I go alone? Yes, yes—all alone! No (suspicious villagers would march you straight into the first town). Is it safe? (Very safe, no bandits/you will need one unit of armed guards). Is there food? (No food/lots of food). The truth was that no one knew anything other than a couple of the towns on my route.
I found a tent, bought a kerosene stove and stocked up with packet soup and sardines. I tracked down a Tigrinya-speaking guide named Hiluf in Aksum; I asked him to take a bus and meet me in Lalibela. I prised a map from the appropriate government agency.
One morning, I climbed the hill to Giorgis cathedral. It was not yet eight. The crowds were flooding up past the equestrian statue of Emperor Menelik. We were pressed closer and closer together, swept forward on an unstoppable tide. The octagonal church rose from a mass of white gabbis. All around me people were in various states of rapture. Some men were dancing. Others bowed their heads. Women stood in tears. From the steps, a flop-haired hermit delivered a eulogy to the dual virginity of Mary: ‘There is nothing that equals her glory. She is higher than all creatures, men as well as angels! Her dress is the sun with the moon beneath her feet…‘ Amputees dragged themselves among the worshippers’ legs. A group of boys had climbed into the trees to watch. It could have been the fifteenth century, or any century.
Giorgis cathedral was the first place I ever saw the spectacle of Ethiopian worship. I had come here with Teklu on my second day in Addis. After a lifetime of sober grey churches and bloodless rite, I was astonished. Christianity to me was something dusty and ossified, but not here. Over the years, the Ethiopian Church came to distil for me all that was extraordinary and ageless about the country. After my first visit, I thought you only had to step out over the threshold of Europe to be faced with such a sight. Now I know that that is only partly true. There is nowhere else on earth quite like Ethiopia.
The next morning, with 130 pounds of equipment and food, I flew to Lalibela.
An hour before dawn and Lalibela’s rock-cut trenches are dark as oil. Their high sides rise to a narrow strip of stars. Underfoot the tufa is rough and pitted. I steady myself with a hand on the cold walls. The night air is sharp against my nostrils. Along the tunnel from the church of Debra Sina comes the nasal sound of chanting. Each phrase lasts a minute. Then—boooom!—the first beat of the kebbero. It is a sound like no other. It strikes you somewhere deep in the thorax. Another beat, and I quicken my pace.
Far below ground level, the base of the church rises from its own plinth of bedrock. Sandals are heaped by the door. Light glows from keel-arch windows. Inside is warmth, the smell of an all-night presence. Dozens of people are wrapped in white gabbis. Some are no more than shapes on the floor; others are standing heron-still around the central bay. On sturdy columns can be seen the chisel-cuts in the rock. The columns rise to shallow cupolas. Far beneath them two drummers squat beside their kebberos. Slowly, alternately, with the flat of their hands, they are beating the goatskin tympana.
The debtara are standing over them. They are elongated figures in white turbans and hanging white shawls. They are chanting. The drums beat, the debtara drop their wrists and their handheld sistra rattle like coins.
One of the drummers gives a quick, double bo-boom! The other follows. The tempo increases. One by one the shapes rise from the floor. In two lines the debtara shuffle towards each other. Their prayer sticks cluster above them. At the exact moment they begin the dance, a blind cantor steps to the front, his mouth open in song. He is wearing a pair of women’s dark glasses. The drummers are standing now. Each kebbero hangs from a shoulder-strap. They circle each other. They give two more double beats. Rhythmic clapping spreads through the church. One of the drummers leans to the right, the other to the left. Now they are spinning. They are crouching, rising. Their faces glow with abandon. The people press closer around them. The cupolas fill with ululations. The drummers’ eyes flash in the half-light. The debtara are swinging the prayer sticks now, surrounding the drummers in their ecstasy of beating. A young boy joins their line, his head level with the men’s hips. He is imitating their movements.
Out of nowhere, a man leaps into the midst. His matted hair swings from side to side. He dips his cross-staff above his head. His movements are fluent and precise. A grin splits his skull-like face. The boy has stopped dancing. He is standing still, buffeted and jostled by those around him. He is staring at the man, and his eyes are wide with fear and amazement.
No force on earth could stop this. The man is revolving around the drummers. Sweat flicks from his hair. Deep below
the ground, the hollowed-out chapel is filled with drumming, filled with clapping, filled with ululating, and it all merges in a fever of sound and movement and devotion.
Then it is over. The drummers are lifting the kebberos over their heads. The debtaras‘ sistra tinkle as they set them down. Two priests are involved in a hissed argument, flicking through a psalter. The shapes on the floor are re-forming themselves. The man with matted locks has disappeared.
Outside again, dawn is a pale loom above the trench. It is still cold. From the distance comes the sound of a tirumba, the funereal horn—and a cry: ‘Citizens of Lalibela! Come out—come out! Come and help bury the body of Colonel Melaku. Citizens of Lalibela, come out, come out!‘
Lalibela is a town to die in. The tunnels that once linked the complex of churches are clogged with centuries of corpses. To make a pilgrimage to Lalibela eases your later passage to heaven—but to die here is much better. The soil itself is sacred, and those who take the journey are buried in shallow graves.
The site has never been conclusively dug by archaeologists. Scholars know by heart the handful of significant written references to it. It is easier to list what is not known about Lalibela than what is. It is not known precisely when the churches were carved, whether they were started during the thirteenth-century reign of King Lalibela or much earlier. Nor is it known where all the excavated rock was deposited, nor if any outside expertise was responsible. Nor why, deep in the mountains of Lasta, the Herculean task of chipping out these eleven churches and their labyrinth of link trenches was undertaken. Like Ethiopia itself, it is a timeless place, veiled by layer upon layer of mythologies.
The town’s earlier name of Roha is linked perhaps to al-Ruha, Arabic for the holy city of Edessa which was lost to the Christians just before the reign of King Lalibela. Then again it was the heir of the holy city of Aksum, believed by Ethiopians (never shy in their myth-making) to be Zion itself. So Lalibela took on something of the aura of Aksum and Zion, and thereby of the holiest of all earthly places, Jerusalem. King Lalibela himself was taken on a dream-tour of Jerusalem by the Angel Gabriel and was able to replicate its sites. Pilgrims therefore needed to go no further than Lalibela to earn God’s favour.
The yearning for Jerusalem has haunted generations of Ethiopians—a yearning amplified by its extreme risks. Wild animals, pirates and Muslims have combined in the imagination of Ethiopian Christians to create an über-threat for all those daring to leave the mountains. In the eighteenth century Queen Mentuab wailed to James Bruce that, after thirty years on the throne, she would give up everything if only she ‘could be conveyed to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and beg alms for my subsistence all my life after’. Jerusalem was where it all began for Ethiopian kingship, where the union of Solomon and Sheba took place and from where Menelik I acquired the Ark of the Covenant, dancing before it like King David.
So Lalibela became a Biblical Land in miniature. Here is Golgotha, Cana and Nazareth. Beneath Calvary is the Tomb of Adam. I had skirted the slopes of Mount Tabor, Mount Sinai, crossed the River Jordan and climbed the Mount of Olives. In
