Edward Norman on modern religion

Time to repost some wonderfully good quotations from the great Edward Norman, my favourite living historian and religious commentator. I wish I had met him for more than a quarter of an hour.

"The age is described by welfare: it occupies the space for sacral values once filled by the churches. Indeed the neo-Puritanism of the times promotes welfare considerations as exclusively important."

"Extraordinarily enough, the leaders of the Church manage to identify the present welfare idealism - which is based in Humanist materialism - as fundamental Christianity, an application of the love of neighbour enjoined by Christ. But preoccupation with material welfare, whatever higher considerations may become attached to it, cultivates worldliness, and is an enemy of authentic faith."

"The Churches themselves, in fact, have rushed to acclaim the new humanism - the `caring society - as the very essence of Christianity. But it is actually quite pagan, concentrating as it does on the merely worldly needs of people in a way which is plainly contrary to the renunciations indicated in the teachings of Christ. This is not an academic matter. For when Christians identify the present secular enthusiasm for humanity as basic Christianity - the love of neighbour - they are in reality acclaiming and legitimising their own replacement."

"Through contact with liberal and Christian values the other world religions were sanitised and made acceptable to Western sensibilities: widows were no longer incinerated alive on their husbands funeral pyres, and the way was opened for that late-20th-century phenomenon, the Western idealising of Oriental religiosity, beads and mantras in Californian condominiums."

Books read and films seen this year of grace 2012

The High Window*, Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye*, Raymond Chandler
Muhammad, Karen Armstrong
Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor 
Defying Hitler, Sebastian Hafner
Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital 1939-45, Roger Moorehouse
This Business of Living: Diaries 1925-50*, Cesare Pavese
Relapse into Bondage, Alexandru Cretianu
Friends and Heroes*, Olivia Manning
Waugh in Abyssinia, Evelyn Waugh - I reviewed it here

As You Like It*, William Shakespeare
History of the Roumanians*, R.W.Seton-Watson 
A History of Romania, Kurt Treptow

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, Victor Sebestyen

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi - Geoff Dyer
In Ethiopia with a Mule, Dervla Murphy - I reviewed it here
Tippu Tip: The Story of His Career in Zanzibar and Central Africa, Heinrich Brode
First Footsteps in East Africa, Richard Burton
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, Ryszard Kapuscinski - I reviewed it here
Here is New York, E. B. White
The Psychopath's Bible*, Christopher Hyatt
Remote People, Evelyn Waugh 

The Diary of Terror: Ethiopia 1974-1991, Dawit Shifaw 
Solitude*, Anthony Storr
Pagans and Christians Robin Lane Fox - I reviewed it here
The Shadow of the Sword. Tom Holland - I reviewed it here.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon.
The Early Church*, Henry Chadwick

Bold means I loved it. An asterisk means I have read it before. 

What a masculine, middle-aged list. I am even reading military history, which is the last refuge of the middle-aged male. In fact I tried Beevor's Stalingrad on a recommendation from an aesthete friend but it bored and repelled me. Gibbon though is great.

I read Chandler for the prose style not for the plot, though he is a good storyteller. I thought when 14 that The Long Goodbye was too long and too much trying to be a proper novel. Now I absolutely loved it except the ending with the silly twist which I merely skimmed without attempting to understand it.

Karen Armstrong on Muhammad is not worth reading as she does not mention that the evidence for her subject's life is extremely late indeed (two centuries after the event).

Hafner's book, to my great surprise, an account of his uneventful life in Berlin in 1933, found among his papers and published ten years ago, is absolutely wonderful. It is beautifully written and deeply horrifying because of the sheer normality of his life as he describes it in Berlin in 1933 and the ease and rapidity with which Germans accepted Nazism and Nazi indoctrination. I hope it becomes a classic and is read in a hundred years' time as it deserves to be. People follow like sheep. I saw a somewhat faint parallel with another totalitarian ideology with a whiff of sulphur, political correctness, which has made cowards of us all in recent years. 



The Moorehouse book is not particularly well written or strikingly insightful, but it efficiently covers the ground. The story of Stella Kübler, the beautiful blonde Jewess who was used by the Nazis as bait to uncover Jews hiding in Berlin, chilled my blood. She was told that, by her collaborating, her parents would be saved, but unsurprisingly they were sent to the gas chambers anyway. She herself lived to an old age before she committed suicide. One solitary Jew was permitted to survive in the Jewish cemetery burying Jews according to Jewish practice. He was still alive when the Russians came. 

This is what a friend of mine calls Hitler porn but my excuse is that I know very little about German domestic history during the Nazi period, the subject is important and I am interested in biographies of cities, writing as I am one a book on Bucharest. 

Olivia Manning's third volume in the Balkan trilogy, set in Greece, which I reread while spending the weekend in Athens and Hydra, inclines me to think that the reason I like the first two so much is because of my love of and interest in Romania not Manning's writing. She does not create characters. Her characters are clearly drawn from life in many cases and therefore do not come alive. It is the invented ones like Yaki who live. 

Seton-Watson is magisterial and should be read by all foreigners who speak English in Romania. I am ashamed that I had only skimmed it before. I had never opened Treptow, which the author gave me in 1999, before he went inside, and had assumed it would be a facile popularisation but, despite the numerous mistakes and misspellings, it was a more vivid, condensed account than Seton-Watson and taught me rather a lot. Dennis Deletant tells me it was written by a  group of Romanian historians not by Treptow and completed very hurriedly - hence the mistakes and typos - so that Adrian Nastase, when he was Foreign Minister,  had copies to give away when he visited the USA.

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen is journalism rather than history, but very interesting.

I read Here is New York, by E. B. White, because Johann Hari tweeted that it was the best essay of all time. It is not but it is very well written and might inspire me to write about Bucharest if I am lucky. But reading Remote People by Evelyn Waugh immediately after Here is New York makes Waugh's prose seem even more dazzling than usual. White is a very good stylist whom Waugh effortlessly outdoes. Although perhaps I am biassed as I 'get' English writers so much better than American ones. Americans speak our language but do not think like we do. And they write in English but not in the setting of the English class system, which always makes reading them seem eerie.

The Psychopath's Bible is a reminder that psychopaths, though amoral or rather immoral, have values they believe in, which they cannot be argued out of - might is right, survival of the fittest, victims want to be victims, selfishness is good, the ideas of Ayn Rand. A reminder that morality, like art, is inspired by love not logic.

'Tom' Holland went to my college years after me and took a Double First in Classics and History and has many books to his credit. I try not to be jealous, but he cannot write.

I haven't decided whether I love Gibbon yet - reading a book on a kindle makes love more difficult, for some reason - but I am enjoying him, though his paganism and contempt for the early church disgust me. He is a very good historian indeed. Cardinal Newman said, "It is melancholy to say it, but the chief, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the unbeliever Gibbon."  

Four novels, which is much better than my usual score, although I am not sure the two Raymond Chandler thrillers really count.

Films seen

Six films is also much better than my normal score, which is none. None were any good, except In A Better World. Albert Nobbs was dull, pleasant but in the end a waste of time - please read George Moore's wonderful short story instead. George Moore is an unjustly neglected genius (like me).

