TO THE BLUE NILE 

WITH AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD

by Frances Somers Cocks

Over the centuries, people have travelled to the source of the Blue Nile for many reasons: my young son Abraham and I went there because he was besotted with rivers.

The Portuguese Jesuits, Jeronimo Lobo and Pedro Paez, who, in the 1600s, were the first Westerners to explore the headwaters of the Blue Nile, did it for the greater glory of God, as a scholarly diversion from their mission to convert Ethiopia to Catholicism; the Scottish adventurer, James Bruce, re-discovered the source in 1770, irascibly dismissing the various feats of his predecessors as the lies of “grovelling fanatic priests”. He thought that he had finally solved “the opprobrium of geographers” and found the main source of the Nile itself, not realising that the Blue Nile was merely a tributary of the White.  I went there in 2004 because my eight-year-old son, Abraham Alexander, had developed a passion for maps and globes, diligently tracing the routes of roads, railways and rivers on every continent.  He was particularly keen on the tributaries of the river Thames, and I was becoming weary of excursions to Oxford or Reading or Brentford or the East India Docks to admire their confluences, and of being told at every turn that the river Lea rises in Luton, or the river Colne near Watford. It seemed time for a tributary with a bit more dash to it.

I had all sorts of reasons for taking Abraham to Ethiopia: for a start, he was called after an Ethiopian, or at least after an African alleged for a couple of centuries to have been Ethiopian: Abraham Petrovich Hannibal (or Gannibal), a black slave-boy who became a general in the Russian army, and the great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin.  Secondly, we were on our way to Cameroon, via Chad, to check out a possible alternative birthplace for this Abraham Hannibal, assuming that he wasn’t really born in Ethiopia after all; the cheapest flights to Chad went via Addis Ababa, and it would have been a sad waste not to make the side trip to the Blue Nile, its source, and its mighty Tissisat Falls, the second biggest in Africa.

Taking Addis Ababa by storm

        I felt that Abraham was ready for Africa: he had always been an excellent traveller, putting up with long car-journeys around the British Isles, and even longer coach-trips on the Continent.  So, I spent more on vaccinations and medication for the two of us than I had on all our holidays for the last three years put together, and off we flew to Addis.  I had been to Ethiopia, and also Eritrea, twice before, on the trail of Abraham Hannibal, who was widely thought to have been born in what is now called Eritrea; it was very different travelling together with my Abraham - something akin, I imagine, to travelling with royalty.  As we strolled up Churchill Avenue from our Addis Ababa hotel on the morning our flight got in, killing time until our room was ready, people couldn’t take their eyes off him.  

        “Baby! Hello, baby!” they called at him all the way up the road, smiling and waving.  Abraham smiled and waved back, and when crowds of street-boys clustered round us, he shook hands with them all.  It was as if the Faranjis, the Franks - foreign tourists and business people - had all been childless up till now, and no one had ever seen a little white boy with fair hair and blue eyes before.  Abraham revelled in the attention, took it as his due, and shook hands with ever more enthusiasm, horribly confusing the crippled beggars by shaking their outstretched hands as they hunched on their little wheeled trays against the walls of buildings. Only when we got back to the hotel did bashfulness suddenly set in; he pulled my head down to his level and whispered, “Mum! Can we get some brown paint?  For our faces? I don’t want us to be the only white people!”

Abraham in front of the Ras Hotel, Addis Ababa 

Our hotel was a faded and ramshackle Art Deco building that had once been the pride of Italian-occupied Addis Ababa; the waitresses seemed to have plenty of time to cuddle Abraham, while the waiters’ friendly banter got progressively more technical between their cuddles, beginning with “You like David Beckham?” and “What team you support?  Ah, Chelsea!  Very good!” but proceeding to detailed analysis of Chelsea’s impressive performance in the Champions League and even more glorious feats in the Premier League. Abraham tended to get a bit lost at this point: unfortunately, his many and varied interests had never included football

The cuddles continued in the most unlikely locations, such as the bank, where the hour-long tedium of changing travellers’ cheques passed very pleasantly for him, as he was passed from lap to lap round nearly every member of staff, being kissed and hugged and questioned.  Fortunately, he had always adored being with people – provided they were devoting all their attention to him, and not having too many conversations between themselves.  Actually, in Ethiopia he derived pleasure from all sorts of things - even the rain.  In spite of the worried mutterings of my Ethiopian friends, we were going to Ethiopia in the rainy season: there wasn’t really any choice, since if we were to do all the things I wanted to there and in Cameroon, we needed the long school summer holidays to do them in – the time of the Long Rains in Ethiopia. 

Abraham’s first tropical rain-storm was a revelation to him: we were in the seedy Merkato area of town, to buy our long-distance bus-tickets to Lake Tana and the Nile, when the heavens opened.  We sheltered under the wide eaves of a strip of little shops, and watched a curtain of water pour down in front of us from the furrows in the corrugated-iron just above our heads; the rain crashed down onto the metal roof like an avalanche, and the drain-pipe next to us gushed gallons per second out onto the road with a great roar.  The rain was smashing down with such force that great fat drops ricocheted back from the concrete pavements and the tar roads, so that it was actually raining upwards as well as downwards. Solid sheets of water lashed the roads, turning each one into a river, and the buses left a great foaming wake as they surged through the flood.  Thirteen months of sunshine, say the Ethiopian Tourist Board posters; this August certainly wasn’t one of them.  (The Ethiopian year really does have thirteen months, as the Ethiopians are the only people in the world who still follow the pre-Julian calendar of twelve 30-day months, with all the left-over days in a thirteenth month of five days, or six in a leap year.)

When the rain slackened off, we ventured out again, enveloped in rain-coats; as we came to one hilly street which was still a rushing torrent, Abraham suddenly exclaimed, “Mum!  Is this a tributary of the Blue Nile?”

Well, strictly speaking, no: it was a street in the middle of Addis Ababa, and this rain was actually contributing, ultimately, to the drainage basin of quite another river, the Awash – but it was certainly a reminder that Ethiopia is not always the drought-stricken land of Band Aid notoriety.

the railway station, Addis Ababa

One benefit of the rain was as a diversion: Abraham enjoyed visiting the old French-built railway station, a charming, vaguely Renaissance building in yellow brick, ornamented with mosaic flowers, but there were no trains running, either down to Djibouti on the Red Sea coast, or back up from there, and in general he found Addis Ababa undistinguished: “Where are the nice old traditional buildings?  There isn’t any interesting architecture!”

