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Descent into hell
MATTHEW PARRIS
This article is from The Times published on 27 June 2006. Camel
Train was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 11am on Friday 30 June 2006
Dusk falls fast in Mekele. In this cool, busy, sunny place, perched
in the Highlands of northern Ethiopia, tropical twilights are sudden.
From the hillside above the town where I stood, watching, the clear
skies turned to mauve, then purple. I was looking for something:
scanning the horizon for specks in the gloom. And sure enough, with
the dusk came the camels. It was as Haji Karzai had said; you could
see their silhouettes on a ridge, moving, swaying. These hills were
their destination, the end of a ten-day, 400km (240-mile) journey.
They had been to hell and back. Hell lies 3,000m (10,000ft) below
Mekele, below sea level, in the deserts of the Danakil Depression.
A hundred miles over dry mountains and down the other side is an
inferno of a place: one of the hottest and most inhospitable on
Earth. A range of volcanoes, some extinct, some still spitting sulphur
dioxide and simmering orange lava, lines this basin; and a range
of hills keeps out the Red Sea. And at its lowest point a salt lake
shimmers and stinks in the burning sun, its centre a dead, black
sea, its margins a great, unbroken rim of solid salt crust. Salt
is precious to humans and their livestock in Africa - always has
been.
So every year since the earliest times (some say the trade was
recorded by the Ancient Greeks) men and beasts from the green and
pleasant Highlands of Ethiopia have gritted their teeth and descended
into the furnace of the Danakil. They go with trains of camels and
donkeys too, the camels strung, tail-to-lip, up to 30 at a time.
They fetch the salt.
Haji Karzai is a Mekele salt trader, a Muslim in a mostly Christian
town. He and his family inhabit an Aladdin's cave of a mud-built
house in a maze of little alleys in the centre of the town. A horse
and cart took me there, and as my BBC producer Jeremy Grange and
I entered, blind in the gloom after the glare outside, we felt ourselves
to be in the presence of treasure. The treasure was stacked in white
ingots, each bound lovingly in sisal, from floor to ceiling. This
white gold was solid salt. In the middle of the room a young man
with a special hand-axe was cutting into small bricks the paving-stone-sized
slabs of salt, each weighing about 4.5kg (12lb), brought by the
camel trains. A strong camel can carry up to 20 of these. From Karzai's
store the stacks of smaller ingots would make their way by van and
truck to all the open-air markets of Ethiopia
Jeremy and I were making a programme for BBC Radio 4. We had with
us a fantastic Ethiopian guide, Solomon Berthe, and he had arranged
two Toyoto 4x4s, drivers, and a cook. Our plan was to go where the
camels I had just seen at twilight were coming from: to trace the
salt-trains up from their source. Our track would cross and recross
the camel-drivers' route, we would take time off to walk with them
by day and to stay in their encampments by night. We would learn
what it is like going down, what it is like cutting and loading
the salt, and what it is like to climb back up, winding through
the mountains. We would see how these men and animals lived and
survived through what is - by common consent in Ethiopia - one of
the toughest things a man, boy or camel can attempt in his life.
The camel men set out with nothing: nothing, that is, but dry bread,
tea-leaves, and a few bottles to carry water. The camels set out
with mountains of straw piled high on their backs. These they deposit
at the small villages they pass on the way down. Villagers keep
them safe on their roofs for the camels' return journey. There is
no fodder down in the Danakil - none at all. This helps to explain
the sharp and time-honoured division of labour we found to exist
in the trade. Only Tigrayans - the people of the Highlands - drive
camels to and from the Danakil. Only the Afar - the beguiling, volatile
and by reputation bloodthirsty nomadic tribe who have made the Depression
their home - cut and shape the big pavers of salt that the Tigrayans
load on to their camels.
The Afar have camels but they have no straw, so the range of their
camels - the reach of the camelid fuel tank - cannot carry them
up into the Highlands and back. The Tigrayans have both camels and
straw - but they do not have the lake or the salt: that is in Afar
territory, and Afars will not relinquish their salt without a share
in the action and the proceeds. The early 20th-century traveller
the late Wilfred Thesiger reports that the Afar male was notorious
for the posthumous castration of those he killed - and the stringing
of the desiccated genitals on to his necklace, to prove his own
manhood. Outrage disintegrated (mercifully) into giggles when I
challenged an Afar group who had invited me under their shelter
for tea, with that allegation. Not true, they said. Still, we sensed
that the Afar wear with pride their reputation (among their fellow
Ethiopians) for ferocity.
It is tempting to impress you with tales of our own discomfort
and fortitude as we followed the ancient camel route from Mekele
down through the mountains into the desert below, but the truth
is that Jeremy, Solomon and I had a whale of a time. We had transport,
food, water and tents (though soon it was too hot to need these,
and we slept out under the blazing stars) and we observed the stoicism
and guts of the camel drivers only as amazed witnesses.
I think we came closest to these brave souls and their own private
experiences when, after walking for an hour with a small posse of
camels, mules and donkeys, arriving - their journey almost over
- on the Highland plateau with their loads of salt, we decided to
bed down among a large encampment of drivers and their beasts. Some
were on their way up from the Danakil, others on their way down.
