ADDIS ABABA – I can’t tell what my dread means. Shrieking children chase one another around the Ethiopian swimming pool. Tanned, well-oiled U.N.-types lumber up and down the lap lanes. The hotel pool’s chlorinated oblivion mirrors my unease, or maybe my exhaustion. I didn’t sleep last night on the overnight flight from Rome to Addis Ababa. Usually, I find such arrivals thrilling. I relish the anonymity of knowing no one and of no one knowing me. Sitting by the largest swimming pool in one of the world’s poorest countries, I feel remorse at having come. It costs $20 to occupy the white, cement deck; another $25 for the Jessica Simpson-brand flowered two-piece I purchased in the gift shop.
The children sound like ominous birds, maybe flesh eaters. I can’t tell the difference between diplomats and arms dealers. This sinister foreign tableau reminds me of the landscape of the young Joan Didion. If she came to Addis Ababa, she’d visit this pool too. She, however, would be clad in a chic black suit and her cool reserve. Sweating and vainly burning in an ill-fitting tankini, I am the opposite. I am hopelessly overexposed.
Chemical waves lap at my fellow First Worlders. I will this time to pass. At sunset, my friend José Cendón, a Spanish photographer based here, will arrive. I haven’t seen him since we worked together in the Somali capitol of Mogadishu two years ago. On his next trip to Somalia, in November 2008, Cendón was kidnapped by pirates and held for three months. We’ve Skyped and e-mailed since his release, but there’s always the awkward, electronic delay. Waiting for dark, I lie prone. Outside the green, plastic perimeter, the country withers.
The terrible traffic also signifies the capital’s boomtown status. From the airport, after a rush-hour jam this morning, I finally reached my guesthouse. This is the neighborhood Cendón told me to stay in. The neighborhood doesn’t really exist yet. There is no road, just a track through what look to be sand dunes. The building is more Saudi sheik—pastel-colored, tinted windows—than African. Inside, the living-room walls are dotted with photographs of Americans who’ve come to adopt babies. All the other guestrooms are full with eager, prospective parents.
In truth, the guesthouse is dismal. We have to share the bathroom. But it received such glowing reviews on TripAdvisor.com. Of course, I think, this is where the new parents had one of the happiest days of their lives: They were given children. As an outsider, I find the sheer numbers of pictures of children and of potential parents disturbing. It seems like an industry. From my room, I can hear one frustrated father arguing with his new son. I start writing. “The Addis Ababa Hotels Are Booked With American Parents”:
I wake from a nap to hear a child too old to forget his first parents scream mama, aba in the next room. Instead of their coming, I hear his new father yank open the pressure-board door, growl Stop it in a language I, but not the child, can understand. The tone is clear enough to shudder the cheap wall between us. Stop, the father softens, adding, please.
This is the band where religious fervor and swelling populations are growing faster than anywhere else in the world. This is the band where the world as we know it is breaking apart. This is the band that runs through Ethiopia. Today, Ethiopia’s population of nearly 83 million is divided nearly evenly between Christians and Muslims. I’ve come to see what happens when the two religions meet.
It’s hardly a new encounter. Ethiopia has one of the richest and oldest religious histories in the world. The story begins more than 2,000 years ago with Judaism. Ethiopians trace their Hebrew identity back to a legendary union between King Solomon and the queen of Sheba. (Sheba, or Saba, is not a person but a place, a kingdom that probably included Yemen and ancient Ethiopia.) According to the biblical account in the Book of Kings, the queen of Sheba heard stories about King Solomon’s belief in a single god. Leading a fabulous caravan of spices and gold, she went to Jerusalem to meet him. After hearing him talk, she converted to Judaism. That’s where the Bible story ends and Ethiopian tradition begins.
Compared with its Jewish history, Ethiopia’s Christian heritage is relatively new. It dates back only to the fourth century. And Islam arrived in Ethiopia, which was then the Kingdom of Abyssinia, during the seventh century. In A.D. 615, the Prophet Mohammed’s tribe, the Quraysh, attacked him for preaching about one god.