Architecture had been one of Abraham’s earlier, more agreeable obsessions; he still showed flashes of interest in it, particularly Art Deco, but Addis Ababa wasn’t really the place for that: one needed to go to towns where the Italians had really let themselves go, like Gondar on the far side of Lake Tana, or Asmara, their old capital in Eritrea.  Abraham had also seen photos of early colonial-style Addis, showing large and gracious bungalows with intricate verandas, but in central Addis these had mostly disappeared, replaced by wholly unexciting blocks of flats and offices.

On the road, past smoking huts and Willy Wonka rivers

It was pouring – again - when we left our hotel at 5.30 am to catch our bus; rods of rain glittered in the twin beams of the taxi’s headlights, and through them shadowy forms loomed up abruptly, alarmingly, on the unlit roads: donkey-carts laden with towers of bulging sacks, or pedestrians swathed in white cotton cloaks, like children playing ghosts.  Mercifully, the rain slackened off to a drizzle while we stood for an hour in the dark next to our bus, waiting to be allowed to board: for some reason, long-distance buses in Ethiopia always leave at an unholy hour of the morning, and you are always required to turn up at an unholier hour still, even though you’ve been obliged to buy your ticket in advance. 

“This is ridiculous, Mummy!” Abraham kept grumbling loudly, with some justification. In front of us and behind us in the queue, Ethiopians stood decorously, the children as silent and uncomplaining as the adults, while Abraham was getting more and more agitated. “Why are we waiting?  Why can’t we just go?” 

At last the luggage was all heaved onto the roof and shrouded in giant tarpaulins, we were allowed to get on, and the bus set off, to the sound of something with a strong reggae beat on the radio; after a while, the music segued into something much more plangent and exotic and – well, Ethiopian - and then back again to the reggae beat.  After a while, we left the breeze-blocks and the corrugated iron of Addis Ababa’s outer suburbs behind us, and climbed over the Entoto ridge: we had now entered the rain catchment area of the Blue Nile. The bus was jammed to bursting-point, but we had good seats near the front, with a bit of room to stretch our limbs over and around various bundles and boxes; the road was infinitely better than anything I’d travelled along on my earlier visits, being not only tarmac, but newly engineered by the Japanese.  Nevertheless, Abraham fidgeted, looking around him anxiously.  “There aren’t any children sitting near us!  I’m the only one! I don’t want to be the only one!  I want some children to play with!”

It was true: there weren’t any children in the rows near us, but then alternative entertainment appeared, in the form of Yednkatchew.  Yednkatchew was an amiable, moon-faced young man who worked for the Ethiopian Lotteries, and he was a marvel: he was double-jointed, with very long fingers, and he could do a very good trick where he made one of his thumbs disappear; he could also wiggle his ears, and he spoke enough English to keep up with Abraham.  Then he asked if he could take him down the bus; I watched, mesmerised, while he escorted Abraham along the aisle, introducing him to everyone, from time to time lifting him onto passengers’ laps. It was like a three-ring circus: Abraham hugging, kissing and shaking hands, jumping and dancing, and from time to time singing extracts from Mary Poppins.  Everyone thought he was wonderful: Anglo-Ethiopian relations have never been so good. 

Yednkatchew and Abraham on the bus to Bahar Dar

The countryside was flattish and quite densely populated; the houses by this time were picture-book round wattle-and-daub huts with conical thatched roofs — tukuls — each one crowned with the top half of a clay water-pot. I was alarmed, at first, to see that almost every hut was gently smoking, coils of thick grey haze puffing out from between every stalk of thatch. No one else on the bus seemed to think anything of it; I calmed my urge to call the fire brigade by reflecting that no doubt the hearths of mediaeval cottages set their thatch oozing smoke in much the same way, especially on a cold and rainy day such as this. And, of course, these buildings were undeniably traditional.

“Look, Abraham! You said you wanted traditional architecture!  Here it is!”

Thatched huts, however, didn’t seem to do anything for him.

We stopped for lunch; I had injera, the giant, flabby sour pancake of Ethiopia, with a spicy vegetable curry – it was the period of fasting before the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, and Orthodox Ethiopians were abstaining from meat; Abraham had pasta with the same sauce – the Italians’ gastronomic legacy is amazingly strong in Ethiopia, considering that they only occupied the country from 1936 to 1941.

We reached more spectacular terrain: every now and then, the clouds lifted, to reveal ravishing vistas of steep red cliffs between expanses of vivid green.  This was one advantage to travelling in the rainy season: instead of the barren, desolate, drought-cracked land I’d seen on earlier visits, this looked fertile and lush.  Streams and rivers were all swollen to overflowing, each one a thick, rich chocolate-brown: as the soil of the western highlands of Ethiopia is eroded away, so it finds its way into the network of tributaries that feed into the Blue Nile, and so, at last, enriches the farmlands of Egypt.  The Blue Nile owes its name to the burden of soil that it carries: it makes the water so dark, compared to the White Nile that it joins at Khartoum, that in Arabic it is known as asrak, or ‘black’, which in European languages is rendered as ‘blue’. To me, it seemed as if the country’s life-blood was seeping away, but Abraham found a more cheerful metaphor:

“Look, Mum!  Willy Wonka rivers!”

the Blue Nile or Big Abbay, seen from the road to Lake Tana

Then the tar of the new Japanese road gave out as we came to the biggest Charlie-and-the-Chocolate-Factory river of them all, and the bus inched its way down the hair-pin bends of the old gravel road across the mighty Blue Nile. In fact, it did not look so very mighty; as Abraham observed, it was about the same width as the Thames at Richmond, though, judging by the formidable depth of the gorge, it was vastly deeper and more powerful. I took photos of the towering red banks of the gorge, and of the bridge we were about to cross, quite forgetting that photographing bridges in Ethiopia is tantamount to spying, and strictly forbidden: it was a measure of our popularity among the passengers that none of them took it upon themselves to turn busybody and stop me from doing it.

