Free In Ethiopia with a Mule by Dervla Murphy Page B

the temerity to discuss astronomy when they went home from school. The highlanders still think that the earth is flat: some imagine it to be square, some see it as a disc and others believe it to be limitless. For them day and night are caused by the rotation of the sun above the earth, and the moon is responsible for the crops’ progress after the sun has brought the seedlings above ground. Theoretically it is desirable that such ignorance should be dispelled; but will these children be any better off, as they till their fields throughout the years ahead, for having had their conception of the cosmos thoroughly disorganised?
    On returning here I found the Chief of Police, the headman and a character described as ‘the Sheriff’ sitting in a row on the bed debating how best to deal with the problem of me. A group of privileged children – presumably the offspring of the officials – had been permitted into the room and were squatting motionless along the walls, gazing at me as though hypnotised, while various other locally important personages stood around joining in the argument.
    Had I been willing to ‘do in Rome …’ I would have accepted an escort for tomorrow’s trek; but escorts are so ruinous to my enjoyment that I remained obstinate – and eventually won the battle. I was then asked to write out and sign a statement (in triplicate: one copy for each official) declaring that I had been warned of the dangers and offered an escort, but had insisted on continuing alone. Obviously if I believed in these dangers I wouldn’t be such a fool; but the risk of being shot at by shifta while walking through Ethiopia is probably no greater than the risk of being strangled by a maniac while hitch-hiking through Britain.
    In the course of our argument Haile Mariam had said reproachfully, ‘It is not part of our culture to travel alone’; and I suspect that the unconventionality of my trek upsets these people as much as the possibility of a faranj being murdered and local officials getting the blame. They cannot understand why anyone should want to travel alone – and not understanding they disapprove.
    While our dispute was in progress a touching number of gifts were being brought to me by the locals – dozens of eggs, gourds of curds, flat slabs of different kinds of dabo and four chickens, all squawking frantically in premonition of the pot. (The teachers will benefit greatly from my visit.) Meanwhile the headman’s wife was pouring us tea from a kettle and handing round an earthen bowl of damp, roasted flour, rather like the Tibetans’ tsampa : we all dipped in for our handfuls and then kneaded them into little balls. The curds, too, were delicious; they tasted strongly of wood-smoke, as do some types of talla . One of the chickens became durro-wat for my supper, which I shared with the teachers.
    Like many semi-educated young highlanders, these teachers despise their own Church. Haile Mariam ridiculed the Ethiopian fasting laws and said that the people endure them only because of a superstitious fear of the priests. Perhaps there is an element of truth in this, yet fasting is so emphasised by Ethiopian Christianity that to the average highlander ‘keeping the fast’ and ‘being a Christian’ are synonymous. These fasts have long been known to weaken the highlanders. Both Muslims and Gallas repeatedly attacked the highlands during Lent, but throughout the centuries the Church has been increasing the strictness of the laws, until now the average highlander is expected to fast on 165 days each year and the clergy and elders on about 250 days. *
    Donald Levine states that ‘the rationale commonly given for the extensive schedule of fasting is that man’s nature is wicked and only by weakening himself in this manner will he be turned away from some act of aggression against others’. This reason for the imposition of such irrational laws is interesting. It hints that from the outset Ethiopian Christianity found