Wilfred Thesiger in Africa. Chris Morton
all below ground level and were only visible from close at hand. Lalibela did not disappoint him. ‘Perhaps no other place in the world,’ he wrote, ‘has so profoundly impressed me.’87 The Chief Priest–no doubt forewarned by the Crown Prince’s staff of their visit–invited them to pitch their tent in his compound and, during their stay, showed Thesiger and Mansfield round the churches. Thesiger photographed the Chief Priest by the entrance to the church known as Golgotha, which had been carved from the rock on which it stands. There were twelve of these churches, all of them different.
The most spectacular had been chiselled out of enormous blocks of tufa[a porous limestone], and separated by deep trenches from the surrounding rock. Some of the others were detached on all sides from the rock overhead; others again had been excavated into rock faces. One called Beta Medhane Alam (‘The Saviour of the World’) was over a hundred feet long, seventy-two wide and thirty-six high, with external and internal columns precisely aligned: another, Beta Giorgis, was in the form of a Greek cross’.
Thesiger added emphatically, ‘Giorgis, which stands apart from the others … was my favourite.’88 He listed the churches, possibly in the order he had visited them, with a tick in biro beside each one: ‘Medhane Alam, Beta Mariam, Maskal, Dairaghal, Debra Sina, Golgotha, Selassie, Markarios, Aba Lebanos, Gabriel, Emanuel, Giorgis’.89 Thesiger’s handwritten list was later kept in his copy of Churches in Rock(1970), Georg Gerster’s monograph on the early Christian art of Ethiopia. Thesiger’s interest in Lalibela’s rock-hewn churches may have owed something to his father, who was interested in archaeology, and wrote an illustrated account of a church excavated in 1912, at Sellali, ‘only some five hours distant’90 from the monastery of Debra Libanos, and whose carvings, Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger felt convinced, dated the original building to the eleventh or twelfth century.91 This ruin was contemporary with the gloomy, though strangely impressive, church of Imrahanna Krestos (‘Let Christ be Our Guide’), inside a cave in a ravine, north-east of Lalibela, which predates by a hundred years Lalibela’s cluster of thirteenth-century rock churches.
On the Sunday of their visit, Thesiger and Mansfield went to a service at Beta Mariam that started in moonlight and lasted for five hours until 10 a.m. The congregation remained standing throughout and leaned on armrests like crutches, for which after a while Thesiger said he felt thankful. He was easily moved by the singing of choirboys, and had felt thrilled by the ‘really lovely voice’ of one singer in particular.92 When the service ended, the deacons performed a traditional slow dance to the rhythmic beating of their drums.
Leaving Soddu on 1 April, Thesiger trekked in heavy rain to Lake Margharita in the Rift Valley; then to Chenchia; and from there across the mountains to Gardula and the border with Kenya. In southern Ethiopia he found beautiful country–green and pleasant, covered with wild flowers in bloom after the rain. At one camp a lion chased and killed a mule–an event Thesiger omitted from his later account, yet which added a frisson of excitement to this otherwise uneventful journey. He determined that, in future, he would buy mules, instead of hiring them, since it had proved impossible to find muleteers who would travel any distance and, to his exasperation, their mules had to be changed at every village market.
Some of Thesiger’s most striking photographs were of Konso grave monuments near Bakawli and other villages beyond Lake Ghiamo and Ghidole. The villages were set among stony hills 5,000 feet high. Each village or group of houses was enclosed by a stone wall and the surrounding landscape scattered with acacias in flower and majestic euphorbias, which Thesiger’s father used to compare with Judaic seven-branched candlesticks.93
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