The Merry Men of Gojjam Province, and a migrant Muslim returns

On the other side of the Blue Nile Gorge, the smart new Japanese highway resumed. We were now in the province of Gojjam, and many of the peasants trudging by the roadside looked quite different from those we had seen up to now: where men and women in Shoa province wrapped long white cloaks – shemmas - around themselves, giving them the stately air of toga-clad ancient Romans, here some local textile mill seemed to be churning out cotton in a dark pine-green, so that the area had a bizarre look of Sherwood Forest about it, with many of the men-folk apparently ancient Romans rather ineffectively disguised as Merry Men.  The women wore the same green, styled into demure, rather institutional frocks, with long black cloths tied round their temples, turban-fashion.  Yednkatchew told me that they were of the Agaw tribe, and that many of them were neither Christian nor Muslim, but still followed their traditional animist religion.

It was late afternoon, and the bus stopped for the night at a one-horse roadside settlement called Dangla, where a newish breeze-block motel, its single-storey buildings arranged around a muddy yard, charged us £2.50 for a clean room with glass in the window and its own shower and lavatory, with water that worked; roadside inns had definitely improved since my last visit.  We went for a walk with Yednkatchew, negotiating huge gutters full of rubbish and muddy water, Abraham shaking hands enthusiastically with the swarms of children who followed us around.  The language-barrier meant that the conversations didn’t progress much beyond “David Beckham – good!” and “Chelsea – good!”, but Abraham didn’t mind. In an exceedingly basic little hotel and tea-house, I had an excellent espresso (those Italians again!); I offered Yednkatchew biscuits, but he politely declined:  “It is fasting time now, the biscoo-its are containing eggs and also milk.  I must not to eat eggs or milk before the holy day of Saint Mariam.”

Abraham coped remarkably well with the little inn’s squalid long-drop latrine, but it was incongruous to see, next to this unappealing and primitive feature, an enormous satellite dish – in fact, they seemed to be in every hostelry.  The television in the tea-house was tuned to CNN, but Yednkatchew explained the mystery of everyone’s remarkable familiarity with British football: the Ethiopian TV channel frequently broadcast European matches.

            Back in our own hotel, we passed a small room crammed with men engaged in some obscure game, and went in to investigate.  They were playing an extraordinary version of billiards which didn’t involve the use of cues: the players set the balls rolling over the green baize just with their hands.  Abraham eagerly tried to join in, but the rules were beyond him (and certainly beyond me); I removed him before he totally wrecked the game, and we went to have supper.

The dining-room was packed with travellers and local farmers watching TV over bottles of beer or little glasses of sweet tea. Women cooks working on wood stoves in a tiny, crowded kitchen produced delicious injera and vegetarian fasting food, and Yednkatchew and I both had a beer with ours.  I couldn’t resist teasing him, “I didn’t know that beer is fasting food.”

            He grinned, and tossed his head.  “Ah, it is no matter.  It is only 2.5% alcohol.”

            Everyone else on the table was chattering away in Amharic.  Luckily, Abraham was happily occupied by his injera and curry; Ethiopia is a dream country for a child who is reluctant to master the use of cutlery, since it is customary to eat injera with the right hand, and he was well used to the process, as well as the taste, from his many visits to Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants in London. 

            One young woman at our table was a passenger from our bus who had puzzled me all the way from Addis Ababa.  She was smartly dressed in a Western-style skirt and jacket, with gold ear-rings and a gold necklace, her hair pulled back into a neat bun, but she did not appear to be educated: certainly, she spoke not a word of English.  I asked Yednkatchew about her, sotto voce.

            “She is Muslim.  She has job in Saudi Arabia.  She is coming home for her holiday, to visit her family.”

            “Do you know what her job is?”

            Yednkatchew consulted with her briefly in Amharic. “She is … how is it called? … domestic servant in a family’s house.”

            “Does she like it?”

            The woman rolled her eyes heavenwards, and mimed swathing fabric around her face and body; we all smiled sympathetically.  Clearly, Islam in Ethiopia is a very different matter to Islam just across the Red Sea, and I felt a pang for her, forced away from her family and friends by poverty to work in that austerely pious land; just as surely as the thousands of Abyssinian women sold into slavery in Arabia as servants and concubines, right into the 20^th century, she seemed condemned to her plight by forces she couldn’t control.

            Our evening came to an abrupt end: Abraham was tired after his hard day providing entertainment for Ethiopians, and, before I could stop him, he was rubbing his sleepy eyes with his spice-stained hands.  He gave a huge, anguished yell which turned every head towards us.  I rushed him to the bar, where the barmaids found him water and we sluiced the chilli out of his eyes.  It was definitely time to retire.

Swimming in spinach soup and boating on Lake Tana

Our early-morning wake-up call from Yednkatchew came at 5am, and we squelched and stumbled our way to the bus station in deepest darkness.  The Japanese tar road soon ended, and the rest of the journey was a slalom between the slippery mounds and the water-filled troughs of the old gravel road, and stretches of new road, as yet unmetalled: all road-building had stopped till the dry season. Then, below and in front of us, we saw Lake Tana, a thousand square miles in area, and, at 6,000 feet above sea level, one of Africa’s highest lakes.  Most strangely, the Blue Nile is said to flow into it (as the Little Abbay), and then out of it again (as the Big Abbay), its course visible at certain times as a brownish current through the lighter waters of the lake. 

In the lake-side town of Bahar Dar we got off the bus and said goodbye to Yednkatchew, who was carrying on to the ancient capital of Gondar with its imperial castles, to whip up business for the National Lottery.  There in the bus-station we were speedily accosted by a would-be guide, a young man in jeans and anorak, aquiline and very dark.  For once, I was only too willing to accept the services of a guide.  The source of the Blue Nile, Gish Abbay, 9,500 feet up in the Choke Mountains, was not on the normal tourist trail, and we would need help to get ourselves there; I’d even been told by no fewer than three friends who knew Ethiopia well that we’d be lucky to reach it at all in the rainy season. In addition, if we had time, I was hoping to do a side-trip from there to a ruined imperial palace, nearly 400 years old, that lay somewhere beyond the source. Taddele turned out to be a real find: knowledgeable, honest, and a big hit with Abraham; he had even been to the ruined palace himself, and knew all about finding permits and mules to do the trip.  His daily rate was very modest, and I somehow found myself engaging him for most of our stay in the region.  We discussed the choice of hotels, but it wasn’t difficult which one to pick: the Papyrus, said Taddele, was just nearby, and had a swimming-pool which contained water, even now in the cold season.  At an exorbitant £15.00 per night, I knew it would give Abraham so much fun that it was cheap at the price; he had been rather downcast to learn that at no point would he be able to swim in the Blue Nile.

