Most highlanders can walk tirelessly from dawn to dusk, so these long, leisurely treks are not a hardship, but a welcome break in the routine labours around field or compound and an occasion for meeting relations and friends, and for collecting such news as may be percolating through from the outside world to the market-town.

  As we left the village many others were leaving too and I could see lines of trotting donkeys moving across the plain in every direction, some of them followed by whole families, down to the newest member on mother’s back. Then, looking up, I saw other groups making their way along the crest of a nearby ridge – the women draped in simple, chiton-like dresses, carrying high loads on their heads, the men striding behind pack-animals, their dulas held across their shoulders, supporting both hands, and a rich man cantering proudly on a gaily-saddled mule – all silhouetted against the grey sky.

  Two hours later a break in the cliff-wall on our right revealed how high we still were, for below us lay the weirdly wind-sculptured summits of a range of blue mountains that spread far away to the western horizon.

  We then climbed slightly to cross a pass, before beginning the final, gradual descent from the Semiens. By sunset we had reached 8,400 feet and were rounding a steep mountain which towered above us on the right and fell away below us on the left. To the south-east I could see our serpentine road diving through a narrow gap that leads to Gondar – only fifteen miles further on – but here no settlements were visible, and I only noticed this tiny compound when surveying the mountainside for a camping-site. (If not marked by blue-gums tukuls are inconspicuous to the point of invisibility.)