Free In Ethiopia with a Mule by Dervla Murphy

and each time I half-emptied my quart-measure gourd it was filled to the brim by Yohannes.
    My supper consisted of two minute raw eggs, sucked from their shells, and a rusty tinful of fresh milk. Then I sat by the door watching the sunset colours and the first stars darting out in a still-blue sky. The men were all sitting on their haunches in the compound, talking and drinking talla , their shammas wrapped tightly around them against the evening air – which to me feels only pleasantly cool. The women were pounding peppers for wat in a hollow piece of tree-trunk, or cooking injara over a wood-fire in the main hut; probably none was offered to me because of a mistaken idea that it is unacceptable to faranjs .
    My attempts to buy barley for Jock have failed and he is tethered to a gnarled, dry-leaved tree, mournfully chewing pale teff straw – which contains no nourishment whatever, though presumably it will take the edge off his hunger. This whole compound is rather miserable; a few thistles grow in corners and a little enclosed patch of cotton-bushes is the ‘garden’. But the people are very handsome, like most highlanders. Both men and women have the basic bone-structure that good looks become even more pronounced with old age and everyone shows the finest of teeth that seem never to decay. Few highlanders are conspicuously tall, though the young sub-chief here is well over six feet and devastatingly handsome. I suspect that he and several of his contemporaries have some Italian blood. This is not because of any difference in colouring (many of the highlanders are quite fair-skinned, owing to their part-Semitic ancestry), but because of a difference in physique. The spindly limbs of the highland men and the exaggerated buttocks of the women clearly distinguish them from any European race.
    Ten minutes ago ferocious fighting broke out nearby. The roars and screams of pain and rage were rather alarming, but Yohannes calmly explained that itwas only a quarrel about cattle-stealing between neighbours armed with mule-whips . Now all is silent again, and as the boys have just come in to sleep I’ll do likewise – I hope!
1 January 1967. Mai Cheneta
    This has been an irritating New Year’s Day. When I was ready to start at 6.30 a.m. disaster befell me, for Yohannes was unequal to explaining (or the chief was unwilling to believe) that Leilt Aida had said I might travel alone. Therefore an escort of two was inflicted upon me and as these youths were anxious to get home this evening we arrived here at 2 p.m., having covered sixteen miles of rough terrain in six hours.
    Our departure was delayed by the chief’s insistence on giving my escort a chit, to be delivered to the police on our arrival here; then the boys would be given a receipt from the police for the chief, confirming my safe delivery, and another chit from me informing all whom it might concern that they had done their duty in proper fashion. Such a preoccupation with the written word seems odd in a country where at least 99 per cent of the rural population is illiterate; but possibly it is because of this illiteracy that chits are considered so immensely significant. The sub-chief was the only person in Workhsegeh who could write and, when I had provided paper and pen, all the elders held a long and inexplicably acrimonious discussion about what was to be inscribed. Then the young man began his anguished struggle to form the Tigrinya characters. Merely to watch this effort made me feel mentally exhausted – and when we arrived here the whole performance was repeated, with variations.
    Before we left I shocked everyone profoundly by trying to pay for my lodgings; looking at me with scorn Yohannes said – ‘Here we don’t like money.’
    At 10.30 we stopped briefly for the boys to eat hunks of dark brown, bone dry dabo , which they wished to share with me. I can’t imagine how they swallow it without water: and they never seemed to get thirsty, despite the