It was only nine o’clock, so we had plenty of time for a swim before a full day’s exploring, but the water in the Papyrus swimming-pool turned out to have the look of spinach soup about it; I certainly didn’t fancy getting into it myself, and I hesitated about letting Abraham anywhere near it.  However, he was desperate for his swim, so I just made him promise not to drink any of the water, and if possible not to get his head wet.   There was an enormous four-level diving-tower at one end, of the kind which is banned in public pools in Britain nowadays.  No one ever seemed to use it, and I decided immediately that it was out of bounds: there was no way of knowing what lurked at the bottom of that turbid water, or how deep the pool was.

Our expedition that day was to be a boat-trip across a corner of Lake Tana, to visit a few of the 29 ancient monasteries that dot its islands and promontories, and to see the spot where the Blue Nile – the Big Abbay at this point – flows out of the lake.  The sun was shining, and the chilly sharpness of the high tableland air had gone now; ever since Addis Ababa, we had been descending from a plateau 8,000 ft high, and there was a balmy softness in the breeze.  We walked to the lake in real holiday mood, along avenues lined with palm trees and wonderful flowering frangipani, bougainvillea and flame-trees, though I couldn’t pretend to Abraham that there was any architecture of note here, either: there were plenty of quite flashy new blocks, mostly hotels or local government or further education buildings, and then the usual huddle of breeze-block shacks and sad little shops. 

Taddele organised a small motor-boat from the grounds of a grand lakeside hotel (gleefully, Abraham noted that its swimming-pool was empty), and we chugged off towards the end of a long peninsula where, Taddele told us, he had grown up, and his family still had a coffee-farm.  The shores of the lake were low and gently sloping, lush with grass and the huge feathery stems of papyrus, but the strip of land at the very water’s edge had a strangely sinister look to it: it consisted not of sand, or mud, or gravel, but of jagged pumice-like rocks, deep black and oddly sterile, like the banks of a reservoir. However, the waters were sunny and peaceful; we saw a very old man paddling a tankwa, a papyrus canoe, towards the mainland; it looked perilously low in the water, laden as it was with many enormous sacks, and the smallest wave would surely have been a threat.

“He is taking charcoal to sell in Bahar Dar,” explained Taddele.  “It takes four hours from the region where the charcoal is made.  Even me, I used to do this job when I was a boy.”

charcoal-seller in his papyrus tankwa

It was a long, leisurely and uneventful journey; Abraham was becoming bored, so we began a game of spotting crocodiles, although there are none in Lake Tana, and each potential croc was only ever a floating log.  Our tranquillity was brusquely shattered when we disembarked at a rough rock jetty near the end of the peninsula to visit our first monastery: a mob of trinket-sellers were lying in wait, and kept thrusting illuminated parchments, little brass crosses and miniature tankwas into Abraham’s hands, while other hopefuls tried to support us up the uneven path by seizing our elbows.  I had plenty of souvenirs of Ethiopia at home already, and had no wish to carry a load of Ethiopian knick-knacks around Cameroon; it was all a bit overwhelming, I thought, as they pressed their trinkets back into Abraham’s hands just as fast as I could give them back. 

At length, we made our way through lush woodland up to the monastery: there it was, a typical circular Ethiopian Orthodox church, modelled on the pattern of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, with the Holy of Holies at the centre, concealing the tabot, the replica of the Ark of the Covenant that is held at the heart of every Ethiopian church.  For once, here was a church left in delightful traditional style with its great conical thatched roof, the underside as elaborately and tightly woven as a basket: most Ethiopian churches, alas, have now been upgraded with a modern corrugated-iron roof, and have lost most of their rustic charm.  The church was surrounded by a pretty, trellised veranda, a sort of circular cloister, where I left my sandals and Abraham his wellington boots; our boatman flung himself down on the cloister floor and prostrated himself before he entered.

one of Lake Tana's 29 churches and monasteries

        Inside, the walls were glowing with colour – and there were plenty of walls, since traditional Ethiopian churches are built as concentric circles.  Abraham and I surveyed the quaint, stiffly naive figures of saints and angels, kings and apostles and prophets.

            “Are these Ethiopian holy people?” he asked.

            It was a good question.  They all had large dark eyes and vaguely Afro hairdos, but their skin was pale: Ethiopians do not make their saints in their own image or likeness, and in their church paintings, only the devil is really black.

            Abraham left the peninsula clutching a miniature papyrus tankwa with a balsa-wood paddle: he was keen to have one, it weighed nothing, and it would be an intriguing reminder, when he was learning about the ancient Egyptians at school, that here, hundreds of miles to the south in a very different land, people still used papyrus boats just like those on the Nile of the pharaohs.

Lake Tana: Abraham with his toy tankwa,  Taddele with his map

            Our next monastery was much more serene: it was on a small island, so there were no neighbouring villagers desperate to scratch a living from visiting tourists.  However, the monastery itself was a sad disappointment: the original church had burnt down, and its replacement had not only a corrugated-iron roof, but a truly vile crazy-paving-effect exterior wall; the cells of the monks and nuns were the poorest shacks of mud and sticks and corrugated iron.  The island, at least, was wonderful: a sweet-smelling cornucopia of coffee-bushes, gourds, vines, cumquats, hops, maize - a little tropical paradise. The only surviving building of real antiquity, however, hinted at darker times: a Portuguese prison dating from the sixteenth century, a sturdy little two-celled building of volcanic stone, mortared and plastered, so Taddele told us, with wheat and egg.

            Then we chugged off to the shore, to where the Nile flows out of Lake Tana in two papyrus-fringed channels; we took the more southerly one.

