In Ethiopia with a Mule

by Dervla Murphy

  Twenty minutes later I had discovered that the ‘grassy plain’ was a peculiarly hellish semi-swamp. Apart from patches of black mud, in which we occasionally sank to our knees, the vegetation was diabolical. Thick, wiry grass grew shoulder-high, the stiff, dense reeds were seven to nine feet tall, and a slim, five-foot growth, which looked dead, had such powerfully resilient thorny branches that I soon began to imagine it was deliberately thwarting me. From amidst these mingled horrors I could no longer see the ridge – or anything but an infinity of reed-tops and a darkening sky. Nor was it possible to steer straight, for we had to go where the ground was least swampy and the growth least obstructive – though whichever way I turned I was lacerated again and again by that nightmare thorny plant, and by a weird kind of thistle that now appeared to complete my demoralisation. As the light faded I cursed myself for not having turned back. This inferno was a real danger that could have been avoided, whereas murderous humans were merely contingent dangers.

  By seven o’clock it was dark. I remembered that pythons are reputed to live here and was suitably depressed; this seemed my day for meeting a python. Then the vegetation ahead thinned – usually a sign of a swampy patch – and I poked cautiously at the ground with my dula. As there wasn’t any ground, swampy or otherwise, I stepped aside into the reeds on my left. Unfortunately there wasn’t any ground there either, so I fell into a hole six or seven feet deep. It contained glutinous black mud, too thin to stand on and too thick to swim in, and its vertical, slippery sides were unclimbable; but for Jock’s intelligent reaction I would not now be reporting the occurrence. Instinctively I had held on to the halter and steadfastly Jock stood braced on the brink of the hole – instead of bolting, as many a lesser mule would have done when their owner abruptly vanished. So I felt only a momentary panic, for I quickly realised that all would be well if the halter didn’t snap. Luckily mules are tough and the incomparable Jock showed no resentment as I hauled myself on to dry ground – though his ears and jawbones must have been taking at least half my weight.

  I then decided that enough was enough and fumblingly unloaded Jock. A cautious starlight survey of our immediate surroundings revealed a bewildering number of deep, narrow channels, filled with mud or water – so if I lit an anti-animal fire amidst this density of dry growth we might soon have to choose between roasting and drowning.

  Sitting dismally on a spot that I had partly cleared of the more dire vegetation I ate immoderately to cheer myself up. Apart from the advisability of guarding Jock I was too cold to sleep without my flea-bag, for a chill breeze had been blowing off the lake since sunset. In this situation there was an extraordinary incongruity about the prosaic little evening routine of winding my watch.

  At 2.15 the waning moon rose – but by then I had been in misery for so long that the beauty of moonlight didn’t help. Reeds shaken by the wind now looked as though they were being shaken by advancing hyenas or leopards, and this new, calm lustre seemed to emphasise the lifeless silence of the marsh. Jock had at last stopped munching the short grass that flourished beneath the other growths, and there were no cicadas, or bird-stirrings, or distant dog-barks – nothing but the whispering rustle of the reeds. To pass the time I began to scrape the dried mud off my body, but when I realised that it was keeping me warm I desisted.

  Three and a half hours later the first light released us. I then saw that in the darkness we had crossed a natural bridge of solid ground and become trapped on what was almost an islet. Retracing our steps we resumed the struggle and, after sitting tensely for nine and a half hours, to be moving again was such bliss that neither slime nor thorns seemed to matter any more.

  An hour later the vegetation began to thin and soon we were on ploughland at the foot of the ridge. A broad path led down towards the lake and as we followed it a young man came towards us, driving a few cattle. He took one look at me, yelled in terror and fled. No doubt I’ve now given birth to a myth – the Dawn Devil of Tana.

