my own breathlessness. In the evening, I sat on the terrace outside my room and read. A breeze would come up from the south and a thousand eucalyptus leaves brush together with a long watery shhhh. I was filled with expectation. Each morning I lay in bed and watched daylight leak into the eastern sky. Each morning I heard a blast of the tirumba: ’Citizens of Lalibela—come out, come out! Come out for the burial…come out, come out!‘
One evening I returned to the guest house and there was Hiluf sitting on a wall. A small bag lay beside him, a water bottle and three tied-together batons of sugarcane. He had the thick-lashed eyes and easy smile of the Tigrayans. He jumped down and we embraced. I liked him at once.
In my room, I showed him the neatly-packed bag of supplies. At once he set about repacking it, with the reverence for food of those who have lived with real hunger. We looked at the maps. I ran my fingers up across the dense contours of Wag and Lasta, into Tigray, Tembien and Gheralta.
‘Do you know any of this?’
He shook his head.
I glanced at his feet. ‘Hiluf, your shoes!’
He bent down and poked his finger through the sole. ‘It’s all right—they are quite good shoes.’
He looked up at me. He began to laugh, and I couldn’t help laughing with him.
‘We’ll have to get you new ones.’
Hiluf bent down and took a needle and thread from his bag.
In the morning Bisrat and Makonnen were at the gate. They held a mule each. The sun was a pale glow behind Mount Eshetan. We loaded the mules and set off. It was a feast day at Beta Giorgis. I let the others go on and went down to join the ring of worshippers on the edge of the pit. Another crowd filled the shadowy space below. The fat cruciform block of the
church rose high above their heads. The debtara were dancing. The beat of a kebbero sounded from among them.
The sun reached me with a warning flash in the corner of my eye; in a few hours it would be hot. I turned to leave and wound up through the gathering crowds. I stopped a woman with a flat-pan basket on her head and bought six bananas. They were stumpy and very sweet. The woman had a burn-mark covering one cheek. ‘Pay me what you like,’ she said.
As I caught up with the others, there was a distant cry: ‘Citizens of Lalibela! Come out! Help bury Girma Gabre-Selassie! Citizens of Lalibela, come out, come out!‘
The path north from Lalibela cut down the mountainside in short zigzags. Pilgrim heads bobbed up it. They were blowing horns. They were shaded by umbrellas. They were leading sheep. They were carrying rust-coloured cockerels suspended from sticks. They were all heading for the feast of Giorgis.
I stood aside to let them pass and looked down beyond them to the valley floor and the grey riverbed. On the opposite side the path began to rise. I followed its course with my gaze, through a series of fields bordered by rocky outcrops, up to where the rise steepened to cliffs. There the path reverted to zigzags before reaching the flat ridge-line of the plateau. It left a hollow feeling in my stomach.
It was mid-morning by the time we started to climb. Hiluf and the mules went ahead. Their pace was easy, untroubled. I felt the hot sun on my back. For months I had been preparing for this. But now, in the first hours, I was fading. The path steepened. I gulped at the thin air. Flies buzzed into my panting mouth. Each step became a mountain in itself. Stumbling the last few yards, I cleared the ridge and joined the others under a lone olive tree. It was a false summit. The path continued up.
A man sauntered down it. ‘Peace be on you!’
‘And on you…’
He put a foot up on a rock and looked at me flopped on the ground. The sun was behind his head; as he moved it flickered on and off. He wore a bath-cap of yellow towelling.
‘Has the farenj‘s car broken?’ he laughed.
By mid-afternoon we were following a broad shelf around the northern slopes of Abune Jozef. The concentric lines of terraces bordered the fields. There were homesteads and small villages and stock grazing. The path was flat. The walking was easy. Then the terraces stopped. They gave way to a pair of gate-like rocks. The ground dropped at our feet. The sight ahead was so vast, so overwhelming that we all stopped.
‘Whweeeee!‘ hissed Makonnen.
Between the rocks, row upon row of ridges stretched out into the distance. Their grey flanks were dappled with cloud shadows. The horizon was a graph of hazy peaks and saddles. The line of our path followed the mountainside, shrunk to a thread by the vastness all around it. I could see beyond it to the next spine of rock rising from a hidden valley, and beyond that another and another. I forgot the morning’s labour and felt a sudden surge of exhilaration. It was the reckless confidence that comes at the beginning of a journey, and I longed to be in each one of those valleys, each little smear of a village, each hut.
Makonnen grinned at me. In a wave-like motion he raised and lowered his hand over imaginary hills. He was looking forward to watching the farenj deal with it all.
‘Which way is Sekota?’ I asked.
With his dula, he pointed north. The sides of a large mountain shouldered the sky.
‘Behind, behind! That road we call “the breaker of knees”.’
But we were not going to Sekota, not directly anyway. I wanted to try to reach the rebel town of Amda Worq.
‘And Amda Worq?’
He swung his dula to the west. Partly in shadow, the ridgeline was more distant. Makonnen raised his voice to an excited falsetto. ‘Way, waa-ay over!’
‘And what is that road like?’
He shook his head. He had never been there. ‘They say it’s the devil’s own.’
We carried on. The path continued as a narrow ledge. When the mules stumbled, rocks slid out from under their feet and rolled down the scrub, gathering pace until they were bouncing off the mountain and plunging into the emptiness.
We dropped into a small juniper forest. The boughs of the juniper were hung with lichen. It was late afternoon. Makonnen put his dula across his shoulders and began to sing: ‘Aya alemayehu igray derso! May my foot reach the place I want!’
That evening we put up our tent in a village above the monastery of Yimrehanna Krestos. I cooked a meal over the kerosene stove. Hiluf and I sat outside the tent spooning up rice from plastic bowls. I felt a little life flowing back into my limbs. The stars above were pinpricks in the darkening blue.
Hiluf was twenty-six. He had been born in the mountains of south-eastern Tigray, a region famous for its frequent rebellions. His father was a priest and his mother was just thirteen when he was born. Hiluf was her third child.
In 1984 the great famine came, and Hiluf ‘s father left for the west of Tigray to try to find farm work. The clay vats of grain ran down. The cattle grew weaker. Their neighbours left the land to look for food. His mother said: ‘We will stay, your father will soon be back.’ But in the end they too were forced to leave. They walked two days north to a feeding camp.
Hiluf wrapped his hands round a mug of tea. ‘My mother left behind my brother to look after my little sister and the animals. All the time she was just sobbing.’
One day Hiluf was in the camp, on his way to collect their ration of flour and milk powder. Suddenly he saw his father.
‘At once he started crying,’ said Hiluf, ‘ “Why did you leave our land?” ‘
Hiluf explained and his father embraced him. He had money from the west; now he could take them home!
So the two