Read Online In Ethiopia with a Mule by Dervla Murphy - Free Book Online Page B

before one’s drink is poured. While I was imbibing my second quart two old men came along and stopped to look wistfully at the talla -jar – and then hopefully at me. I stood them a drink each, and that was the end of my solitude for today. They too were coming here, so they insisted on accompanying me, one leading Jock. (It is considered frightfully non-U for a faranj to walk instead of riding and the absolute bottom for a faranj personally to lead a pack-animal.) The only traffic we saw was a man on a cantering mule, escorted by two servants running alongside – one armed with a rifle. Highlandersrich enough to own riding-mules never travel unprotected and their servants are natural long-distance runners. No wonder Ethiopia’s representative has won two Olympic Marathons – he probably regarded the twenty-six mile race as a sort of pre-breakfast stroll.
    The track was easy, running smoothly over a burnt-up golden-brown plain, with dusty-blue mountains in the middle distance and contorted red cliffs nearby. The highest of these cliffs was used for exterminating Italians during the war and one can still see a few bleached human bones lying at its base.
    This settlement is on a hilltop from which superb mountains are visible in every direction and when we arrived, at half-past-four, it seemed that my appearance was the most shattering local event since the Italian invasion. A ten-year-old boy who goes to school at Abbi Addi was summoned as interpreter; his English is minimal, but he conveyed that soon the headman would come to welcome me. This encounter took place fifty yards from the edge of the settlement and pending the headman’s investigation I was not encouraged to approach any nearer. None of the many staring men who had surrounded me seemed at all well-disposed – which is understandable, when one remembers what this region suffered during the occupation and how impossible it is for these peasants to distinguish between Italians and other faranjs .
    Indicating that Jock could safely be left, Yohannes, my young guide, led me to a nearby Italian military cemetery where scores of graves lie in neat rows – their headstones smashed or defaced – at the end of an avenue of mathematically-planted giant candelabra. In a country where neither building nor cultivation is planned or arranged, but everything appears merely to have ‘happened’, this little corner of forlorn orderliness was alien indeed – the epitome of the whole Italian-Ethiopian tragedy.
    On our return we found Jock surrounded by Workhsegeh’s entire male population and the headman stepped forward to greet me ceremonially. He looked rather ill-at-ease in rumpled khaki slacks and a patched tweed jacket, so I deduced that he had been delayed by a compulsion to don these garments of state in my honour. It is sad that Western clothes have become status symbols – the highlanders look so dignified and right in even the most tattered shammas , which hang around them in swinging folds and gracefully emphasise their proud, erect bearing.
    Yohannes explained that I was to stay in a hut in the chief’s sister’s compound; but another long delay followed because the hut was being cleaned out for my reception. There are some forty compounds here, each containing two or three tukuls and all securely fenced in by thorn bushes as a protection against hyenas and leopards. This hut is used only as a bedroom-cum-storeroom. A narrow mud platform runs around half the circumference and opposite is a mud ‘double-bed’, with a built-in ‘pillow bump’ at one end. The cow-hides and goat-skins must secrete bugs by the million so I have already sprayed fanatically, uncharitably wishing the livestock on the three children who will be my hut-mates. As I write, by the light of a tiny wick floating in oil, a clay vat of talla is fermenting audibly beside me.
    The chief’s elderly sister is friendly though shy. When I entered the compound talla was immediately produced