  It took fifty minutes to wash the adhesive black mud out of my clothes and hair and off my body, and innumerable scratches began to bleed afresh as I removed their mud plaster. When we had climbed the ridge I found a clear westward track which we followed for four hours across hilly farmland, with the lake sparkling below on our left. There were many settlements, but the locals seemed unfriendly. One little man of about fifty – dressed in a ragged bush-shirt and cotton shorts – made a miscalculation when he saw the lone faranj. Standing before me on the path he grabbed my dula and tried swiftly to pick my pockets – in full view of three leering youths who were sitting under a tree. However, in populated areas one can afford to be aggressive and this morning my mood was not sunny: I punched him in the eye, wrested my dula from him and brought it down hard on his skull. As he reeled away I further relieved my feelings by throwing a stone at the youths and shouting ‘Hid!’

  By midday my body and mind were limp with exhaustion. Ahead I could see blue-gums and soon we were in Delghie, a market town of many tin roofs on the west shore of the lake. I rested in a talla-beit for two hours and had a large meal of injara and wat and five pints. As we set off again, through the hot afternoon glare, I felt slightly drunk and much restored.

  Our track ran close to the lake for three miles; vast herds of sleek cattle were grazing on the lush pastures of the shore and for a time we joined a dour family going home from the market. Then the track turned inland, became a faint path and switch-backed for three hours over a series of steep, thinly-forested hills where I saw only two distant settlements and a few small fields.

  By sunset we had covered twenty-two miles, and though the lake was invisible all afternoon we are now overlooking it again, for these compounds stand on a clifftop high above the water. The locals welcomed me kindly, but the poverty and ill-health of this family are most depressing. My skinny, sunken-eyed hostess has recently had malaria, her haggard husband coughs incessantly, their five pot-bellied children have trachoma and boils, and a young man lying in a corner by the door has a gruesomely injured eye into which he frequently squeezes drops from a phial of penicillin marked ‘For Intra-muscular Injection Only’. Worst of all is the condition of the youngest child, a girl of about two; her feet and calves are covered in ulcerated burns and the poor little mite never stops screaming. Yet when I told her mother that she should be taken to Gondar hospital at once I got the impression that no one considered her cure worth such a long journey.

  The walls of this tiny tukul are flimsy and already the night air is cold; so despite my exhaustion I foresee getting very little sleep.

  4 February. Kunzela

  By now I feel like a shipwrecked nonagenarian. I was being optimistic when I foresaw ‘getting very little sleep’. For the second successive night I got no sleep – a personal record which I would prefer not to have achieved. Possibly because of my exhaustion I felt the cold even more last night, and in that overcrowded hovel I had no room to move a finger. Fleas tickled and pricked relentlessly and bugs swarmed over me, inducing that peculiar, feverish irritation which cannot be imagined by those who have never experienced it. The unfortunate burnt child never stopped whimpering, my host never stopped coughing, the injured young man never stopped moaning and the local dogs never stopped barking. Rats raced all over everyone and two donkeys who ‘live in’ kicked me three times. At midnight I crawled out to the starlight, broken in spirit and shivering in body. I found a little pile of straw and burrowed under it, but it was too little to warm me – and anyway I’d brought the bugs with me in my clothes.

  As I sat chain-smoking the moon rose over Lake Tana and lost itself in a drift of thin cloud that glowed above the water like a length of torn satin. Being deprived of any sleep for such an unnatural period strangely distorts one’s sense of time. It would seem logical to feel that one has lived longer; instead, towards dawn, I found that having twice failed to cross the normal frontier between consciousness and unconsciousness I was aware of the past forty-eight hours as only one long day
.

  Not surprisingly we covered less than sixteen miles today. During the morning our path wound through sweeps of jungle grass that shone like bright copper, and on either side low ridges were covered in vivid green shrubs, and sometimes Lake Tana’s blueness glinted between the hills.

  At midday we came to a village where the marketplace was crowded – though all morning we had been walking through uninhabited country – and when I told my robber story in a talla-beit this ill-treatment of a faranj roused everyone’s indignation, sympathy and generosity. The Medical Officer invited me to lunch and, though he is the poorly-paid father of nine children, he wanted to present me with five dollars and a blanket. His fair-skinned wife has a sweet, oval face and large, brilliant eyes; she is the same age as myself but looks ten years younger. At first she was very shy of me, but soon she relaxed, went to the iron bed and carefully opened an enormous bundle of clean blankets – to show off Number Nine, aged three weeks.