“It looks like the river Cherwell at Oxford, doesn’t it, Mum?” exclaimed Abraham, which it did, very slightly, at least in its dimensions, and if one discounted the papyrus.  Like the Cherwell, it was shallow enough for punt-poles, and we passed a group of white-cloaked villagers punting across it on a papyrus raft, their destination a church on the island formed by those two branches of the Nile.  Our boat went a few hundred yards further, to where the two channels joined, and the Blue Nile, the Big Abbay, set out unhurriedly on its way towards the thundering Tissisat Falls, and then in a great arc, through the Blue Nile Gorge and down to the sweltering plains of Sudan.  

villagers punting on the Blue Nile or Big Abbay as it flows out of Lake Tana

We turned round, and I asked Taddele what would happen if we continued downstream, and he explained that only a little further on was a dam which aimed to conserve the water of the lake, so that its level might be kept as high as possible for times of drought: the Nile was being tamed.  I’d also been warned back at home and in Addis that the Tissisat Falls, the Smoke that Thunders, were thundering a lot less these days: the Bulgarians had recently built a huge hydro-electric scheme just above them, which diverted 75% of the water away.

            We got back to the Papyrus. Taddele had assured us that in Bahar Dar it rained only at night, and so it proved: Abraham was able to have another swim. I felt obliged to join him in the rather chilly spinach soup; if he was to meet his end from water-borne typhoid or cholera, at least we would go together.

Uproar and Olympics at the Blue Nile’s source

Getting to the source of the Blue Nile turned out to be simpler than I’d been led to believe: James Bruce had trekked for days from Lake Tana to reach the source, sometimes across country, sometimes following the course of the Little Abbay upstream, travelling all the time through sparsely-settled terrain. But Ethiopia’s population has nearly doubled just in the last twenty years, and what had once been the tiny hamlet of Sekala, a mile or so from the source, was now quite a substantial settlement, and there was a daily bus that went there from Bahar Dar. It still took us the whole day to cover the seventy miles: for one thing, Taddele told us to be ready to leave at 7am, but, in the end, the bus didn’t leave till 10.  We doubled back the way we had come to Bahar Dar, along the Addis road, and at last reached Tilili, a straggling little settlement which was the junction with the side-road to Sekala.  Here we waited two hours for the bus to pick up enough passengers to make it worth its while to carry  on, and Abraham’s patience was stretched to its limit; I tried to get him interested in bar footie and ping-pong, but they weren’t his thing.  I was fretting too, since we didn’t have many days before our onward flight to Chad, and our trip to the ruined palace looked in jeopardy. 

At last we left, and drove on through close-cropped hillsides of lush green grass, dotted with huge trees, each standing in its own wide shadow; between them, stock grazed peacefully.  There was something oddly evocative of English parkland in this exquisite scene, except that it was a little too rugged, a little too dramatic: the slopes were steeper, their summits craggier, than one would find in England, and there were other alien elements too: the cattle had horns that were exotically huge, and beside them grazed goats and mules.  Here and there, a little cluster of thatched tukuls perched high up above the road, puffing smoke gently into the afternoon sunlight.

The road was gravel, but in quite good shape; nonetheless, we got a puncture. I gave up all hope of seeing the source of the Nile that day, and thus of exploring the ruined palace the next.  After all, we couldn’t leave for Cameroon without seeing the Blue Nile Falls, so we had to leave time for that.

            We got into Sekala just before dark, and immediately caused a riot. Even though Sekala was now connected with the metropolis of Bahar Dar by its daily bus, to its inhabitants, Abraham and I might as well have come from Mars. The bus had stopped at the side of an enormous open expanse of beaten mud which turned out to be the site of the weekly market; I could see only a few traditional thatched tukuls here, and the village looked raw and makeshift, consisting mostly of rectangular mud or breeze-block shacks with corrugated roofs.  Several dozen children rushed to gather round us and stare, and even the adults stopped what they were doing and came over to investigate the cause of the excitement. Our side of the market-place became full of interested spectators; Abraham approached the children at the front, ready to shake hands and speak of the merits of David Beckham, but they all ran away from him, shrieking.  Huddling together at a safe distance, they stopped and stared again, so he ran after them; they ran away again, and it turned into a game of ‘Chase’ all along the side of the market-place and down the road.  A hundred or more villagers pounded after them, while I panted in the rear, yelling at Abraham to come back. Sadly, the game of ‘Chase’ seemed to be all one-way: the children running away screaming, Abraham in excited pursuit, with a stand-off every now and then, when the children would stop and form a huddle, and Abraham and they scrutinized each other. From time to time, to my consternation, men hurled stones at the children, or whipped them with branches, to try and keep them away, which merely had them scattering with even louder shrieks, before regrouping and confronting Abraham again. Then off they would go once more, Abraham driving his pack of children in front of him like some frenzied, diminutive Pied Piper.  At last, he responded to my yells, and stopped; the whole enormous crowd of us all walked back soberly to the market-place, as if from a mass demonstration, with me firmly gripping Abraham’s hand.  As a play-date, the episode had not been a success.

On the way back, I was confronted, to my mortification, by a stern young man in a thick white shemma who took a very disapproving view of the whole incident.

            “Madam, I think you and your son should go back now to your destination place!  You are causing severe disturbation. Your son was playing with our children as they were puppets.”

            I feebly tried to explain that he’d meant no harm.  His friend, a handsome young giant who turned out to be a veteran of the recent border war with Eritrea, took a more relaxed view,

“Oh, they are only children.  It is no matter.  I think your baby is a very good baby.”

Then suddenly, back at the market-place, it all got worse again.  More children gathered, and did a sort of surge towards us, a young man took it upon himself to beat them viciously out of the way with a long stick, the children stampeded, and one little boy stumbled and fell with ear-splitting wails of anguish.  He wasn’t hurt: his tears were for a tiny bag of sugar which he’d been sent out to buy, and had burst all over the muddy ground.  A kind-hearted villager gave him the money for some more, and when I’d figured out what was going on, so did I; he skipped off very merrily.

By this time, it was nearly dark.  Taddele had been minding our luggage, and he took us into Sekala’s only inn, the usual breeze-block structure with a large tea-house in the front, and a yard lined with tiny bedrooms behind.  Once again, there was the interesting juxtaposition of a disgusting long-drop latrine and a very large satellite-dish, although Sekala did not appear to have electricity: we were stumbling around in the gloaming.

“The village generator will be switched on at 7pm, until 10pm,” explained Taddele. “Everybody is coming to watch the opening parade of the Olympics in Greece.  They want to see the Ethiopian runners.”