The Blue Dahlia (1947)*
The Brasher Doubloon (1947)
Albert Nobbs (2011)
In a Better World (2011)
Thank you for Smoking (2005)
Goodbye, Lenin (2003)

Christendom and social democracy

 “Social democracy may be defined as an arrangement under which we all largely cease to be responsible for our own behaviour and in return become responsible for everybody else’s. The temptations which this way of doing things offers to synthetic anger, fraudulent penitence, all other forms of hypocrisy and the sheer evasion of duty are infinitely too great for fallen man.”  

T.E. Utley

The  Catholic social theory of the common good is the fruit of the continental mind which is dirigiste, when in fact a small state should be near the heart of Christian social thinking. The modern anti-discrimination ideology and welfare considerations have taken the place in Western European culture formerly occupied by religion and spiritual values. 

Dr. Martin Israel, a Jew who was a leading pathologist before becoming an Anglican priest and mystical writer, goes much further. He says:

Antichrist is not a demonic figure typified in our own century by the person of a fascist or communist dictator or one of his henchmen....Antichrist reveals himself much more subtly and plausibly than this. He appears as an outwardly enlightened man of apparent good nature and well-disposed to his fellows, who takes charge of the world and usurps the place of God. He organises the world into the form of an advanced welfare state and makes everyone happy provided they bow down and worship him. All who co-operate with him live pleasant, uneventful lives, have plenty of possessions, and strive for the maintenance of their present status. Their inner eye is no longer lifted up to the Figure on the cross, who is the way, the truth and the life in God. Therefore they are not themselves transformed. They remain comfortable, complacent people, selfish and blind to the greater world, living like intelligent animals. They do not respond to the existential problems of life until they disappear, like the followers of Korah, swallowed up by the earth that splits and opens to receive their mortal bodies (Numbers 16:31). This is the way of Antichrist, that great deceiver, who promises us all the kingdoms of the world in their glory if we will only fall down and do him homage (Matthew 4:9).

In fact Antichrist assumes many guises and some limited aspects of social democracy are positive.

I do not want the poor to go to the wall or the welfare state, which in America is used as a term of abuse, abolished. The British National Health Service will probably become unworkable but it is a fine example in some ways of social democracy, because in England it really does have great popular support - it is an example of social solidarity as well as of big government. As Nigel Lawson said, it is the British religion, which is making my point for me. Its greatest achievement is to make doctors work for much less than they would under a private system and keep the costs of drugs down far below what they cost in the United States. 

However the big state requires big money, which requires a baby boom, at a time when affluence and opportunities at work for women are reducing the birth rate to disastrous levels. This will bring about a catastrophe at some point, in some form not at present foreseeable. I am reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and wonder how many centuries Western civilisation has left. At the moment, we are still where Gibbon starts, with the wise and beneficent philosopher-Emperor Marcus Aurelius and

‎"the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous." 

Or is this nonsense, on stilts? British, French, German, etc culture is strong enough to absorb almost any number of immigrants. Can civilisation carry on with different races in Europe and with a loss of religious belief by Christians or loss of belief in their tradition and culture by Europeans? Yes probably but it will be a new story, not the continuation of the old one. I trust we shall not have something like the  fall of Rome but whatever happens, like the fall of Rome, will be the end of a very old story and the start of a new one.

Hilaire Belloc said this on the subject:

I have never said that the Church was necessarily European. The Church will last for ever, and, on this earth, until the end of the world; and our remote descendants may find its chief membership to have passed to Africans or Asiatics in some civilisation yet unborn. What I have said is that the European thing is essentially a Catholic thing, and that European values would disappear with the disappearance of Catholicism. 

Pagans and Christians

I am at last reading Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians and finding it interesting and informative but less of a joy than I expected. He writes reasonably, but not exceptionally, well but his learning is vast and his insights seem astute to a general reader like me. I wish he took the story up to the first century of Islam but of this very little is known.

It is unusual for a historian to write authoritatively about both Christians and pagans, as does Lane Fox. He admits his debt to Gibbon but finds much evidence to show that Gibbon greatly exaggerated the loss of faith in the old gods before Constantine's conversion. Only a highly educated few did not believe that the pagan gods intervened in human affairs. One is interested to see parallels between this folk religion and later folk Catholicism and I wished the book drew them out

One thing Lane Fox makes clear is that, of course, the second century church was much more puritanical about sexual morality than almost any modern Christians. Virginity was prized very highly and even sexual intercourse within marriage was suspect, at least for some. Homosexual activity and divorce followed by remarriage, both of which were considered absolutely normal in the Roman world, were always considered grave sins by Christians, as were abortion and infanticide. This distinguished Christians from Jews who, following the Mosaic law, allowed divorce and disapproved of abortion from concern for the health of the mother, rather than the unborn child. Christians today who condemn abortion and homosexual acts are therefore not distorting Christian doctrine. Au contraire. Liberal theologians who maintain that sexual rules are not really part of Christianity are simply wrong, unless they argue that the church taught differently in the first century, but we know from the letters of St. Paul and from other writings that this was not the case. Jesus, a first century Jew, of course considered fornication and sodomy as sins. The change he made was to make sexual morality much stricter by abolishing divorce and this is the rule which, according to Lane Fox, early Christians found hardest to accept.

Lane Fox explains how homosexuality and bisexuality were taken for granted in the ancient world, for men, and goes on to say:

As for homosexuality, Paul and the early apostles agreed with the accepted Jewish view that it was a deadly sin that provoked God's wrath. It led to earthquakes and natural disasters, which were evident in the fate of Sodom. The absence of Gospel teaching on the subject did not amount to tacit approval. All orthodox Christians knew that homosexuals went to hell, until a modern minority tried to make them forget it.

The last part of the book is a detailed discussion about St. Constantine, the Emperor Constantine the Great. I knew very little about him except that he was a murderer and adopted Christianity for pragmatic reasons. Lane Fox is convincing that Constantine's conversion was very genuine and a deep change of heart. 

Constantine deserves better than any other historical figure the soubriquet 'Great'. He transformed Europe far more than Napoleon or even Hitler and, unlike those two, he transformed it for the better. He also transformed Christianity. He also created Constantinople and the Byzantine cultural space in which I am typing these words, in my office in Bucharest. His reasons for executing his wife and son I do not know.

One of the reasons Constantine was converted was because, very understandably, he saw the hand of God in his victories over his opponents. So did other Christians. This belief that God intervenes in history was what made the early Muslims believe their prophet was the true one. It made the British and the Americans, who borrowed the idea from the British, believe that God had given them a special destiny. It has recently, for some reason, gone out of fashion even in America, as I discuss here. 

The idea that God is visible in history was replaced by Marx with the idea that the historical process is God and I think this illusion continues to influence progressive thinkers.