For safekeeping, Mohammed sent his family to the court of an Ethiopian king—a Christian. The descendants of those first Muslims still live in an Ethiopian town called Negash, on land that first king granted them during the seventh century. Tomorrow, I’m hoping to meet them in that northern town of Negash.
Ethiopia is a tricky country. There’s a high level of government repression. I’ve given myself the assignment to write poetry, not political analysis. I’ve also come on a pilgrimage of sorts. After years of writing and thinking about other people’s ideas about God, I want to consider my own for a few days.
At last, the relief of evening arrives. I shower and head up to the lobby, which is full of foreign hacks. Red-faced, many are wearing those ridiculous fisherman-type photographer’s vests. I keep my head down over a fresh lime soda and hope to see no one I know. We all make the same rounds.
Cendón hates thugs. He also hates being told what to do. When Freeman started to stumble, Cendón plunked himself down in the sand and refused to keep walking unless the pirates gave their captives water. By way of an answer, one young kidnapper shoved the muzzle of an AK-47 against Cendón’s forehead.
“You can shoot me if you want. We can’t go on without water,” he told the jumpy gun-boy in the darkness.
“That was pretty brave,” I say.
“We couldn’t keep walking without water.”
Eliza Griswold Subject: North to Negash Posted Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2010, at 7:14 AM ET
NEGASH—In 615, when the Prophet Mohammed was attacked by his own people, he had to flee Mecca. His sermons were threatening the power of the Quraysh, so the tribe wanted him, his family, and his followers killed. Mohammed fled to the Arabian town of Yathrib, 210 miles from Mecca. Today, the town is known as Medina, the Prophet’s city.
Mohammed also sent a small number of his devotees, including his daughter Rukiya, to Ethiopia. He asked the Christian king of Abyssinia, as it was then known, to keep his family safe. He trusted the African king because the two men, like the Jews before them, shared a belief in one god. Mohammed hoped this tie would prove more powerful than those of blood or nation. It did. When these first Muslims in Africa were brought before the king of Abyssinia to explain their newfound faith, the expedition’s leader told the king a story from the Quran. It was the story of a virgin named Mary giving birth to a baby boy named Jesus. The Christian ruler allowed the Muslims to stay in his kingdom. The king of Abyssinia granted what has come to be known as one of the earliest cases of political asylum. He even gave them a small plot of earth in northeastern Ethiopia, in a place called Negash.
To reach Negash, I hopped a predawn flight north from the capital of Addis to the trading town of Mekele, renowned for its salt market. Ethiopia once supplied much of East Africa with salt. The Afar people—Muslim nomads who manage to survive in one of the hottest places on earth, the Danakil Depression in northeast Ethiopia—have traveled to Mekele for centuries with salt strapped to backs of their camels. Having never seen a salt caravan, I’d looked forward to the romance of miles of salt-encrusted beasts.
Mekele is also the place where I am to meet a driver who will ferry me 50 miles north to meet whoever is left of the seventh-century settlement at Negash.
To my disappointment, on arriving in Mekele I learned that the salt caravans I’d imagined are largely a relic of the past. Thanks to the newly built Chinese road, the Afar people now truck their salt most of the way to town from the Danakil Depression. Yonas, the driver I’d hired through a Roman hotelier (who owns the stunning stone Gheralta Lodge, where I will be staying) feels my disappointment keenly. To cheer me, he insists we visit the palace of the 19th-century Emperor Yohannes, a precursor to the most famous and final of Ethiopia’s kings, Haile Selassie.
Thanks to its European architect, the palace looks and feels like a Swiss hunting lodge, except for mud crenellations, a mahogany throne, and the emperor’s leopard skin. The latter functioned as the emperor’s cloak in times of peace; his saddle in times of war, I am told. We marvel at a musket with a golden trigger, a gift from Queen Victoria. The massive bronze head of Mussolini sits in an upstairs window as a nod to the fascist’s brief flirtation with Africa.
