The Chains of Heaven: An Ethiopian Romance. Philip Marsden

       5

      It was late in the afternoon when we reached the rock-hewn church of Bilbala Giorgis.

      ‘Very holy place!’ With his dula, Makonnen pointed to the traffic of bees around a blind window. ‘Their honey—you must take it for illness of legs, for illness of the stomach, and—’ he tapped his temple ‘- illness of the head.’

      A man sat alone in front of the church. He was pestling the red tufa to granules.

      ‘What is that used for?’ I asked him.

      He looked at our mules and our baggage. ‘Men take this one to prevent journey-accident.’

      ‘Usshi, usshi,‘ I conceded, smiling.

      I bought a cup of the powder and put it in water. I stirred it with a pencil, drank it and passed the cup to Hiluf. It tasted of, well, ground-up rock.

      ‘Do you think that will see us to Aksum?’

      ‘Aksum?’ The man frowned and shook his head. ‘You’ll need more.’ He watched me fill a film canister with the dust. ’The people who took it to fight the Italians or the rebels—those who took the soil always came back. Always.’

      Below the church was Bilbala itself. It was a brown and dusty town. The buildings were brown and dusty, the road that split the buildings was brown and dusty, and the children who played in it were brown and dusty. The only colour was the orange and green of plastic bottles hanging outside a store.

      We pitched our tent in the grounds of the town’s clinic. A sign outside, in Amharic and English, urged RESPONSIBLE REPRODUCTIVE BEHAVIOUR.

      Darkness fell upon Bilbala with a series of shouts, ox-bellows and baby-wails. We sat with the clinic guard. He was an elderly man and had fought for the rebels.

      ‘We killed many Derg soldiers, many,’ he recalled. ‘Some of them were even my neighbours.’ He had a warm and friendly face.

      I spread out the maps on the clinic’s concrete verandah. The light from my head-lamp picked out Bilbala and Amda Worq, and between them several inches of alarming gradients. Tigray and Aksum were a whole yard away in the darkness—and Lalibela just a thumbnail south of Bilbala. For all the aches and sweat, we’d done nothing. Folding away the map, I let the word ‘bus’ seep into my forward planning.

      At dawn two sets of headlights raked across the scrub beyond Bilbala and bumped away to the south. In single file we climbed the low embankment and crunched across the gravel of the main road. The mules slid down the other side, and trotted ahead with a jangle of cooking pots. The air was crisp. Behind us, the fingers of the sun stretched high above the ridge of Abune Josef. We headed north-west into the hills. The path was a shadow of a path. It followed a series of gentle valleys. Sometimes it disappeared altogether.

      Bisrat hummed quietly as he walked. He was taller than Makonnen and had a very gentle manner. He walked with soft slow steps but covered the ground at a great pace.

      Soon after midday we reached a shallow gorge. It was too hot to carry on; in the shade of some ironwood trees I called a halt.

      Makonnen unloaded the mules. He fell asleep against the bags. I lay back and enjoyed one of walking’s simple rewards: gazing up at the sky. It glowed deep blue between the leaves. A bird was going puk-puk-puk…puk-puk-puk…It took a while before I spotted its blood-red throat: double-toothed barbet, according to my Birds of Eastern Africa. I dozed off.

      Bisrat was busy prodding at the ground with a stick when I woke. He had an expression of childlike innocence. I found myself hoping that everything was OK for him. As I watched, a faint smile spread across his face.

      ‘What are you thinking, Bisrat?’

      ‘It’s all right. I’m not thinking anything.’

      He carried on with his prodding.

      ‘Were you born in Lalibela?’

      ‘I was born there, yes.’

      ‘Do you have family?’

      ‘I have five children. Three brothers, two girls. My wife is dead.’

      ‘What land do you have?’

      ‘Three timat. But it’s not good land. It’s stony.’

      ‘What can you grow?’

      ‘Only barley and teff.’

      ‘Is it steep?’

      ‘It’s half steep and half flat.’

      ‘Enough for consumption?’

      He shook his head. ‘I collect relief food for two months.’

      ‘And is this mule yours?’

      ‘No.’

      Bisrat had no livestock at all. Until recently he had had no land either. He had always worked for others. But when the Derg fell he was given land—three timat of land that no one else wanted.

      He gave me a look of genuine gratitude. ‘My life is better now, thanks to God.’

      Some way further on, we spotted the round roof of a church. Its compound was bordered by euphorbia—not the candelabra euphorbia but the k’inch’ib tree - Euphorbia tirucallii—known as ‘finger cactus’ for its fat succulent leaves.

      A couple of priests were reclining in its shade; they were an elderly priest and a young priest. Two laymen reclined with them, and one of the laymen, it turned out, was having a little trouble with his daughter.

      ‘I have found someone for her. He comes from Tara. But she will not have him.’

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘She wants to go to Bilbala to work.’

      ‘She is throwing her life away!’ said the young priest; he was very interested in two pebbles by his feet.

      ‘I told her, I told her.’

      ‘That is good.’

      The men were all agreed that the girl needed correcting, and in their agreement they lapsed into a satisfied silence.

      ‘What is happening? In the old days girls were afraid.’

      ‘They won’t do grinding now.’

      ‘The government tells us a girl cannot marry until she is eighteen.’

      ‘You cannot expect a girl to keep her virginity until then.’

      ‘Now if you show her your back for one minute,’ said the old priest, ’a girl will throw away her virginity.’

      ‘It is better if they marry young.’

      ‘Eleven is the best age.’

      They lapsed into another satisfied silence. Across the valley, a man was driving two oxen to plough.