Hallowe'en is rearing its ugly head in Bucharest tonight, four days early

Samhain (pronoun­ced SAH-WEEN), nowadays known as Hallowe'en, approaches. A time, the Druids taught, when the earth begins to deaden and the chasm separating living and dead thins out. The Catholics renamed it All Souls' Eve. It is now a marketing campaign for various businesses, in Romania as everywhere else. 

Just as the North American grey squirrel has made the red squirrel almost extinct so has the North American Hallowe'en taken over with extraordinary swiftness, extinguishing older, weaker traditions. This too is life, I suppose, but it is part of the process by which the whole world is becoming plastic.

Hallowe'en, traditionally marked by apple bobbing, was almost dead in England when I was a boy and I never heard of anyone bobbing apples except in books, but Hallowe'en was taken by the English to America and has been exported back to us and worldwide in recent years, for purely commercial reasons. Romania has her own traditions about ghosts walking the earth on St. Andrew's Eve, 29 November, which alas are nowadays being submerged by Hallowe'en, just as the commercial Western St. Valentine's Day (increasingly the word saint is dropped nowadays) is subsuming Dragobete.

So the American Hallowe’en is an originally pagan and Catholic festival which now reflects America’s core Protestant and English identity. As America becomes less Protestant and less English the traditions change with the times. In America it is the tradition to wear fancy dress for Hallowe'en parties and in the last few years rules have emerged to discourage party goers from ‘perpetuating racial or gender stereotypes’. Dressing as Chinamen or Red Indians or, heavens forfend, from blacking up to impersonate the President, all these are not acceptable in the USA, a country in the grip of a collective nervous breakdown about any sort of discrimination. Rules have emerged to guide party goers.

This costume is definitely outré, it appears:

As is this:

I thought Mynah Bird looked very fetching in her scanty Nazi stormtrooper costume on The Two Ronnies, but that was long ago and in another country and besides the wench is dead.

Out of laziness, I asked my friend Valentin Nas, who knows very much about Romanian folklore and traditions, to advise me about the significance of St. Andrew's Eve and he tells me:

There are many legends and customs related to the night of St. Andrew when the souls of the dead are believed to come out of graves and fight the living undead. The ghosts return to their graves at dawn, when they hear the first rooster. If the undead have nobody to fight, they go to people's homes and try to suck the blood of those they can catch. Garlic is believed to keep them away, therefore, in order to stay safe from ghosts and undead, people use to brush with garlic their windows and doors before evening comes. 

A common tradition on this day is to plant wheat seeds and keep them indoors until New Year’s Eve. Tradition says that the person who plants the wheat will be able to tell how next year will be based on how the plants will look like. Another tradition is to take small branches from a fruit tree, put them in water and keep them until the Christmas holiday. The branches should bloom, which is another sign of how fruitful next year will be.

The last line of Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party provides a final thought for the 31st., from Hercule Poirot: 

Halloween is not a time for the telling of the stories macabre, but to light the candles for the dead. Come, mes amis, let us do so.

Note written on November 1st: Last night charming girls in Hallowe'en costumes walking down my street looking for Hallowe'en parties made me realise that I only wrote part of the truth. Hallowe'en  is transmogrified and made charming by Romanians and it is great craich.

Do we know anything about Muhammad or the origins of Islam?

I am reading Tom Holland's book In the Shadow of the Sword which I should probably not have bought had I taken the time to look through the pages and see that it is a popular history, written to make the paperback bestseller lists. But this would, on the whole, have been my loss. Some of the book's themes are important and should be widely discussed.

The book is exasperating and quite exceptionally badly and vulgarly written.  I cannot remember ever reading anything that insults the reader quite so much and yet Mr Holland has won several literary prizes, which I find completely incredible. The book contains many hundreds of sentences as bad as this one:

'He [Muhammad] had experienced history's most epochal mid-life crisis.'  

Historians are discombobulated. A sultan with halitosis can 'slay flies with a single breath'. Holland sounds like a history teacher trying to amuse his fifth form class and the whole book seems to be written for serialisation in the Daily Mail. The stories about the Empress Theodora's prepubescent sexual life, which are completely off the subject, are repeated with unnecessary detail and given undue credence. The book is, as Gerald Manley Hopkins described Locksley Hall, an ungentlemanly row, but the subject matter is fascinating.

Holland convinces me that we know virtually nothing about Muhammad, including whether or not he had a religious conversion at the age of forty. This is largely because of a lack of a written culture in the Arabia of the period. Compare what we know about fifth century Britain: we know much more simply due to Gildas and the Venerable Bede. The Koran tells us almost nothing about Muhammad. There are no more than four references to him in the Koran and two fleeting references to him by name in near-contemporary Christian writers. The Teaching of Jacob, a Greek Christian apocalyptic text written between 632 and 640, which Holland does not specifically mention, might be the oldest reference to Muhammad in existence. It does not name Muhammad, but puts the Christian case against him poignantly and pithily: 

I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him: "What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?" He replied, groaning deeply: "He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword. Truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist."

The hadiths, sayings attributed to Muhammad, and the biographies of him probably have no value at all as historical evidence, being written far too late. This lack of evidence should always have been obvious (Gibbon pointed it out in a footnote to the Decline and Fall) but only became reasonably widely accepted in the last thirty-odd years, though it is still fiercely disputed. We do not know, for sure, if Muhammad visited Mecca. The battles he is thought to have won, over which historians have spilt much ink, are probably as factual as the Battle of Camlann at which Mordred defeated King Arthur.

Thomas Carlyle's famous essay praising Muhammad and Sir William Muir's Life suggesting he may have been a psychopath possessed by Satan seem equally houses based on sand. The most important fact that we know for sure about the early history of Islam is that Muslims conquered half the known world in the seventh century, including the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, before being defeated at the Battle of Tours in 732. We do not know for sure if Islam enabled the Arabs to conquer so much of the world or whether Islam was a by-product of this remarkable explosion. The late Bishop Kenneth Cragg said: 

Muhammad, in expanding his empire, managed to start a religion.

However, we do not know for sure if Muhammad himself led the Muslims to victory. Some have even argued that Mohammad did not exist, as others have done about Jesus of Nazareth, of whom much more is reliably known. 

Holland is certain (perhaps too certain) that the Koran originates in the early seventh century, basing his argument on one verse, which he thinks refers to the Persian conquest of Palestine in 614. He rejects, in a couple of sentences, the idea that the Koran was composed using material from various sources, including Christian hymns, as others have asserted. This is a question that deserved much more space in a long book that includes many long and irrelevant digressions. I suspect that it is elided for fear of the reaction from Muslims.

Two scholars were allowed to examine parchment fragments of the oldest known Koranic manuscript which were found forty years ago in a mosque in Sana’a, in Yemen. One, Gerd- Rudiger Puin, decided that the Koran had evolved over time using material from various sources. The Yemeni authorities were understandably angry and no further research has been published. This is also the theory of other scholars, including Patricia Crone and 'Christoph Luxenberg' (the latter writes under a pseudonym for fear of violent reprisals).  Holland, however, agreeing with the scholarly consensus, is convinced that the variations in texts are not of great importance and their similarities point to an early origin. These scholarly disputes require a good working knowledge of Arabic and classical Syriac or Middle Aramaic. Holland, so I have read, does not have these languages.