  I would have liked to accept my host’s invitation to stay, but now I’m in a hurry to get to the telephone at Bahar Dar, since it is just possible that the Gondar Police may be able to recover my irreplacable high-altitude sleeping-bag, which I bought from a Japanese Himalayan expedition in Nepal.

  When I left this kind family I discovered that extreme tiredness leaves one abnormally vulnerable to talla. Beyond the village I found myself swaying and stumbling across rough ploughland and the landscape went unnoticed. I felt sick and drunk and horrible as I hung on to Jock’s halter with one hand and leant heavily on my dula with the other. Inevitably we got lost, but that has proved a blessing. This little town is one of Lake Tana’s chief ports, from where grain and coffee are shipped on small steamers and huge, unwieldy reed rafts to Gorgora and Bahar Dar; therefore it has some uncommon amenities, including one tin of insecticide which almost reduced me to tears of relief when I saw it beside my bed.

  The Port Manager noticed our arrival and at once offered hospitality; then an agreeable young teacher appeared and the three of us walked beyond the town to this tiny, corrugated-iron shed beside a warehouse at the top of a stone jetty. Here my host put down a camp-bed for me, and produced a ‘Visitors Book’ to be signed. There was only one other name in the thin exercise-book – Chris Barry, Churchtown, Dublin, Ireland. My compatriot had spent the night of 7 February, 1966, in this shed, on his way from Gorgora to Bahar Dar by steamer. It cannot be denied that we Irish get around.

  5 February. Zeghie

  After eleven hours’ deep sleep I woke to find that my host and the teacher had decided that we must have an escort to get us safely across the Little Nile. Few people walk from Kunzela to Zeghie, because the short boat-trip is so much quicker, but there is a track of sorts, used by the locals, and a tribe of pagan boatmen runs a ferry service. The teacher said that these boatmen are notoriously difficult to deal with and would be as likely to steal my load as to ferry it; so I greeted my escort enthusiastically, having had my fill of difficult lakeside dwellers.

  We set off at 8.15, Jock being led by Fikre Selassie, a wiry little man of about forty who wore a permanently puzzled expression and was very polite but unbelievably dim-witted. As he wanted to get back to Kunzela before dark we walked non-stop for five and a half hours.

  The track ran inland, at first across an uninhabited flatness where eight-foot thistles had flowers like foxgloves, and then through hilly, heavily-wooded country, inhabited by many small monkeys. Today the noon heat affected me more because of our forced march, and six of my swamp scratches have become throbbing streaks of pus – three on each leg – so I was not sorry when we passed a large settlement and came to the end of our marathon.

  Here Lake Tana is very close, though invisible, and the Little Nile is some eighty yards wide, flowing deep and slow between low banks overhung by freshly-green shrubs. Wide, level pastures stretch away from both banks to the blue horizons and directly above the ferry-point the stream divides around a tree-covered islet. At times there is a disconcerting un-African-ness about these highlands. When I looked at this dark current, gently moving below its fringe of dense greenery, I could fancy for a moment that I was standing by the Blackwater River near my home. Yet some eccentrics still believe this stream to be the true source of the Blue Nile.

  However, there was nothing homely about the human element here. At the ferry-point gravelly shores replace the banks and, as we approached, I could hear violent shouting. Then we saw one of three tall, bony, black-skinned boatmen viciously striking a passenger across the face, while abusing him for not paying the fee demanded. (I afterwards found that ten cents had already been paid for the ferrying of a small load of salt-blocks, but the boatman wanted another ten cents because the donkey had been towed by the same raft.) The passenger was a frail young man, hardly up to his opponent’s shoulder, and now his wife courageously intervened by throwing a stone – which unfortunately struck her husband instead of the boatman. Then a second boatman joined in – the third was on the far bank – and at that point the young man gave up and produced the extra ten cents. These ferrymen certainly take full advantage of the highlanders’ inability to cope with water-transport. By local standards eightpence is a most unscrupulous charge for a single crossing.

