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.
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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.
Camel Train is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 11am on Friday