Of course, for Christians the idea that the Koran we know today does have an early origin is rather disappointing, although they hate it when biblical scholars undermine the historicity of the Gospels. Still, there is very much that is very mysterious about the Koran. It is fascinating to learn that many hadiths insist that the punishment for adultery should be death by stoning, but the Koran stipulates 'a hundred lashes'. How does this square with the Koran being much older than the hadiths? It tells us that the scribes who copied out the Koran did not adjust the text to accord with the hadiths but also that those who wrote down the hadiths did not know the Koran in the version we have it.

The Koran is almost the only evidence that we have for the origins of Islam, yet the Koran tells us virtually nothing about history. According to Holland, we do not even know if it originates in the Arabian peninsular (Arabia) or elsewhere in the Arab world - Iraq has been suggested by Patricia Crone as an alternative site.

Some light on this mysterious period in Arabian history is also shed by this book about the Jewish kingdom of Himyar (very roughly what is now Yemen), where Jews oppressed Christians. The suppression of Himyar by the Ethiopians provides Holland with the opening chapter of his book, though it is not very relevant to the origins of the Muslim religion. My visit to Ethiopia and to the Yazidi holy place, Lalish, in Iraq have whetted my appetite to know more about this period and part of the world. I look forward to going to Sana'a, though possibly when it is a little less dangerous.



Here is a very good article in Standpoint by Nick Cohen, about Tom Holland's book.

America is no longer a Protestant country

Two enormously significant milestones in 24 hours for the U.S.A. 

First, America is no longer a Protestant country. The end of an old song. 




I am a Catholic, yet am sad, though I was expecting America, the only industrial country which is intensely religious, to become slowly secular. She will thereby be gravely weakened. The future for America looks European and this means wisdom, sophistication and decline. I am much more saddened by this than by the economic statistics showing America losing ground to China. Economics is in itself unimportant - economics reflects culture which reflects, in the broadest sense of the idea, religion (and genetics). In no country have religion, self-belief and sense of purpose always been as closely linked as in America, founded though she was by Deists, with church and state strictly separated. 

As Margaret Thatcher said: "Economics is just the method. I want to change people's souls."

It is a mistake, by the way, to confound American Protestants with the religious right.  There is also a smaller but still large and influential religious left and most American churchgoers are not in either camp. And religious conservatism is found in both parties. Black voters who mostly vote Democrat have voted down homosexual marriage in California. But there is an anti-religious strain in the Democrats and the American Left which is becoming more visible.

To Europeans, American religiosity seems odd. First because Americans, despite being proverbially rich and modern, take religion seriously, including those who do not believe. Second because, while few countries are more religious, none is less mystical. And few countries are more violent, more exuberantly keen on making money or more relaxed about divorce or sex generally. American Christianity is very Old Testament. Nevertheless, this very muscular, very individualistic Christianity is what gives America her self-belief. Victor Frankl learnt in Auschwitz that what gives an individual the strength to endure is the belief that his life has a meaning. This is true of societies too, which are made up of individuals.

The second milestone is a new Gallup poll today that finds that, for the first time, most Americans believe that the government should "not favor any set of values" rather than promoting traditional ones. Until 2004, a majority favoured the promotion of traditional values, and since then, the numbers have been in flux. A slim 52 percent majority now say that "the government should be values-neutral".

Most of that 52% do not in fact want government to be values-neutral. They want government to enforce all sorts of values like sexual and racial equality, just not traditional ones. I should add that I am not sure what traditional values are, and perhaps it is not important to know, though marriage between two people of the same sex is certainly not one of them.

Many of the 52% are 'Millenials'. I was interested to read an American demographer the same day saying that: 

"Millennials say the role of government is to be our parent. Parents set rules. " 

An interesting analogy that suggests that young Americans have been infantilised by the state like West Europeans.


The small-town Protestant America which elected Ronald Reagan is losing ground rather fast. This, rather than economic statistics, makes me think that America is starting to decline. It might be a nicer, fairer and more interesting place in decline, like Canada, which is in a much worse state. We shall see.

In twenty or thirty years, the USA will also no longer be a white majority country. Many Americans I learned recently, from the BBC, do not speak English. Everything flows and this tide is flowing quickly. 

Edward Gibbon on the Ethiopians

From Chapter 42 of the Decline and Fall:

Justinian had been reproached for his alliance with the  Æthiopians, as if he attempted to introduce a people of savage negroes into the system of civilized society. But the friends of the Roman empire, the Axumites, or Abyssinians, may be always distinguished from the original natives of Africa. The hand of nature has flattened the noses of the negroes, covered their heads with shaggy wool, and tinged their skin with inherent and indelible blackness. But the olive complexion of the Abyssinians, their hair, shape, and features, distinctly mark them as a colony of Arabs; and this descent is confirmed by the resemblance of language and manners, the report of an ancient emigration, and the narrow interval between the shores of the Red Sea. Christianity had raised that nation above the level of African barbarism: their intercourse with Egypt, and the successors of Constantine, had communicated the rudiments of the arts and sciences; their vessels traded to the ifle of Ceylon, and seven kingdoms obeyed the Negus or supreme prince of Abyssinia, The independence of the Homerites, who reigned in the rich and happy Arabia, was first violated by an Æthiopian conqueror: he drew his hereditary claim from the queen of Sheba, and his ambition was sanctified by religious zeal. The Jews, powerful and active in exile, had seduced the mind of Dunaan, prince of the Homerites. They urged him to retaliate the persecution inflicted by the Imperial laws on their unfortunate brethren: some Roman merchants were injuriously treated; and several Christians of Negrawere honoured with the crown of martyrdom. The churches of Arabia implored the protection of the Abyssinian monarch. The Negus passed the Red Sea with a fleet and army, deprived the Jewish proselyte of his- kingdom and life, and extinguished a race of princes, who had ruled above two thousand years the sequestered region of myrrh and frankincense. The conqueror immediately announced the victory of the gospel, requested an orthodox patriarch, and so warmly professed his friendship to the Roman empire, that Justinian was flattered by the hope of diverting the silk-trade through the channel of Abyssinia, and of exciting the forces of Arabia against the Persian king. Their ally, Nonnosus, descended from a family of ambassadors, was named by the emperor to execute this important commission. He wisely declined the shorter, but more dangerous, road through the sandy deserts of Nubia; ascended the Nile, embarked on the Red Sea, and safely landed at the African port of Adulis. From Adulis to the royal city of Axume is no more than fifty leagues, in a direct line but the winding passes of the mountains detained the ambassador fifteen days; and as be traversed the forests, he saw, and vaguely computed, about five thousand wild elephants. The capital, according to his report, was large and populous; and the village of Axume is still conspicuous by the regal coronations, by the ruins of a Christian temple, and by sixteen or seventeen obelisks inscribed with Grecian characters. But the Negus gave audience in the open field, seated on a lofty chariot, which was drawn by four elephants superbly caparisoned, and surrounded by his nobles and musicians. He was clad in a linen garment and cap, holding in his hand two javelins and a light shield; and, although his nakedness was imperfectly covered, he displayed the Barbaric pomp of gold chains, collars, and bracelets, richly adorned with pearls and precious stones. The ambassador of Justinian knelt; the Negus raised him from the ground, embraced Nonnosus, kissed the seal, perused the letter, accepted the Roman alliance, and, brandishing his weapons, denounced implacable war against the worshippers of fire. But the proposal of the silk-trade was eluded; and notwithstanding the assurances, and perhaps the wishes, of the Abyssinians, these hostile menaces evaporated without effect. The Homerites were unwilling to abandon their aromatic groves, to explore a sandy desert, and to encounter, after all their fatigues, a formidable nation from whom they had never received any personal injuries. Instead of enlarging his conquests, the king of Æthiopia was incapable of defending his possessions. Abrahah, the slave of a Roman merchant of Adulis, assumed the sceptre of the Homerites; the troops of Africa were seduced by the luxury of the climate; and Justinian solicited the friendship of the usurper, who honoured, with a slight tribute, the supremacy of his prince. After a long series of prosperity, the power of Abrahah was overthrown before the gates of Mecca; his children were despoiled by the Persian conqueror; and the Æthiopians were finally expelled from the continent of Asia. This narrative of obscure and remote events is not foreign to the decline and fall of the Roman empire. If a Christian power had been maintained in Arabia, Mahomet must have been crushed in his cradle, and Abyssinia would have prevented a revolution which has changed the civil and religious state of the world.