“May I show you the emperor’s personal toilet?” The guide asks in a hushed tone. He opens a door in the throne room onto a second-story wooden privy. We peer into the seat’s 20-foot drop. In glass cases, there are thousands of Ethiopian hand crosses: elaborate latticework crucifixes that priests and kings carry to show their devotion and legitimize their power. Most of the crosses are marked conspicuously with typed index cards naming the European museum that has recently returned them to their rightful owners in Ethiopia.
On our way out of town, Yonas, a spindly ethnic Tigrayan, begins to shout, “A salt caravan!” He gestures madly as I scan the horizon for the stenciled shapes of the hundreds of beasts I’ve been waiting to see. Instead, about 500 feet ahead of us on the road, two dozen tired camels lope forward, bound to one another by a length of dirty rope. Knee-high donkeys swarm around them, bucking like rambunctious schoolboys walking home. The camels and donkeys carry white flour sacks stuffed with grass: their food.
The camel driver is not Afar, I can see, because he is not a Muslim. From the silver cross that flashes on his neck when he waves at our passing truck, I gather that he is a Christian.
“Oh, everyone has camels nowadays, Christians and Muslims, the people of Tigray, and the Afar people,” the driver says.
We drive on, heading north on the China Road, toward Ethiopia’s war-torn border with its enemy Eritrea. The latter is a relatively new country; Eritrea only declared its independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after a bloody civil war. Although the two nations are still fighting over the border between them, there’s no evidence of strife: no soldiers, no checkpoints.
Instead, the land around us is biblical: smudged, pastel escarpments with an occasional handful of whitewashed houses to suggest the passage of the last 2,000 years. Then ahead of us, I see a single, 30-foot-high minaret shingled in green tile.
Here is Negash, but the place looks deserted. We park and wonder for a moment where everyone is. Then I notice thousands of shoes on the mosque’s porch. It’s Friday, of course, and I’d forgotten that the residents, who still trace their lineage back to Mohammed’s first followers, would be engaged in midday prayer. We have to wait. Finally, men stream from the doors of the large, shining mosque. Two elderly gentlemen approach. After visiting hundreds of mosques over the last seven years, I am used to all manner of greetings. Not all have been warm, but from the smiles on the faces of the approaching men, this one promises to be. The first introduces himself as Sheik Ahmed Adam, the leader of this community of 600 Muslims. He is 58 but looks much closer to 90.
Yes, the sheik says, some of his people can trace their lineage to the first 15 followers who arrived in Africa during the seventh century: 14 men and one woman, the Prophet’s daughter. I remove a palm-size Flip video camera from my purse and begin to record their stories. Yet when I ask who among them has such a family, the story quickly grows vague. I don’t think he’s lying. We’re just suffering the shared muddiness of memory and translation.
My mind is starting to feel like a failing butterfly net; trying to follow story lines is proving elusive. No matter, I think, I’ve come to write poems. The men and their histories muddle on. I grow frustrated. For better or for worse, I am trained to experience places by recording information. I am trained to write things down, to assess through the frame of a notebook. I’m trying to rely on this stupid camera—a tape recorder and camera all in one—but without a notebook open before me, I feel naked and woozy. So I pull out the notebook and pocket the Flip camera, knowing the video will be no good anyway. The sheik’s head keeps bobbing out of frame. For an old man, he moves fast.
Has there been trouble here with Christians? He looks bewildered. None, he says, thanks to the express directions of their Prophet. According to the Hadith, or sayings of the Prophet, there’s an injunction against attacking Christians here. Tradition has it that Mohammed told his followers, “Leave the Abyssinians alone unless they take the offensive!” The sheik says, “In Mecca, the Prophet, peace be upon Him, had a great, great, great, war with his own people, but not here. Because he blessed us, we have had no problems. We have weddings and funerals together. We are one community.”