Abraham and I left our luggage in a tiny bedroom with a metal shutter over the glassless window, and a metal roof and door, and we went through into the tea-house.  The lights came on, and we watched benches being set out in rows; a large curtain was drawn back at one side of the room, to reveal a big television, regally draped in its own flowery cover. The men-folk of the village, propped on their staves and swathed in their shemmas, started to come in, pay their few cents, and find themselves seats.  The TV was ceremonially unveiled and switched on; the picture quality was extremely poor.  No one seemed to know when the Olympic parade would start, and the men sat stolidly through flickering renditions of the cartoon Jungle Book (in English), the news (in Oromo, a language spoken in a completely different region of Ethiopia, delivered by a female news-reader of remarkably un-Ethiopian pallor), and an interminable documentary about hospitals in Addis Ababa. Abraham handled this entertainment with considerably less forbearance than the local peasants, but luckily the injera that Taddele had ordered in for us soon arrived, and after supper I was able to put Abraham to bed – a speedy process, as there was no running water. 

Our stern critic of earlier in the evening entered with his war-veteran friend, and came over to shake hands amiably.  He turned out to be called Gabre Selassie – Servant of the Trinity – and it seemed that he’d decided to overlook the whole business; we shared a few beers very pleasantly and waited for the Olympics.  At last, with a great sigh from the audience, the programme began: I wondered what on earth they made, the peasants of this remote, archaic spot, of the gimmicky computer graphics, the hovering statues of Greek gods, the athletes in their tiny Lycra garments.  We got a fleeting glimpse of the Ethiopian team, and then, all of a sudden, the generator shut down.  Outside, it was raining hard; the peasants shuffled off to their shacks through the dark and the wet, and I switched on my torch and sidled rapidly along the yard to our bedroom, where a bitter wind was rattling the metal roof and window-shutter, and water was sluicing under the door in considerable quantities.

The holy source, and jumping the Blue Nile

We got up in the chill of first light to visit Gish Abbay, the source of the Nile, about a mile away.  In the tea-house at the front of our inn, I was glad to see that the proprietress had lit a brazier and was boiling water for tea; a boy came past with a kind of fried crispy flat-bread for sale, and I bought some and offered a piece to Taddele. He shook his head.

“We must fast before we go to Gish Abbay.  It is holy place.”

We set off down the road where Abraham had chased his mob of children the evening before; no one much was about, and we were left in peace.  We passed a row of wattle-and–daub rectangular shacks on each side, a few tukuls, and a gaudily-painted church with the usual corrugated-iron roof, and then struck off down green tussocky slopes, the turf springy with wet beneath our feet. There were gentle grassy hills curving around us, dotted with large trees, and, once again, it could almost have been England.  Further down the slope was a curious little building, a sort of circular kiosk of breeze-blocks, with a metal roof; a couple of dozen large plastic jerry-cans and bottles stood round its base.

“The people leave water from Gish Abbay here, so that the priests can bless it,” explained Taddele.  “They will bless it for the holy day of St Mariam.  It is helpful for stomach-trouble.”

The terrain became more overgrown, thick with low thorny shrubs, and we came to a very large circular enclosure, like a giant cattle-pen, built of rough stones. 

“Inside is Gish Abbay,” said Taddele.

“Inside here?  How do we get in?”

“”We cannot get in.  It is forbidden for everybody, except the priest who is looking after Gish Abbay.”

I stood on tip-toe, and peered over the wall. In the middle of the enclosure I could see a crudely-built modern stone structure, without windows.

“Gish Abbay is inside the building.  The people were making the water to be muddy, so concrete has been put over Gish Abbay, so that the water will be clean.”

Abraham was demanding to have a look, so I helped him to scramble up the wall – but really, there was nothing to see.  The verdant swamp that had filled James Bruce with such exhilaration, where an island of green turf stood like an altar, and a fountain of pure, icy water bubbled out – all this was under concrete. It was all a dreadful come-down.

“The water goes through a pipe under the ground.  You can see where it comes out, twenty metres from here.”

Well, at least we could go and see the Nile at its new, artificially-enhanced source.  There, hidden in a clump of trees, was a dank little hollow lined with crudely concreted rocks; rough steps led down to a small cave-like enclosure, roofed with corrugated iron.  From its back wall protruded two pipes at more or less shoulder-height, and from them poured – the Nile.

the source of the Blue Nile or Little Abbay

“Mum, it’s not very … nice architecture, is it?  I don’t really like that metal stuff,” commented Abraham, uncertainly.  I couldn’t but agree with him

 A dozen or so people, adults and children, were crammed among the dripping rocks with their buckets and jerry-cans and bottles.  They gawped at us, but it seemed that Faranjis – mere humans, after all, like them – could not compete in importance with the sacred source of the Nile itself, and they went back to collecting their water.  Abraham and I started down the steps, but Taddele stopped us:

“It is holy place. We must to remove our shoes.”

So Taddele, Abraham and I carefully picked our way, barefoot, down the jagged and slippery stone steps, and waited our turn in the queue to savour the waters of Gish Abbay; I washed my face and arms in the icy water, drank several gulps, and refilled our water bottle, and gave Abraham a good wash too.  Taddele stuck his head right under, and gave his hair a scrub.  Then we scrambled back up, and searched round the clump of trees for the cleft where the spring emerged.  There it was, a tiny, clear brook, at the bottom of its own miniature gorge, carved out of the soft red earth.  A few yards out of the copse, the tiny stream was crossed by the very first bridge of the Blue Nile: a mighty structure of four or five small branches. 

Abraham on the first bridge across the Blue Nile or Little Abbay

“Look at me, Mum!” called Abraham.  “I’m crossing the Blue Nile!”

He crossed and re-crossed the bridge several times, and posed on it for photos; a crowd of children began to gather.  The rather ragged priest in charge of the source then appeared, and politely requested our fee; after a great deal of discussion, Taddele negotiated it down from £1.50 to 50p. The crowd of children grew larger, and we began to return to Sekala, not the way we had come, but along the course of the Little Abbay. This time, the children were less hysterical than the evening before; many of them had seen us then, and the novelty was wearing off; Abraham was happy walking along the Nile with his entourage.  One little boy called Mami, super-confident, even decided that they were special friends, and they walked along arm-in-arm, for a while, Mami and his friends chattering in the local language and laughing, while Abraham babbled excitedly in English, to no one in particular. 