In Ethiopia with Dervla and a mule

I made a very poor fist of researching Ethiopia before I went last month and I only read Evelyn Waugh's Waugh in Abyssinia and took Dervla Murphy's book, In Ethiopia with a Mule with me. 

Dervla  Murphy's story is wonderfully inspiring because she achieved her childhood ambition, which Freud said is the secret of happiness, even though it was a crazy one.

“On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as gifts, and a few days later I decided to cycle to India...However, I was a cunning child so I kept my ambition to myself, thus avoiding the tolerant amusement it would have provoked among my elders.”

She left school at fourteen to look after her sick mother and spent her twenties doing so. When her mother died, she was free to travel and 'like an elastic stretched to breaking point' as she said, she immediately set out from Ireland for India by bicycle. In India she met Penelope Betjeman in the street. Mrs. Betjeman was fascinated but this Irish colleen who had made such a remarkable journey, loved her postcards and persuaded her to write. Jock Murray commissioned a book. Destiny and a great example of how the universe conspires to make you succeed, if you remain true to your true ambitions. 

It reminds me of the lines by Philip Larkin:

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

Dervla (I can't call her Miss Murphy as I should) visited Ethiopia in 1966, when the Beatles were cutting records, England and Ireland had heavy pennies, shillings and half-crowns and other countries had small, lightweight decimal coinage. 1966 is a long time ago and a very long time ago in Ethiopia. 

The Emperor Haile Selassie was on the throne, of course, and in the countryside when Dervla went 99% of the country people were illiterate. When I went, the children, even the barefoot ones, spoke to me in English and asked me to test them on the names of the capitals of the world. (They got every answer right.)  

Sydney Greenstreet says to Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, ‘By Jove, you are a character, sir!’ and by Jove so is Dervla Murphy. Her intention was to walk from the coast of Eritrea to Addis Ababa across mountainous and inhospitable terrain but her feet gave in at the outset and she was persuaded to take a mule whom she named Jock after her publisher. She has a keen sense of beauty and is observant and acute but it is her energy, courage and knack of getting herself put up in all sorts of unlikely kraals which make one read on.

"Within fifteen minutes I had been accepted by the settlement-as a most puzzling phenomenon, it is true, but also as someone to be fed, and joked with."

You do not read her for her prose style, although it is vigorous, clear and workmanlike. She is not a Fermor or an Evelyn Waugh. But you read her almost as much because of her as because of the places she visits.

‘It is not part of our culture to travel alone,’ an Ethiopian says to her and everywhere people try to provide her with bodyguards and guides. She represents, as the Irish sometimes do, an extreme example of Western individualism, whereas Ethiopia is a traditional society that thinks in terms of families, not individual fulfilment. I came to adopt the Ethiopians’ point of view. Why did she have to risk her life so often? One reviewer spoke of the ‘gothic levels of discomfort’ that she endured (often unnecessarily). One particular passage – she is on a narrow mountain ledge above a chasm with a reluctant mule - gave me vertigo just reading it, which shows she is a good writer but a foolhardy traveller. My unsympathetic feeling, after reading several accounts of difficult terrain, illness, exhaustion and unfriendly natives was – why not take the bus? In the end, after finding a man who was kind to his mules to adopt Jock, she does just that.


She was nearly murdered, while walking across a treacherous marsh, by some men led by a priest in full ceremonial robes and carrying a censer, who had made a career change and swapped the cure of souls for leading a gang of brigands. After being robbed but allowed to live (the priest had voted for killing her), she promptly almost died sinking in quicksand. The mule saved her by standing there (mulishly I suppose) while she clambered out pulling on his reins. This story ended happily. The police took her to the camp where the criminals were hiding and arrests were made - and beatings administered by the police about which she was very indignant. Evelyn Waugh would have had fun with this.


She hates the very faint signs of incipient tourism and complains about

"the corruption by Western superficialities of a non-Western mind which then quickly rejects its own traditions while remaining incapable of extracting any virtue from ours."

Lalibela had just started to get a daily tourist flight when she went and her irritation that it had recently acquired a hotel (the Seven Olives, where she and I stayed) is understandable, I suppose. In the 1950s Thomas Pakenham had been told Lalibela received only four or five tourist visits a year. Now Lalibela has several hotels, but it is still not yet spoilt, though it is no longer innocent. It is going through its Lolita phase.

I wonder what Dervla would think if she returned. I wonder too how much she really understood but what is important is what she saw, rather than what she understood. D.H. Lawrence started writing about Italy as soon as he arrived and this was right. He was writing about the feelings Italy inspired in him and this is what interests us. As Mircea Eliade said, we travel to explore our unconscious mind.  Ethiopians can write about how they believe things are and be right on details. They cannot know how things appear to an intelligent outsider from a more developed society.  

The Ethiopia she saw was not today's Ethiopia of fast economic growth. And, of course, it is not Communism, which led to murders and droughts, but capitalism (in some cases it is true thanks to Communist China) that is changing the country. The villages remain the same but the peasants now often wear clothes made by Chinese political prisoners and mobile telephones are transforming their universe very slowly but surely. In towns, internet cafes came five or ten years back and are doing their trade, though often with internet connections that rarely work. 


Dervla does not blame Hollywood or Western culture for the promiscuity she detects in many Ethiopians and this is a reminder that not all traditional cultures are chaste. I have read that in Africa before colonialisation, or even  eighty years ago, men and women were sexually conservative. Africa is a big place and perhaps Ethiopia is an exception. It seems to be from Dervla's account. A priest, with whose family she lodged in a kraal, offered her his daughter for the night, thinking his guest was a man. When the girl reached under Dervla's clothes and found a mistake had been made, Dervla and the whole family laughed uproariously.