The gentle afternoon serves as a reminder of the more than 1,500 years of peaceful history Islam and Christianity share in Africa. As we return to the car and continue north to the Gheralta Lodge, I feel my brain stretching itself around this new history. No, I think, it’s hardly new. This is ancient history new to me because much of it lies outside the American history books I was raised reading.
From: Eliza Griswold Subject: An Offering Posted Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2010, at 7:42 AM ET
Abuna Yemata Guh, the church carved into the rock at the top of the cliff, is named for a shadowy fifth-century saint. Abuna means “priest,” and Yemata is one of nine who is believed to have fled persecution elsewhere in the Roman Empire. The Ethiopians call these nine foreigners Syrian, because they were white. Guh, means “sunrise.” Ethiopians say that from the summit you can see where the world begins.
I’ve made much easier climbs than this one wearing a harness. If the monk, my driver-cum-guide Yonas, and I were climbing in the United States, we would be clipped to each other and to the rock.
“Don’t look down,” Yonas says, helpfully.
I don’t. I realize, in the thinning air, that I am risking my life to reach a church. I laugh at the absurdity. I grew up as the skeptical child of an Episcopal priest in the Philadelphia suburbs. I resented church and all that Sunday entailed. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God. I believed in something. But I was afraid to believe too much. I feared that God would come down from heaven and ask me to do something painful and against my will. To a child’s mind—and my father’s—that meant being a nun. We visited one of my father’s best friends sometimes, Sister Pia. She lived in a cloister. I only saw her through a grate. It looked like jail. In that exchange, or any that God mandated, I would be forced to relinquish myself to a divine and mercurial will.
Eventually, a friend offered a different way to consider God’s will. “Has it ever occurred to you that God might work through your will?” she asked me. “Your will and God’s will might be the same.” She meant that what I wanted to do might be what God wanted me to be doing. That baffled me.
This ascent feels too charged, too laden with memory. I grip the cliff and keep my mind on the next foothold. Fear can be focusing. We scramble up and on until we reach a rocky saddle wide enough to rest. I notice the mouths of two different caves. Gasping for breath, I peer into one and pull back. It’s layered with human skulls. I look closer and note rib cages and femurs poking through rotten cloth of old rags that look very much like those the monk accompanying us is wearing.
The cave’s a sacred burial ground, Yonas explains. When a monk or priest dies, his brethren carry the dead man up this cliff. For centuries, these unburied bodies have been picked clean by buzzards. I’ve seen this rite elsewhere. In Congo, for instance, pygmies don’t bury their dead. They wrap them beneath a tree in the forest. The idea is that the earth is too sacred to take in human dead.
“You climb with dead bodies?” I ask Yonas to ask the old monk. A loud, cold wind licks the rock. My legs are still shaking.
“Not just the dead,” he replies. “Mothers must climb this cliff too.” He continues, “They must baptize their babies less than 40 days after the baby is born.”
With feet firmly planted, I allow myself to look back where we’ve come from, imagining a mother, days after giving birth, hauling her newborn and herself up this sandstone mountain.
In the second cave of hollowed-out rock, an oversized egg, there’s room enough for a 12-year-old boy—or me, at 5-foot-3—to stand up straight in its center. There’s nothing inside the shelter but a tiny wooden seat that looks like a milking stool. The stone egg is a chamber for meditation, the monk explains before he and Yonas leave me alone for a minute. I pull the stool under me, and look over the rock’s lip. A few feet away, the cliff falls off to oblivion. I can feel the wind scour my bones clean, like the monks’ skeletons in the cave behind me. I don’t think that the men can hear me over the wind.
“Thank you,” I say, “You can have my life now.”
