AFTER Christmas last year, I flew from Dublin, shrouded in freezing fog, down to the sunny Horn of Africa to Addis Abba to find that Christmas there had not yet arrived. At my hotel in Addis, a tourist poster proudly proclaimed, "Ethiopia - 13 months of sunshine". I discovered also that Ethiopian time was measured from daybreak which is one o'clock, and that I was nearly eight years younger than I had been the previous day, by virtue of their Julian calendar. Armed with such new-found youth, I set out by twin Otter plane to visit the sites of the ancient historic route.
In the northern highlands the Siemen mountains, playground of the ancient Gods of Greece, sit moodily on the roof of Ethiopia. Here, among the dramatic profiles of dormant volcanoes, the deities whiled away their summers playing chess, according to Homeric ode. From smoky ravines and amethyst gorges, craggy peaks rise up to resemble the scattered pieces of their enchanted chess games. Abandoned in haste when the pagan gods took flight from the armies of Christian angels, the castles, knights and kings cut in semiprecious stones lie scattered in the shadows of numerous cloudy pawns.
Nearby, in Gondar, hosts of angels' faces framed with elaborately-drawn wings stared down on me with expressive eyes from the painted ceiling-beams of Debra Berham Selassie. These angels with their Ethiopian features, and the rich decorative plan of the church, make it one of the great moments in Ethiopian art. The city of Gondar was the 17th-century capital of the Emperor Fasilidas. According to legend, God chose the site and pointed it out to Fasilidas on a hunting expedition when he followed a buffalo to the chosen spot. At its heart lie the castle, battlements and towers of an African Camelot woven with stories of plots, intrigues, murders and poisonings. A three-storey pavilion, still relatively intact, overlooking a sunken pool used by the Emperor and his family reflects something of the grandeur of their lives.
At Christmas, celebrated to coincide with the Epiphany in January, the pool is once again filled with water from the Qaha river and thousands of people flock to celebrate the water rituals of the Timkat season.
Further north, at the Church of St Mary Zion in Axum, also built by Fasilidas, the pulse of ancient Christianity throbs loudly throughout the Christmas celebrations. A modern, adjoining sanctuary built on the ruins of old St Mary's is said to house the original Ark of the Covenant containing the tablets of law given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai. Legend says it was stolen from Jerusalem by the sons of the Elders of Israel when they accompanied Menelik, son of Solomon and Sheba, back to his mother's home.
At Christmas, thousands of white-shawled male pilgrims throng to this holy of holies to see the exposition of the tabernacle where the Covenant is said to be. Forbidden to enter, as a woman, I sat under the jacaranda trees beyond the gates among the other women and the beggars, and we listened to the resonant chanting of male voices floating on the scented breezes of old Testament time.
The great creator heroine of Ethiopia is Makeda Queen of Sheba; the great destroyer Judith, a later Queen. Women consequently are perceived within that universally familiar dichotomy of creator and destroyer. The ruins of the Queen of Sheba's palace lie directly across from a prehistoric burial ground marked by jagged limestone dolmens. The queen's body is said to lie in this ancient graveyard. Her successors marked their presence with more monumental stones, the great obelisks or stelae of Axum. The tallest stele stands at a height of 23 metres. It was carved to resemble a nine-storey tower house complete with windows, doors, beam ends and other illusionary architectural features. From the altars at its base, some heady form of stone worship which involved blood sacrifices took place to honour the gods of antiquity.
In the 4th century, King Ezana of Axum converted to Christianity. In the 10th century Judith, champion of the northern highlands, destroyed the city of Axum and ostensibly tried to uproot the Christian faith. Two centuries later the descendants of Judith's highland followers were the most passionate Christian converts in the time of King Lalibela. Al Lalibela, named after that King, I walked through labyrinths beneath the towering peach and terracottawalls of monolithic churches hewn from the rock by hand in the 12th and 14th centuries. Within, the aisles and walls were vivid as an illuminated manuscript or pared back sharply to reveal the sculptural essence of their structural parts. Coptic priests dressed in dazzling brocaded robes and shaded by gold lame umbrellas posed with elaborate fretwork crosses before sanctuaries which contained replicas of the Ark of the Covenant, or "tabot". Outside, burrowed into little square cubbyholes cut from the rock face, monks and beggars lived and prayed.
FROM here I winged my way across Lake Tana to Bahar Dar while the pilot snoozed. Happily the first officer was still awake. Airports, I found, were fairly rudimentary affairs outside of Addis and Gondar. A corrugated iron shed normally served as the main building. A window opening allowed the curious to stick their heads out for a breath of air or a better view of the runway. It was forbidden to leave the departure area in case of disruption to air traffic which normally consisted of one or two twin Otter planes a day at roughly eight hour intervals. Wreckage from planes that did not make it was a prerequisite part of the runway landscaping. A length of barbed wire served as the official dividing line between arrivals and departures. A sign pinned skew-ways onto a wooden stake gave very specific directions - left of the gravel path for arrivals, right for departures. Security was always rigorous - passengers were carefully searched for hijacking equipment. Housekeys, nail polish remover and lipsticks were at the top of the list of offending items.
At dawn, the shores of Lake Tana at Bahar Dar were alive with the sounds of birds and insects. The weaver birds were the busiest, dashing about the vast papyrus groves, chittering, chattering and frantically building pouch-shaped nests with funnel-shaped openings from its downy flowers at speeds that suggested a pressing deadline. On the lake, fleets of papyrus canoes laden to sinking point with people, goods and farm produce, floated towards islands on the distant horizon.
The skipper of the boat that I travelled on was the most miserable man in Ethiopia. He had been a last minute replacement for his colleague who had just contracted malaria. He growled at the passengers, kicked a few things into place on deck, shouted some orders to his assistant, locked himself in the engine room and disappeared from view. He did re-emerge, however, later that evening at the end of the trip, metamorphosed into a smiling vision of gregarious affability to collect his tip.
We sailed to view the point where Lake Tana's greatest secret, the Blue Nile, finds its source.