Abraham and some of the children of Sekala by the Blue Nile

        The stream no longer flowed at the bottom of its little gorge now, but meandered lazily between wide green meadows, creating great swampy patches and little reedy islets.  It was still less than a foot deep.  Abraham tried both jumping the Nile, and fording it, over and over again; it didn’t really matter which, as he was wearing wellington boots; I mostly just squelched through the wet in my sandals, as I had decided years ago that, for the tropics, this was the most convenient tactic with regard to water, and my feet would be dry soon. It was all wonderfully peaceful.  Cows and mules grazed on the luxuriant pasture to either side of the stream, and a few tukuls nestled picturesquely on the gentle hillsides beyond; beyond them again were clusters of large trees. The sun was shining out of a clear blue sky.  I began to think that the source of the Nile had something to be said for it, after all. 

When we got back to Sekala, we found the Saturday market in full swing: the whole enormous open area in front of our inn was chock-full of people squatting on the ground in front of cloths or animal skins with their wares on display: there was hardly space for any customers to pass between them.  Abraham wasn’t interested, and stayed in the inn with the proprietress, who was happy to cosset him, but Taddele and I picked our way between the vendors.  I was fascinated by the spectacle: huge blocks of grey salt for feeding animals, piles of whiter salt for humans, heaps of grain, of chillies, of beans, and great pie-shaped blocks of butter – moulded, it would seem, in big round metal bowls.  Right at the back of the market-place were crude pens where goats and cows were held for sale.  There were a few, a very few, modern goods for sale: batteries, matches, some metal pots and trays, and plastic sandals.

By visiting the source in the morning, we had missed the only bus back to Bahar Dar, and there would be no more transport for a while, so Taddele suggested a walk to where the Nile was wide enough to merit its first proper bridge.  Gabre Selassie turned up, and came along too.  We walked out of Sekala along a track which managed to be both muddy and rocky at the same time, battling our way through a great surge of country people pouring in to the market; when some of them first caught sight of us, I could actually see them start, real alarm in their eyes.  Several of them tripped on the rocks, so busy were they turning round to stare after us.  Many of them were Agaws, the men mostly draped in their Lincoln green, while the women wore the same green frocks and black turbans I’d spotted from the bus to Bahar Dar; from close quarters, I could see now that they wore great embroidered cummerbunds, dangling strips of leather sewn with cowrie-shells.  Abraham began to wilt, and Taddele carried him high on his shoulders, which caused even greater consternation among the crowds of peasantry.

We pose on the first road-bridge across the Blue Nile.

The bridge turned out to be a substantial single-track stone affair, big enough for a vehicle – “builded by Italians,” explained Taddele - but many of the villagers seemed to be ignoring it, and fording the river instead.

“Why aren’t those people using the bridge?” I asked.

“They are washing their feet.  They wish to be clean when they come into the town.” 

            It was a quaint notion, that these peasants could come from homes so remote that even Sekala’s cluster of humble shacks seemed a town to them.

Abraham and Taddele in Sekala with some of the villagers

The Blue Nile Falls

We finally returned to the metropolis of Sekala, and started investigating transport back towards Bahar Dar; I had given up on the idea of any further expeditions in this vicinity, especially as Taddele had mentioned that the next day would be our best bet for seeing the Blue Nile Falls at Tissisat in something like their old magnificence.

            “On Sunday, the officers of the hydro-electric sometimes allow more water to flow over the Falls.  People come from Bahar Dar specially to see it.”  We could only hope.

             The rest of the day was a tedious business of waiting interminably for one lift (in a truck) down to the main road, and then another one (in a government four-wheel drive) back to Bahar Dar.  But we’d done it – we had bathed in the source of the Nile.  And we even got back to the Papyrus in time for a real swim.

            The Papyrus fixed up a tourist mini-bus to Tissisat for us the next morning, and we shared it with Isabella, a charming Italian aid-worker and her partner Gianni, who was out visiting her on holiday.  Although he looked tremendously cool with ear-ring and dread-locks (he was white), the tropics were clearly keeping him in a fever of hypochondria; he was forever rubbing his hands, Lady Macbeth-like, with antiseptic cleansing cream, and expressed horror that we had dared risk the pleasures of the Papyrus swimming-pool.  Taddele didn’t come with us on this trip: the Blue Nile Falls were a closed shop, where one was obliged to use an official guide.

            Abebe, a courteous, wrinkled old man who was our guide, was no insurance against the usual ambush by locals desperate to make some small living from tourists.  Past the entrance to the Ethiopian Electricity Board’s hydro-electric scheme, we entered the Falls area, and ran the gauntlet of women and girls selling beaded calabashes and garish scarves, boys carrying crates of warm Fanta, and youths keen to act as guides and porters (we had nothing much to carry).  A dozen or so of them followed us for an hour or more, like a royal retinue. There was also a man playing a masenko, a sort of one-stringed viol, who somehow kept popping up ahead of us at every point around the Falls, sawing away madly with his bow.  Marvelling at the mighty Falls in romantic solitude was clearly not going to be an option.

            We crossed the Abbay by an ancient Portuguese stone bridge; the river had become a real Willy Wonka one by this time, its rich chocolate waters tumbling through a steep, very narrow gorge, its cliffs the same sinister black volcanic rock as the shores of Lake Tana, which was only some fifteen miles away. 

17th century Portuguese bridge across the Blue Nile

    We clambered our way along a narrow, rocky path with lovely vistas of green countryside, heavily wooded, riven by deep clefts, and then up a steep grassy hill.  One of the would-be porters found himself with a job, after all: Abraham had been expecting the Falls to present themselves to him instantly, and, extremely indignant when they didn’t, he staged a sit-down strike. Nothing I could say or do would persuade him out of his sulk, and he ended up, in classic White Sahib fashion, reaching his destination on the shoulders of a native – or at least, reaching his first view of the distant Falls.  Sure enough, far away across steep wooded valleys, with a view of distant mountains beyond, there was the great river, far wider than at the Portuguese bridge, winding its way towards a vast cliff – 140 feet high, 1,300 feet wide, said my guide-book.  On the lush green slopes that curved down towards its base, we could see the tiny figures of a few sight-seers, dwarfed by the height of that great black precipice.  But the thundering vastness of water foaming down over the whole wide cliff-face that I had seen in photographs was, indeed, much diminished, and two fairly substantial but quite separate waterfalls and a few much smaller torrents were all that the Ethiopian Electricity Board was letting us have.