I don’t know what the offering means, and I don’t stop to think about it. Yonas has warned that the worst part is still ahead, but it’s one of those rare moments when I am allowed to leave my fear and sack of small woes by the milking stool. We press on into a small room decorated with men with piercing eyes riding white horses: the nine pale-skinned saints’ arrival in Africa.
From: Eliza Griswold Subject: Advice From the Guardian of the Ark of the Covenant Posted Thursday, Dec. 16, 2010, at 7:06 AM ET
AXUM—In Greek, Ethiopia means “land of the burnt faces.” This name predates A.D. 8, when Ovid recounts this myth in his Metamorphoses: Phaeton, Apollo the sun god’s bastard son, confronts his father and takes the reins of his chariot. The sun’s horses prove too strong for Phaeton. He loses control and burns the Ethiopians black.
“Ovid on Climate Change”
Bastard, the other boys teased him, til Phaethon unleashed the steeds of Armageddon. He couldn’t hold their reins. Driving the sun too close to earth, the boy withered rivers, torched Eucalyptus groves, until the hills burst into flame, and the people’s blood boiled through the skin. Ethiopia, land of burnt faces. In a boy’s rage for a name, the myth of race begins.
Axum is a dusty, desertified town waiting patiently for archaeologists to dig into its underground tombs, which have lain undisturbed for thousands of years. Above ground, it’s also fairly quiet. On this weekend in February, the main sites are nearly empty. I find my guide through the tourism bureau. He is also named Yonas, a 25-year-old cherub and university student.
He takes me to the basement of a wooden shack. The walls are so shoddy that chinks of striped light catch dust across the dirt floor. There’s no other illumination on the 6-foot-high square stone in the shack’s center. Each of its four sides is etched with characters—languages I don’t recognize—carefully and urgently communicating a message no one can read anymore. This is King Ezana’s stone, a nearly 2,000-year-old monument, which some farmers dug up while tilling the surrounding field in 1981. The stone issues the same proclamation in three different languages: Greek, a dead Arabian language called Sabaean, and ancient Ethiopian Ge’ez. Archaeologists have dated the stone to somewhere between 330 and 356. At the time, a king named Ezana ruled Axum and South Yemen. The stone tells the story of his Christian conversion and of his efforts to bring the Ark of the Covenant from another part of Ethiopia to Axum. The stone is no hoax; maybe the Ark was here for a while. In any case, this is a Rosetta stone, essentially, demanding that every passer-by—from Arabia, the Middle East, Africa, India, and China—pay tax by way of tribute to the king.
Standing next to me, Yonas knows much of what the stone says by heart. I’ve brought the blasted Flip camera. In true documentarian style, he steps forward when I push the red Record button, and recites, “I believe in Jesus, the son of God …” He looks like an angel with the light edging his face, and I think that if this old stone were anywhere else in the world, besides maybe neighboring Somalia, people would be lined up to see it.
Yet Judaism thrived in Ethiopia long before the other two Abrahamic faiths even existed. Its arrival, like that of the Ark of the Covenant, has to do with that union between King Solomon and the queen of Sheba, and with their son Menelik.
Both the Quran and the Bible tell a version of the virgin queen’s story, her fascination with Solomon’s single god, and her conversion. Ethiopian legend unfolds a little differently. Solomon falls in love with this queen, of course. He tricks her into sleeping with him by oversalting her food and essentially demanding sex in exchange for a glass of water. She bears him this son, Menelik, leaves Israel with 12,000 followers, and, unbeknownst to him, the Ark of the Covenant. It isn’t until midway through his trek back to his mother’s home in Ethiopia that Menelik discovered his companions, priests’ sons, had stolen the ark from the Temple of Solomon. That, according to legend, is how the first Jews and the ark came to Ethiopia.