In her day almost all infrastructure that was at all well constructed had been built by the Italians between 1936 and 1941 (it is still somewhat similar in Albania) and she reports that everywhere Ethiopians speak well of what the Italians had built. It is hard not to draw the lesson that colonialism benefitted Africa and would in many ways have benefitted Ethiopia Other accounts of the barbarity of Haile Sellassie's Ethiopia bear this out, including the Emperor's own account. But Ethiopia is the fascinating country she is because, unlike the rest of black Africa, she was only a colony for five years. (Liberia, the other apparent exception, was in reality for 150 years ruled by American colonists, who happened to be black.) And alone in Africa, and one wonders if this is because they are Semites, Ethiopians have a long history, an ancient church and had until recently an even more ancient monarchy. A  very old-fashioned, High Tory country (sex aside) and a fascinatingly strange one.

Ethiopia is a very strange place in a world with few strange places left

"Encompassed by the enemies of their religion, the Aethiopians slept for near a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten."

Gibbon

Addis Ababa. Thankful to be in the low teens Celsius after Dubai in August and thankful to escape from Ramadan. I had intended to find cheap digs but I am tired and I am persuaded to take a four star place, the Jupiter, for $65 and this includes usefully a transfer.

I am talking to a Montenegrin lady who shares the minibus. She is a scientist who has suspended her academic career, which is her passion, for  her job in the UN, which is a complete waste of time but pays very well. She says the whole UN is like this. I suspect a lot of the aid workers one sees in expensive hotels fall into this category too. She tells me what I didn't know - I have shamefully done no homework - that Addis is the Brussels of Africa, the HQ for innumerable international bodies (mostly I suspect transferring money from the poor of the rich world to the rich of the poor world).

The buzz of a new, cheap, little-known country. The African decor in the bar of the Jupiter is very slightly reminiscent, somehow, of being in a  top hotel behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s. The bar is full of UNOcrats seated alone using laptops and I buy a nice, rather weak, St George’s beer for two dollars. 

'About the history of Abyssinia before the Flood we possess no certain knowledge.' 

This is the  beginning of an 18th century history of Abyssinia, quoted by Evelyn Waugh. It has hung in my mind since my early teens. It is one of the reasons I am here. 

Wednesday August 1 Addis

Breakfast in the hotel. The best coffee I can remember drinking. The cappuccino is wonderful because the coffee is wonderful. I never tasted anything with so much flavour. Like seeing my first Old Master after only seeing prints. Or like my first tomatoes in the Balkans in the early 90s. Then Steve sleeps and I try to.

I strongly disapprove of smoking but the sight of ashtrays in the bedrooms gives one an exhilarating sense of freedom. England used to be a free country once where people said and did what they liked. Not any more though.

I post on Facebook:

16°C (= 60°F), overcast, thunder and lightning forecast in Addis Ababa - heaven after Dubai (only 41°C but humid). Nice to get away from Ramadan. All to report so far is wonderful beer and pretty women. Yesterday on the plane there were many beautiful women with European faces and (in George Meredith's expression) queenly rears.

Actually, the pretty girls on the plane were prettier and much more numerous than those in the street. 

In fact, after the plane I didn't see any more beauties until I saw the Muslim girls of Harar who are Hamitic (negro) not Semitic. The Amhara ( a recently coined word for the speakers of Amharic) are the 'people of state' in Ethiopia. They are partly or mostly Semites and have European features. In Gibbon's words:

The Abyssinians, who still preserve the features and olive complexion of the Arabs, afford a proof that two thousand years are not sufficient to change the colour of the human race. 

Abyssinians or Ethiopians were Arab nomads who started  to move into Africa  and become mountain dwellers, according to Dervla Murphy whom I am reading, between 1000 and 500 B.C. But a thousand years later the Ethiopians held parts of Arabia and in 570 A.D. came close to conquering Mecca and converting it to Christianity. 570 is also approximately the year Mahomet was born. As Gibbon says

If a Christian power had been maintained in Arabia Mahomet must have been crushed in his cradle, and Abyssinia would have prevented a revolution, which has changed the civil and religious state of the world.

Instead, the Ethiopians were driven out of Arabia and confined to Africa.

We walk to the Hilton in grey cool weather – Addis is full of strange trees and the green is a wonderful colour. It feels like England in late October, before a storm, in some eccentric place like Cambridge, full of walled gardens. We buy tickets. I buy five internal flights for $280 in total. Am very happy about this and I now have an itinerary. I am enjoying myself. 

Nice chilly drizzly weather like a British summer of my childhood before I moved to the Balkans.It is the rainy season but the rains are light. Actually a good time to come.

So we are in Addis and not as we had hoped in Lalibela and we make the most of it by visiting the National Ethnological Museum which is the least impressive museum I ever visited. Lonely Planet said it was better than the National Museum so we gave that one a miss even though it houses Lucy reputedly the world's oldest human remains. Though this is now in doubt.

Oh let us never never doubt 

What nobody is sure about

The best thing about the National Ethnological Museum is the building and the park in which is situated - a former palace of the Emperor Haile Selasse.







Wooden pillows in the museum - they didn't look very comfortable.





Burial statues look sad in this sad museum.





We wander and pick up Beru, a student of logistics from Harar, who helps us to find our way and visit both the cathedrals one by one. 

The first known Ethiopian Christian was the Ethiopian eunuch converted by St. Philip, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles (8:26-40). Everyone thinks Ethiopia is the third oldest Christian country in the world (325 is the date given in the books), shortly after Armenia (Wikipedia says in 301 or 314) and Georgia. But Christianity became the state religion in Georgia only in 337 so I calculate Ethiopia came second. By comparison, Constantine, Emperor, saint and ruthless warlord, was converted in 312. Christianity became the state religion, which I imagine means compulsory, in the Roman Empire by the Edict of Salonica in 380. 

Hugh Trevor-Roper well said that 

'There is properly no history of Africa. There is only the history of Europeans in Africa.' 

This would be more accurate had he mentioned the history of the Arabs in Africa and the Ethiopians, which is why I am here (and going to Zanzibar). Though the Ethiopians might be considered the exception that proves the rule. They are, at least partly, Semites.






A bookseller sells Communist books. Here Communism killed great numbers but still there are people in the world who say real Communism was never tried and I met Ethiopians who hanker after Communism. The Ethiopian version of Communism was not, it is true, very canonical. The tyrant Mengistu, who overthrew Haile Selassie and the ancient Ethiopian monarchy, did not get round to setting up a Communist Party here before he had murdered almost every Marxist-Leninist in the country. 

I was interested to learn that Mengistu is now said to have personally smothered to death the venerable Haile Selassie. How like a Jacobean tragedy. Perhaps Titus Andronicus or  something by Webster.