            A dispute followed, and Abraham had nothing to do with it this time.  Abebe explained that we had the choice of a very long and roundabout walk to the base of the Falls, partly retracing our steps, or a much more direct route which would involve wading through a river; the shorter route would also give us the chance to cross the Nile above the Falls by boat. Abebe was clearly in favour of the shorter route; Gianni was appalled.  It was impossible, absolutely impossible for him, he said, to put his feet in a river here in the tropics: he would certainly contract bilharzia. Isabella, on the other hand, agreed with Abebe. Mindful of Abraham’s impatience, I was quite keen on the shorter route too, and the boat trip sounded good fun. The argument went round and round, Abebe declaring that there was no bilharzia in the rivers at this altitude, and Gianni insisting that there was bilharzia everywhere in the tropics.  I pointed out that the rivers up here did seem much too fast-flowing and rocky for bilharzia snails, and if he was really worried, he could keep his trainers on.  In the end, shaking his dreadlocks doubtfully, Gianni was persuaded, and we set off again.

            Even the more direct route started off by leading away from the Falls.  Abraham threw a tantrum, and staged another sit-down strike.

            “Why are we going the wrong way?  The Falls are over there!  Why are we going down here?”

            It was all rather embarrassing, in a country where the children were normally a Western parent’s dream, obedient and polite, seen but not heard.  Eventually, I convinced him that we really were going the right way, and soon he was skipping enthusiastically ahead of the whole lot of us.  We reached the river we were going to ford, and I decided that no bilharzia snail would survive this rocky, rushing torrent; I just hoped that my camera would.  There was a herd of cows crossing ahead of us, and the water didn’t seem to come too far up their legs; nevertheless, I entrusted Abraham to his porter of earlier in the day, and he crossed the river on his shoulders, White Explorer-style again.  Wading was an unnerving experience, with every stone on the river-bed shifting alarmingly under my sandals, and the water rushing against my legs with terrific force, but in the end, we all made it across, including Gianni.  Then it was another climb, until eventually we came to brow of a steep hill, and there in front of us was the Nile, cascading down its huge precipice into a long dark pool, before rushing onwards through a narrow, rocky channel.  Even in their depleted state, the Falls were formidable.

            We started scrambling down the hill towards the pool and the base of the Falls, and I discovered, that, as at Sekala, it was possible for terrain to be both muddy and rocky at the same time.  The soil was a slippery clay; my sandals slipped on the hill-side, and my feet slipped inside my sandals.  As Abraham leapt down sure-footedly in his wellingtons, wild with excitement, I skidded and stumbled my way to the bottom in fits and starts, half on my feet and half on my backside.

            At the bottom of the hill was an extraordinary conglomeration of giant mossy rocks, swampy nooks, and tussocky, muddy soil: there was something prehistoric about it, and even though the Falls were right on the far side, with that dark pool in between, the air was heavy with spray.

            “Before the hydro-electric, the water was coming over all this part during the rainy season,” said Abebe.

I blundered my way towards the Falls, Abraham running joyously ahead; I caught up with him as he perched on top of a huge boulder, right over the pool, with the Falls thundering in front of him; we sat on the rock together, and marvelled quietly.  Around us were other visitors, mostly affluent expatriate and city Ethiopians in jeans or designer gear; I could see them exclaiming to each other in excitement, but our silent admiration was not compromised, since the roar of the water meant we could not hear them.

I thought I could detect, on the cliff-face, the ledge where Father Jeronimo Lobo, in 1618, sat with the Falls descending in front of him like a curtain.  His description was one reason why James Bruce mocked his claims of having visited the Nile, since Bruce saw the Falls during the rains, when such a feat would have been impossible; he failed to take into account that Lobo was there in the dry season, when the flow of water was far less.  Alas, there were several points now where one could have sat under the Falls, rainy season notwithstanding. Nonetheless, it was not a sight that we would easily forget.

We scrambled back up the hill (the masenko-player lying in wait for us at the top) and trudged on round to where a little motor-boat took us across the wide, sluggish river above the Falls; on a muddy bank between dense beds of papyrus, the boatman pointed out the broad smears and the sharp furrows left by the body and claws of a crocodile where it had slithered into the water.  Then there was a long, treacherous walk along crude walkways of branches lashed together, crossing an area of marshes, and we finally got back to Tissisat village and our minibus.

We got back to the Papyrus to find it buzzing: it was a sunny Sunday afternoon, and its poolside was clearly the place for modish Ethiopians to be.  Couples sat with their beers, their burgers or their injera in the poolside bar, and families fooled around in the water or chatted on the sun-loungers.  Abraham could hardly wait.  He was the only child venturing into the deep end, and then, when some testosterone-laden youths started jumping off the highest diving-board, he asked me if he could do it too. I reasoned that if these adults could jump off the high board without hitting bottom, my little slip of a son certainly could, and if he was going to catch any vile disease, he’d probably caught it already.   He did the jump again and again, calling out to me every now and then to exult:

“I did it, Mummy!  Did you see me?  I jumped off the highest board!”

The Ethiopians looked on indulgently, laughing and clapping.  I tried the jump once myself, for solidarity’s sake, and found the drop truly terrifying.

It had been a strenuous, if memorable day, and, that night, I put Abraham to bed early. He looked up at me from his pillow and said, with a beatific smile,

“Thank you, Mum! Today was the best day of my life!”

I asked him why; I thought of asking if it was because of the Blue Nile Falls, but I knew it wasn’t.

“Because I jumped off the highest board.  Lots of times.”

It wasn’t what I’d planned to come to Africa for, but if Abraham had had the best day of his life here in Africa, that was fine by me too.

© Frances Somers Cocks 2005

Frances Somers Cocks is the author of The Moor of St Petersburg – In the Footsteps of a Black Russian, a biography and travel book, and of two children’s historical novels, Abraham Hannibal and the Raiders of the Sands and Abraham Hannibal and the Battle for the Throne (all available from Amazon).  Illustrations and maps by Eric Robson.