As Hancock points out in The Sign and the Seal, the dates of this fabled journey can’t possibly check out. Yet much of the story of the ark’s arrival along with a band of early Jews from Jerusalem might. Travel between Jerusalem, Egypt, and Ethiopia took place thousands of years ago. This is just more proof that globalization is hardly a novel phenomenon. But whether the ark is—could possibly be—here now is hard to imagine. We go to St. Mary of Zion, the church where the ark supposedly rests. It is absolutely impossible to see the Ark. No one does. Even the Guardian Monk, the one man appointed to pray and fast and sleep and rest by the ark for the rest of his life, doesn’t see it.
The Guardian Monk is the only link between the ark and the rest of the world, but he doesn’t talk to outsiders. Nevertheless, I’d like to try to speak to him. Yonas supports the effort. He’s pretty positive that we won’t find the Guardian Monk, anyway.
From the shoddy wooden shack, we hop into a rusted-out microbus taxi and drive two miles to the church. The churchyard is shaded by a massive jacaranda tree’s canopy. All over northern Ethiopia, most of its once-verdant landscape has been denuded for fuel. For much of the year, the hills and steppes look as if they’ve been blanched the color of straw. This is not the case with churchyards, however. Most are a green so dark they look like ponds from a distance. Because they are sacred ground, no one cuts down their trees. In turn, all manner of birds and small creatures live in these places.
From miles away, you can tell where a church is by its dark forest splotch against a dusty, fawn-colored backdrop of Africa’s once-green hills. Closer, you can actually follow the cacophony of birds.
We march past the massive, concrete bunker that serves as the modern church. Built by Haile Selassie in 1953, the holy bunker boasts a chandelier, a gift from Queen Elizabeth II. I glance in dutifully, and on we go into a fenced-in courtyard, where two small gray buildings stand alongside a grassy hole. The hole marks the foundation of the ancient church that, the story goes, served as the ark’s resting place until the Jewish warrior queen named Judith, an astonishing heroine, burned down the church on a raid during the 10th century. Six hundred years later, when Muslims and Christians began to fight, a Muslim warrior named Ahmed the Grayn (that is, Ahmed the Left-Handed) galloped into the Christian highlands from a lowland Muslim kingdom to the east called Harar.
In the Guardian Monk’s courtyard, to be polite, I take the tour of Axum’s musty relics, excluding the ark, of course. Animal skins line the glass cases. There are row after row of gold scepters and crowns. I see an emperor’s hank of old hair and gold hairpins; a pair of golden slippers. I nod and ooh encouragingly, as if the guard showing me around cares what I think. I’m sure he doesn’t.
I’m eager to move on to the next event: waylaying the ark’s guardian. On the gray steps beyond a locked iron gate, I can see an aging, crooked man draped in a white cassock and a mustard-colored hat. Attendants surround him.
“You’re in luck,” young Yonas says. We must have caught the guardian out for a rare breath of air.
One downy-faced, black-robed attendant, with the look of a modern-day eunuch, or a choirboy, approaches the fence, smiling.
“She’d like to talk to the Guardian Monk,” Yonas tells him in their shared language of Tigrayan.
“About what?” the choirboy asks, glancing at me.
“The ark, how the monk came here,” Yonas says.
The choirboy leaves us at the fence and whispers in the old man’s ear. The guardian turns his head to consider me. His eyes are pale blue, the color of the hotel pool, of that odd sky beyond the milking stool.
Slowly, he descends the stairs and approaches the fence. His name is Abba Gebre Maskal, which means servant, or slave, of the cross.
“What exactly do you want to know?” he asks. Yonas translates.
“What do you want me to tell people far away who don’t believe the Ark of the Covenant is here?”
“I don’t want you to tell them anything,” he says. “If they don’t believe it’s here, let them be suspicious,” he grumbles. That was a poor choice of questions, I realize.
“How did you come to be the ark’s guardian?”
“At first I resisted,” he says. “It’s so difficult. You are expected to fast constantly, pray all night, prepare holy water, advise people, and talk to them, bless them all day.” Hmm, so perhaps it wasn’t so difficult to speak to him after all.