  When one sees these rafts close to it no longer seems surprising that their management is an esoteric tribal skill. They are simple bundles of reeds, shaped like giant rugger-balls and no more than eight feet long and two feet above water amidships. One man punts them with a thin pole, some twenty feet long, and passengers ride astride with legs dangling in the water. If I were a non-swimmer I wouldn’t cross a deep river on one of those contraptions for all the salt in the Danakil.

  As I unsaddled Jock three interested men and two loaded donkeys formed a queue behind us. Someone asked where Jock came from and when I replied ‘Makalle’ there was an outburst of discussion and everyone assured me that a Tigre mule would not swim a river. Highlanders delight in arguing about a situation for as long as possible before taking any action and if they can build up an atmosphere of doom and drama so much the better; but at this stage I only wanted to immerse my sweaty, bug-bitten body in the river, so I postponed the Jock problem, pulled off my shirt and plunged in. (It is convenient to be among people who are not shocked by women stripped to the waist.)

  The ferrying of our load and saddlery required two trips, during which I swam watchfully back and forth beside the ridiculous raft, half-expecting my precious possessions to slide off at any moment. The water was cool, opaque, probably unhealthy and wonderfully restoring. I tried to dive to the bottom, but failed, so it must be about twelve feet deep.

  Then the Jock problem had to be faced – and it is indeed true that Tigre mules don’t like deep rivers. Clearly Jock had never met one before, and he so loathed the Little Nile that for the first time since our partnership began he turned mulish. When all my efforts to lead him in had failed I looked away, for I couldn’t endure to see him being brutally thrashed by Fikre Selassie, the boatmen and the donkey-men. This was a poor return for his patient, life-saving loyalty.

  Local donkeys are ferried by one man half-lifting them into the water towards another man, who is sitting waiting on a raft and who immediately grabs their ears and tows them across. So now the donkeymen suggested ferrying their animals first, to reassure and lure Jock. But this stratagem also failed. Then at last the poor devil was so tormented that he plunged despairingly in – and, following the men’s advice, I rushed after him, seized the halter and swam beside him. When he broke away my efforts to head him off from the shore merely revealed the interesting fact that a mule swims faster than I do. Twice this happened, but the third time I quickly wound the halter round my shoulder and kept so close to him that I was in no danger of being kicked. Now another return to shore meant towing me, so he decided that crossing the river was the lesser of two evils and followed meekly – at which point even the sullen boatmen raised a cheer. Half-way across I noticed that the panic had gone from his eyes a
nd when we scrambled on to the opposite shore he was looking faintly surprised. Probably he had just realised that swimming a cool river on a hot day can be quite pleasant.

  By 3.30 we were following a clear path across close-cropped pastureland, where a few herds were visible in the distance. Some half-a-mile away, on our left, lay the lake, hidden by a fringe of tall, feathery reeds, and soon after five o’clock the path vanished at the edge of a swamp. This was a much swampier swamp than our last one, but it was also more predictable; the reeds were only two or three feet high and beyond I could see trees along the horizon and black dots that meant grazing cattle. Yet the next fifty minutes were unpleasant enough, for I was wading through waist-high water, slushy with rotted vegetation. As always in hours of peril I held trustfully on to Jock’s halter, but the slippery ground remained solid underfoot. The stink of decay was nauseating, and at every step we disturbed clouds of mosquitoes and other sharp-stinging flies. Later, when we arrived here, I looked at my legs and saw that they were covered with immense, swollen leeches. After burning them off I bled so profusely that my hostess came over all queer and had to sit down in the middle of preparing supper.

  Beyond the swamp a continuation of our path soon brought us to roughly-broken scrubland, and as darkness fell we entered a thick forest, where the filtered starlight didn’t help much. Yet by night a thin forest would be even more difficult; here one knew that the path went where the growth was least dense.

  By 7.30 we were clear of the trees and about a mile away I could see a black, serrated mass against the stars – the blue-gums of Zeghie. Then I lost the path, amidst a chaos of boulders. Before long our way was blocked by an inlet from the lake, and having retreated from that we wandered into a stony gully which seemed to be a cul-de-sac, and on climbing out of this we became painfully enmeshed in a thorny thicket. I was about to give up and unload when suddenly the path reappeared, and twenty minutes later we were beneath the shadows of the blue-gums.