Read In Ethiopia with a Mule for Free Online

through the undergrowth into the invisible depths of the valley below. Apart from the workers, scores of men, women and children walk for miles every day just to watch, and they feel that this machine which moves mountains must be operated by some high-powered magic, lately discovered through the cleverness and virtue of their Prince. Frequently, during our picnic, Ras Mangasha leaped to his feet and yelled frantic warnings at open-mouthed onlookers who had chosen to stand and stare in the path of lethal boulders. As Leilt Aida remarked, these recurrent dramas were very bad for everyone’s digestion. Not to mention the fact that from our angle the bulldozer itself looked in imminent danger of following the rocks.
    Despite the bulldozer, the tractors and the Mercedes this scene was essentially of another age. As we ate, several peasants approached Ras Mangasha to present gifts of bread. They came towards us bent double, holding out the leaf-wrapped loaves with both hands and not daring to raise their eyes; but when a servant had accepted the gift some of the bolder spirits came closer and, after a moment’s hesitation, reverently touched the muddy princely boot with their fingertips.
    Archbishop Mathew has remarked that until the accession of Yohannes IV ‘the sustained element of the picturesque, which was so marked a feature of court life in Ethiopia, was lacking in the viceroyalty of the Tigre. … These viceroys were without a sense of dynasty, armed chief had followed armed chief. … There could be nothing withdrawn or sacred in such a feudal history.’ However, since the reign of Ethiopia’s only Tigrean Emperor this province has adopted the rigid, stylised etiquette that for so many centuries regulated the behaviour of the Gondarine and Shoan courts – though the differing traditions are remarkably reflected in the personalities of Leilt Aida Desta and Leul Ras Mangasha Seyoum. Yet neither is pure-blooded, for theirs is not the first marriage alliance between the rival royal houses of Tigre and Shoa. When Yohannes IV was dying on the battlefield of Gallabat he named as his heir Ras Mangasha, an illegitimate son by his brother’s wife (his legitimate heir had already been poisoned), and this man became the future Emperor Menelik’s only serious competitor. Soon Menelik had vanquished the Tigrean prince on the battlefield and he then compelled Ras Mangasha to divorce his wife and marry a niece of the Empress Taitu. It was after this Mangasha’s son – Seyoum – had been killed in the 1960 revolution that the present Leul became head of the family.
    As I watched the peasants paying homage to their Prince I thought of all this tangled background – which partly explains why Ras Mangasha maintains no royal aloofness. His noted accessibility is a reversion to type, though it bewilders the Tigrean peasants, who know little of their own history and have long since accepted the formal Amharic code.
    When we got back to the palace I hurried out to see Jock, who was looking a little forlorn in his new quarters. We took a short stroll, and I then decided that since both my feet feel comfortably re-skinned we can start our trek on the twenty-ninth.
    For dinner Leilt Aida provided us with a sheep roasted whole on a spit. It looked romantic and tasted delicious.
28 December
    This morning I woke at 6.30 to see Christopher and Nicola standing by my bed, pleading to come with me as far as Aksum. They are a tough pair – born and bred in Southern Ethiopia – so I said that of course they could come, if parental permission were granted. But in the end this daydream was reduced to Christopher ’s accompanying me on tomorrow’s stage and being retrieved in the evening by a palace car.
    When the other Bromleys had left for home Christopher and I went to the open-air market, where I hoped to find a suitable walking-stick. The market-place covers about two acres and scores of villagers from surrounding districts – the majority