  

Holy Trinity Cathedral (above). Then St George’s Cathedral . Both had museums with ancient manuscripts in the ancient dead language of Ge'ez which is preserved for the liturgy and in other obscure tongues plus less interesting things in the case of St. George's related to Haile Selassie and his coronation in 1930. This will be remembered only because Evelyn Waugh attended and wrote about it in 'Remote People' a book I recently bought but lost unread. I can very warmly recommend his account of his second visit, Waugh in Abyssinia, which I reviewed here. But what most people will read and reread are his two great novels inspired by Ethiopia, Black Mischief and Scoop. 

Waugh writes in Remote People:

It is to Alice in Wonderland that my thoughts recur in seeking some historical parallel for life in Addis Ababa. There are others: Israel in the time of Saul, the Scotland of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the Sublime Porte…. But it is in Alice only that one finds the peculiar flavour of galvanised and translated reality, where animals carry watches in their waistcoat pockets, royalty paces the croquet lawn beside the chief executioner, and litigations ends in a flutter of playing cards.

Waugh did not take Ethiopia as seriously as he might have done but his idiosyncratic, sometimes facetious vision will live as long as Black Mischief is read, which means as long as English novels are read. 

At St. George's it was overcast and drizzling. At two separate locked doors two men were pummelling the doors with their heads. The second man got pulled off by a tall man in a grey army coat and top boots who looked like a deserter from the white side in the Russian civil war except that he was black. Having detached the man from the building he struck him fairly  lightly with a sort of whip.  The drunk man didn't seem to mind.  I knew that here was another civilisation as old as that of Georgia, older than that of Syria. And yet the interiors of these churches look like those of a Baptist church built in the same era the 1890s in my home town or rather  a Baptist hall. The paintings in the church are cheap European daubs.

The priest sang to us. Ethiopian liturgical music is very beautiful but does not sound like religious music. It faintly resembled jazz.

The priest explains the ceremonial drum and its significance. The cords represent the whip with which Our Lord was scourged, the smaller end our birth and the larger end our death (do I remember right after almost 3 weeks?)  and he demonstrated its use in the Mass. 

The  ambulatory or whatever it is in the cathedral is you see decorated like a very down at heel Baptist church hall in 1970s Britain - Ethiopian churches are like that.

most things squalid but the occasional jewel shining in the mud.

Ethiopia is a very strange place in a world with few strange places left. I like it.

We had dinner in Yad Abyssinia near the airport and tasted and very much liked Ethiopian food. Most of the faces were black but whether they were Ethiopians or foreign visitors I don't know.  Wonderful buffet. I gorged and drank the local wine of Goudar.

 Ethiopian curries are wonderful - other food too. Wine odd but drinkable - tastes like dryish sherry. 

They play traditional music from every region and tribe but although on the streets of Addis I am constantly hearing really wonderful music here every song sounds exactly the same. 

We shared a table with an American couple, well-meaning, sexless and innocent, who have just succeeded in adopting a child who had been abandoned in the street and taken to the police. What a good thing of the Americans to do. How wrong Lady Nicholson is to rail against international adoptions in Romania.

Ethiopia still keeps the Julian calendar. It is 2004 here. That I knew this fact astonished Steve, especially as I said I had done no research into Ethiopia (a lie - I had read Waugh in Abyssinia).

At 7.00 a.m. is 1 o'clock here and at 19.00 it is again 1 o'clock which is wholly logical. That I knew this also impressed Steve.  Steve is aghast that this is what I consider general knowledge and I considered him the cleverest candidate I ever placed.  I seem to be better informed  than other people and this makes me feel I might have wasted my gifts.

I thought this system of telling the time was an Ethiopian idiosyncrasy but in Zanzibar I heard of an old 19th century clock that told time in this way and it was described as the old Swahili way of counting time. 

I did not know however that the Ethiopian calendar has thirteen months. Nor that Ethiopians instead of shaking hands like Americans or Europeans do (or doing nothing like the British) bump shoulders.

I never finished Rasselas which I got my Dad to buy me as a present for doing well in my O Levels - the Folio Society edition cost him five pounds second hand - but I am shocked how many people with have not heard of it. I thought it was a book you 'had' to read, meaning you should know it by repute at least. This place is not the Happy Valley, but flying in to Addis reminded me of Rasselas's escape from Abyssinia on wings - a fantasy of Dr Johnson's which is now banal. 

Thursday 2

Plane to Lalibela stops first at Gonder. At both airports there is room for only one plane and both are aerodromes which feel they are at the very top of the world. The thin mountain air, the cool light, the hills, the deep green.

We drive across beautiful country and to the hotel which I select at the airport because the hotel rep offers $25 when the rest want $30 and I realise afterwards it is the Seven Olives where Dervla Murphy stayed in 1967. She is my great friend on this journey – I am reading her In Ethiopia with a Mule and what a reviewer called the Gothic levels of discomfort that she willingly endured make me feel very soft. She disapproved of Lalibela because two or three years before she arrived the tourist plane service from Addis was opened and Lalibela had become 'transformed by greed'. She disapproved of the hotel for being a simulacrum of Home Counties comfort and being terribly overpriced. But Steve said Lonely Planet said it had the best food in town and it had a great terrace overlooking tree filled vista. Behind the trees was I suppose the town. 

For lunch I ate a simple version of tibs which was quite wonderful. Pieces of lamb in a sauce piled high in a mound and sizzling over a flame, ate with injera which is made from a cereal unique to Ethiopia, called teff. Injera is grey and looks like grey foam rubber. The Romanian equivalent of injera is mamaliga, known in Italy as polenta.

The wonderful coffee at my hotel in Lalibela was grown in the garden. I suspect Ethiopian coffee is the best in the world - best I ever drank. They claim to have invented coffee.  I suspect or want to think the Ethiopians did invent coffee - though whether Muslim or Christian Ethiopians I do not know.

The churches. These thirteen churches were hewn from rock in the eleventh century by King Lalibela who had been told in a dream to create a new Jerusalem.

The guide we met at the airport Birhan talks us into spending what I realise is a very large amount of money - $180 for two for one day to see three churches quickly and the church of  Yemrehana Kristos  and we never get back our $20 change. This is indeed the greed which Dervla disliked at its inception but he was a good guide and I am very grateful indeed he suggested Yemrehana Kristos.

Yes Lalibela is touristy – Sighisoara some years ago – say in 2002. Our hotel is for foreigners and for backpackers you would think but it is mostly people in their 30s 40s and 50s. But the tourists are very very few compared to any tourist place in Europe in August. Lalibela has a population of only 20,000 yet it absorbs its tourists well. You don't see them.

A paper I read in Addis said that last year visitors to Lalibela reached a record number of 50,000. I callously wished the number were one tenth of that.

B is brisk and takes us round three churches at slightly too brisk a pace but there is almost no limit to the time that I can stay in an interesting church. The church of St George is fascinating but though the interior is extremely interesting indeed I did not find beauty in it.   

I was not much interested in Africa except Ethiopia and Zanzibar and Ethiopia proves to be absolutely fascinating and enchanting. Like Romania where I live and the House of Lords where I had my first job, it is Gormenghast. I wonder why I like it more than India. The people I suppose, although I like Indians. The Ethiopians are more manly than the Indians and less mercantile. Ethiopia is most traditional country I ever visited. A very High Tory country.