Two years earlier, the Guardian Monk had been an Ethiopian Orthodox priest in a nearby church.
“Right next to the queen of Sheba’s baths,” he says. When the community’s elders came to tell him he’d been selected to be the next guardian, he refused them. So they followed him to his house and wouldn’t leave until he took the job. The Guardian Monk is growing restless, eyeing the chapel door behind him, looking for an escape.
“Have you seen the ark?”
“I don’t see it. We don’t talk about this,” he says, his blue eyes growing vague, as if a cloud is passing behind them through his mind’s high stratosphere. The interview is ending.
“Do you have any advice for me?”
His eyes sharpen immediately. With this question, I have surprised both of us. But there’s something about this man that makes me ask.
“Two things keep you from God,” he says. “Suspicion and being desperate.”
“What does he mean by that?” I ask Yonas to press the monk for another translation beyond this Ethiopian Orthodox koan.
The Guardian Monk goes on, “Suspicion means you think there’s another way to escape this mess besides God. Suspicion is Lot’s wife.”
Lot’s wife was turned to salt for looking backward, for lack of trust.
I grimace to show my incomprehension.
He goes on, “Being desperate means believing in God but not that He will forgive you, like Judas. Judas believed in God, but not that God would forgive him after he betrayed Jesus.”
“He means despair?” I ask Yonas.
“Exactly, yes. He means despair.”
“Have a little faith,” the monk says. “Don’t despair. Even if you’ve done a lot of bad things in your life, God will forgive you.”
I will muse on those bad things later. For now, I ask through the fence if he’s afraid that anyone will try to take the ark away from his people. I ask if they are afraid of Muslims here, and he laughs.
“No. The ark will only leave us if we don’t pray. That would be our fault. No one can take it from us. We are like government employees. If we do our jobs, God will be happy. If we don’t, God will give our jobs to someone else.” He laughs again at his own joke.
“Let them bring their Quran, and we’ll bring the Bible. There’s no man alive on Earth good enough to judge between them. We must be open-minded. Our weapon is our prayer in Ethiopia. A soldier has an automatic rifle. I have this.” He holds up a wooden hand cross. A blue-and-gold sleeve covers its handle and his hand. “Nothing can be done without God’s will,” he says. “You and I wouldn’t be able to meet.”
Quieted by this strange encounter, Yonas and I cross the road to an ancient graveyard of towering shards of stone. This stelae field is known as Africa’s Stonehenge. Some of its leaning obelisks are nearly 100 feet high, and they are carved like apartment buildings; they depict many stories of shuttered windows. There are so many mysteries here. Did the people here build in that manner? Were the stories a symbolic way to reach heaven?
No one knows. Archaeologists have excavated only a small fraction of this legendary city. Why? Because this is Africa, Yonas tells me, and the guides only know a limited amount of the significance of various palace ruins and ancient, pre-Roman baths. Later, as we visit the nearby rubble of a 50-room palace rumored to have belonged to the queen of Sheba (it almost certainly didn’t). Yonas yells out to a friend in Tigrayan, “It’s a holiday, and you’re not drunk yet?” That boy’s mother makes great beer, he tells me.
Here in sleepy Axum, the guides call out to each other in their language of Tigrayan so that the tourists don’t understand that the guides are making fun of each other—or the tourists they’re cheerfully leading around like rueful ducklings. When we pass another of his colleagues, a man wearing a cartoonish sombrero and leading some sunburned folk in shorts through the ruins, Yonas tells me that this guy is no longer an official tourist guide. He lost his license after he was caught one too many times making up stories, like how archaeologists had discovered the queen of Sheba’s arm.
“For tips,” Yonas says.
The next morning at 4:30, Yonas comes to fetch me. We are going to a festival at which a model of the ark, called a tabot, is carried around town by thousands of singing pilgrims who hold white candles. In the darkness, we pass the field of towering stones and walk toward a river of candles.