I have not yet heard our programme, but felt while we were recording
it that our microphone was doing better justice to a black and starry
night among weary camels and their drivers than television ever
could The crackle of the fires, the slurp of weak, gruel-like African
beer served by the women of the village, the sounds of laughter
and storytelling, the rumbles of the camels' stomachs and the gurgling,
bubbling, grumbling noises the animals made when at midnight their
drivers roused them to resume their onward journey . . . these were
sounds and scenes none of us will ever forget.
Nor can we forget the small town of Berahile. Nestling around a
big, dried-up river-bed - the gateway to a final, wild, bone-dry
mountain range through which the rock-strewn track passes on its
descent into the desert - this place is really the last outpost
of modern Ethiopian administration before things turn seriously
primitive. Berahile is a sort of Clapham Junction of the camel-train
community. Encamped on the river bed that evening, we counted (as
we drank beer, cooled in a deep puddle covered with hessian sacking,
at the soldiers' bar above it) perhaps 500 camels and their drivers.
Some were resting here on their way up; others on their way down.
Here there was water for men and camels to drink deep.
Below Berahile, brown camels and white Toyotas diverged. Our track
went through the thorn-scrub and over the mountains. The camel trains
followed the sandy river-bed through them. They were three days
from the Danakil, and only once more would there be water. We met
them again after our GPS altimeter (registering an unchanging 0ft
as we continued to drop) admitted to its inability to calculate
altitudes with a minus sign. Our thermometer, meanwhile, had hit
38C (110F). It was midwinter. Fanned by a hot, strong wind, a straggling,
flyblown village of tin and straw - Hamed Ela: the last human habitation
before the lake - greeted us dusty travellers with a hospitality
we had hardly expected. Children ran to us, a camping place was
found for us, and we sat drinking tea at dusk as a seemingly unending
series of camel trains (I counted 400 camels) padded softly past.
Once heard, seen, but mostly felt, the experience of thousands of
flat leather feet as big as table-tennis rackets, at the end of
thousands of impossibly high, thin leather legs, upon which sway
thousands of strange bodies and snaking necks, and heads so improbable
as to seem to come from another planet, all loping unhurriedly past
in a gentle, yard-long, pad-padding rhythm, like the pentameters
of a poem, stays in your dreams. Camels are science fiction. This
whole world was science fiction.
There was no space in our radio programme - and there is hardly
space here - to tell you about the hills of sulphur and salt below
the village; about the bubbling cauldrons of boiling water and superheated
steam; the oily blue-green pools of sulphuric acid; the smell of
burning matches; the fields of chemical yellow and gashes of red
iron oxide, throbbing with heat. One dead bird, turned to leather
by the salt, was the only animal or vegetable thing we found in
those low hills above the lake: all the rest was mineral: a dead
landscape, alive only with unnatural colour. "Nobody can live in
the Danakil during the summer," a Tigrayan camel-driver had told
us. "Only the Afar can stand the summer."
When after sunrise we walked with the camels and men to their destination
- the salt-encrusted edge of the lake, and turning-point of this
journey - we saw what he meant. This, remember, was winter. In intense
heat, a blinding white pinprick of a sun reflected such a glare
from the flat white surface of the salt that one could look neither
up nor down. Camels were lying on the cracked salt floes, their
necks resting on the powder, licking it. Men with crowbars made
of wood were prising and lifting slabs, others were hacking at them
with steel hand-axes, shaping the slabs which the rest of the men
were loading on to crouching camels saddled with a wood-and-rope
contraption on which the slabs were stacked. The air was filled
with the roaring of dyspeptic camels, the rhythmic songs of the
axe-gangs and the percussion of iron on salt. Some of the camels
had raw red wounds on their backs, where the saddling had rubbed.
Some looked strong, others barely fit for the most gruelling part
of their journey, which was yet to come. On the road we had seen
the bleached bone-and-leather remnants of plenty that had fallen.
Our journey, like that of these thousands of men and beasts, was
only half-accomplished.
We would spend the next few days following them back towards Mekele,
walking with them up the escarpment, drinking tea with them at roadside
shelters of wood and straw, chewing "khat" leaves with them in the
shade. But we knew always that we had the security of our white
steel steeds to whisk us onward whenever we were tired. For these
animals and men it would be different: day upon day of cruel trudge,
one foot in front of the other, as they hauled their strange cargo
up into the hills.
Back in Mekele a few days later, sipping beer on the verandah of
the Abraha Castle Hotel as humming-birds darted among the bougainvillea,
I almost had to pinch myself to be reminded that this was real;
that for me, at least, that giant oven down there in the Danakil,
that nether-world of sulphur, sun, salt and suffering beast, those
days too bright to open your eyes, and those nights of soft darkness,
blazing stars and the gentle pad of a camel's footfall, were real.
They are there now. The Danakil is there now. Hades is beneath us
all the time. I sip my coffee in a hotel bedroom, and shake my head
in disbelief.
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