Then we were driven in an uncomfortable four wheel drive van  to the Yemrehana Kristos Church, Lasta - a 90 minute drive from Lalibela and the part along an unmade road was pretty painful for me in the back of the van. I regretted coming until I arrived. The church is of wood but built in a vast cave and stands on a raft which floats on a marsh. A pile of skeletons stands behind the church and has done for centuries but it is not clear why they are there.

Dervla found the priests insisting on five dollars before they opened up - the priest we met was wholly delightful. It seems they get up to fifty tourists a day depending on the time of the year (August is low season) but we were alone. 

I found the climb to the church hard, unlike Steve, and I this is because we were at above 3000 metres above sea level though he is fitter than me. 

The priest showed us the golden cross, which was stolen from the church but recovered, and the liturgical drum.




 


We were invited to coffee in the village by someone we met. Unlike in Dervla's time when almost everyone was illiterate now they read and write and speak English. They burnt frankincense for us - I made a mental note to buy some in the next market I visited but forgot. The smell of frankincense was pretty unremarkable I can record.

People gather firewood and take it several miles.Often they are barefoot but the majority are shod.








The journey back in which I sat in front was blissful and was followed by a great dinner at the Seven Olives after which I went to bed and Steve went off into the town with the restaurant manager to sample the local delicacy honey wine,  a decision that proved the next day to have been mistaken.

Thursday, August 2

Steve departs, suffering from the sequentia of the honey wine. 

Ethiopia in August is the darkest green imaginable, drizzly, cool. Today is cool but my linen jacket is enough, though I see other white people, who have done their research, are wearing things that look warm and zip up to the neck, not a linen suit. I am grateful I have a long sleeved shirt and wish I had packed a pullover.  It rarely reaches 20 degrees Centigrade in Lalibela in August. Ethiopia is one of the very few places to go in August in the Northern Hemisphere which is (i) interesting and (ii) not too hot.

Mass goers in white translucent robes carrying staves and wearing curious headgear.   

Mass in Lalibela on the day of the Salvation of the World was one of the most extraordinary wonderful experiences of my life. And I got a few minutes on film despite disapproving of filming these things. 

The roof built by UNICEF a few years ago may be necessary but is a dreadful eyesore and ruins the magic of the place and I wonder why it is necessary. Is the rock porous or apt to crumble?

The empty tombs of Abraham Isaac and Joseph. I am very ashamed of how little I know about the Ethiopian Coptic church which despite being until the 1950s being ruled by a monk sent from Alexandria is I suspect very different from Egyptian Coptic Christianity.

Apparently, according to Dervla the Ethiopian Coptic Church for centuries only knew the Septuagint. According to Evelyn Waugh they regard Pontius Pilate as one of the great saints. They follow the Jewish dietary rules and also forbid camel meat and (rightly) smoking. Saturday is the Sabbath. You take off your shoes to enter a church and religion revolves around savage fasting. They have beautiful church music. All is an odd mix of kitsch and piety. Dervla is unimpressed by their religion which she sees as ritual without depth. I wish I could judge. I shall return to learn more.

I just bought this ten year old boy a pair of shoes for $9. The most enjoyable purchase I ever made. His last pair broke a year ago. I also left money with Birhan to buy him a football and hope he got it.

Friday

Waiting at Lalibela airport - Ethiopian Airlines planes are usually delayed but at least they very rarely crash. Lalibela airport does not have internet even in the airport offices so instead of blogging I talk to my fellow passengers..

I am talking to a Russian student who looks and sounds like an American. He tells me 'I have to admit that most Russians are extremely racist.' How different Russian undergraduate conversations must be from their British equivalents. I wonder which students are more open minded. I hope the Russians  are more interested than the British students in an education, as opposed to getting a better chance of a good job, but I doubt it.

A plane to Gonder, and I put up in the Taye Hotel. It is a year old and the best hotel, cost $45 and was very comfortable. It has three stars but might have had four. As we drive from the airport, an estate of detached suburban houses reared up, each exactly like the others, standing like three rows of soldiers. They looked like they belonged in the USA or England. They were being sold I was told to Ethiopian-Americans who had been given political asylum in the USA during the Communist era and were coming back with money. These houses, for some reason, utterly revolted and depressed me, whereas the poverty of Ethiopia does not at all.

Gonder is remarkable for a number of handsome castles built in the 17th century, which show Portuguese influence, though my guide denied this. 

The 17th century Debre Berhan Selassie Church at Gonder, Ethiopia. Attractive paintings from the 18th century, but not beautiful or comparable with the ones in Romania. 

Of the 44 churches in Gonder most were destroyed in the 19th century by the Emperor Theodore (my guide denied this too and blamed Muslims quite unfairly) but this one has interesting, though not beautiful, wall paintings. Interesting too that the angels on the roof are black but Jesus Christ is whitish. One wall painting shows Mahomet being drawn up from hell by the Archangel Michael to prove he was a false prophet.

I wish I had seen the castles without the chattering guide although he explained the wall paintings in the church which was useful. I had not slept the night before and did not spend long enough walking round the decrepit Mussolini era central square. Mussolini intended Gonder to be the capital of his East African Empire.

I first knew of Abyssinia as a little boy, when I read of the Emperor Theodore's holding captive British subjects, in a book my grandfather had given my father as a boy, called The Royal Portrait Gallery. It  chronicled the history of England from the Heptarchy to the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, when it was published, and I memorised it at the slightly precocious age of four. Yet I am ashamed that I did not do my research before I came.  I now discover that, after the Emperor took his own life rather than be taken alive and General Napier released the captives, he brought the orphaned son of the Emperor back to England where Queen Victoria took the young prince under her protection. He was sent to school at Rugby where he died at the age of eighteen 'of pleurisy and despair'.

August 5

The Lonely Planet guide to Ethiopia says that adultery is very widespread 'among men as well as women' and warns women travellers that a wedding ring is no deterrent against male advance, but has the opposite effect. How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen. Muslims are chaste though, I feel sure.

Ethiopia should convince anyone, if they doubted it, that the short period in which Europe colonised Africa did a great deal of good, as well as some harm. On the other hand, Ethiopia is so compelling because it has not been Europeanised and it represents the only African country with history and an ancient culture. 

Dr Johnson said 

'Outside the Christian and Mahometan worlds all is barbarism.' 

In Rasselas, as a literary device, he describes Ethiopia as the Happy Valley but I am not sure if he would have considered Ethiopia barbaric or not. Gibbon says

Christianity had raised that nation above the level of African barbarism

but elsewhere

in their lonely situation, the Aethiopians had almost relapsed into the savage life. 

But then what did either of them know about the matter? Evelyn Waugh, who wanted Mussolini to bring Catholic civilisation to Ethiopia, thought only Harar and Muslim Ethiopia civilised. Harar is where I go next.

I'm growing tired and so are you. 

Let's cut this poem into two.

For my journey to Harar please click here.