The bells of the cathedral fall silent, the muezzin’s voice ceases calling, a fiery, blinding sun emerges from behind the mountains of Yemen, and our bus — an ancient Fiat whose body has been so corroded by rust and so often knocked and hammered that it is impossible to determine its color — sets off, rushing downhill past steep little fields from 2,500 meters above the sea. I can scarcely bring myself to describe this journey. The chauffeur seats me, the only European, next to him. He is a young, intelligent, and careful driver. He understands this road, knows its deadly traps. There are several hundred turns along the one-hundred-kilometer route — in fact, the entire road is just turns and bends, and, moreover, the narrow track, which is covered with loose gravel, runs the entire time above formidable precipices, without any protective railings or safeguards.
At many a turn, if you don’t suffer from fear of heights, you can look down and see lying far, far below you, at the bottom of the chasm, the shattered remains of buses, trucks, armored vehicles, and the skeletons of all sorts of beasts — probably camels, perhaps mules or donkeys. Some are already very old, but others — and it is those that are most disturbing — are quite fresh. The driver and his passengers are in sync, clearly a well-practiced and smoothly functioning team: when we enter a turn, the driver calls out a protracted “Yyyaaahhh!” and at this signal the passengers lean in the opposite direction, giving the bus the counterweight it needs to keep from plunging headlong into the abyss.
Every now and then we come upon a brightly colored Coptic altar at a bend, decorated with ribbons, artificial puffy flowers, and naively painted icons, with several skinny, desiccated monks milling about. When the bus slows down on the turn, they hold clay bowls up to the windows, into which the passengers can throw offerings of some pennies. The monks will pray for their safe journey — safe at least until the next bend.
Every kilometer reveals different vistas, a different landscape emerges from behind each mountain; ever new panormas compose themselves before our eyes, the earth showing off the abundance of its charms, wanting to overwhelm us with its beauty. Because, indeed, this road is at once terrifying and beautiful. Down below, a village submerged in flowering shrubs; there, a monastery, its pale walls shining against the black of the mountains like a white flame. Over there, a gigantic, one-hundred-ton boulder, split in half as neatly as if by a thunderbolt — and thrust into the middle of a green pasture. Somewhere else, fields of loose stones, sparsely, carelessly scattered about — but in a certain spot these stones are more concentrated, lie nearer one another, nearer and neater: the sign of a Muslim cemetery. Here, as in a classical landscape painting, a rapid stream glitters with silver; over there, massed cliffs create heaven-grazing gates, convoluted labyrinths, immense columns.
As we descend lower and lower, constantly spinning around on the frenzied carousel of turns, ever balancing on the border between life and death, we feel it getting warmer, and then very warm, even hot, until finally, as though we’d been tossed with a giant shovel, we are thrust into a blazing furnace — Massawa.
First, though, several kilometers before the city, the mountains end and the road runs straight and level. At this point, the driver is transformed: his slim silhouette goes limp, his facial muscles relax, and his expression becomes gentler. He smiles. He reaches for a stack of cassettes lying next to him and snaps one into the tape player. From the scratched, gravelly recording comes the hoarse voice of a local singer. The melody is Eastern; there are many high, yearning, sentimental tones in it. “He is saying that she has eyes like two moons,” the driver explains to me. “And that he loves those moonlike eyes.”
We enter the ruined city. On either side of the road, mountains of artillery shells. The walls of burned houses, and broken, splintered tree trunks. A woman is walking down an empty street, two boys are playing in the cab of a demolished truck. We arrive at a sandy rectangular square in the center of town. All around, shabby single-story houses painted green, pink, and yellow, the façades cracked, the paint peeling and falling. In one corner, in a spot of shade, three old men are napping. They are sitting on the ground, their turbans pulled down over their eyes.
Eritrea is two altitudes, two climates, two religions. In the highlands, where Asmara lies and where it is cooler, lives the Tigrinya ethnic group. The majority of the country’s inhabitants belong to it. The Tigrinya are Coptic Christians. The other part of Eritrea is the hot, semidesert lowlands — the shores of the Red Sea, between Sudan and Djibouti. Various pastoral people live there, professing Islam (Christianity seems to tolerate the tropics less well, while Islam takes to them). Massawa, the port and the city, belong to that latter world. These areas of the Red Sea around Massawa and Assab, and on the Gulf of Aden at Djibouti, Aden, and Berbera, are the hottest spots on the planet. As I stepped off the bus, I was struck by such heat that I could barely catch my breath. I felt that the flaming air all around would soon choke me, and I realized I had to find shelter quickly because in a moment I would collapse. I began to scrutinize the lifeless town, searching for some hint, some trace of life. Seeing no signs anywhere, in despair I simply started walking straight ahead. I knew I wouldn’t get far, but kept going, with great difficulty, lifting one leg, then the other, as if I were pulling them out of a bottomless, sucking quagmire. At long last I spotted a bar, its entrance shielded by a percale curtain. I parted the panels of fabric, walked in, and slumped on the nearest bench. My ears were buzzing; the heat seemed to be growing more intense, more abominable.
In the darkness, at the back of the empty bar, I noticed a dirt-encrusted, battered counter and two heads lying on it. From a distance, it appeared the heads had been severed, and left here by someone. Yes. That’s what must have happened, because the heads were not moving. They were showing no signs of life whatsoever. But I was in no condition to ponder who might have brought these heads here and why he would have left them. My attention was diverted by the sight of a crate of water bottles next to the counter. With what strength I had left I dragged myself over to them and began drinking, bottle after bottle. Only then did one of the heads open an eye, which proceeded to observe what I was doing. But the two barmaids still did not so much as twitch, motionless from the heat, like lizards.
Having water and a shady place, I now calmly waited for the fierce afternoon hours to pass. Later, I ventured out to search for some sort of a hotel. One could see that the wealthy districts of Massawa must once have been an enchanting mixture of tropical, Italianate-Arabic architecture. But now, several years after the war, most of the houses still lay in ruins, and the sidewalks were littered with bricks, garbage, and glass. In one of the city’s main intersections stood an enormous burned-out Russian T-72 tank. They clearly had no means of removing it. There wasn’t a crane in Eritrea capable of lifting it, no platform on which it could be transported, no forge that could melt it down. Indeed, you can bring a great tank like this into a country like Eritrea, you can fire away with it, but when it breaks down, or someone torches it, there is really nothing to be done with the wreckage.
In the Shade of a Tree, in Africa
It is already the end of the journey. All that remains now is a brief rest in the shade of a tree, on the way back home. The tree grows in a village called Adofo, which lies near the Blue Nile in the Ethiopian province of Wollega. It is an enormous mango tree, with thick, eternally green foliage. Whoever travels across Africa’s plateaux, through the immensity of the Sahel and the savannah, repeatedly sees a startling sight: on the great stretch of sandy, sun-burned ground, on plains covered with parched yellow grasses and sparsely growing, dry, thorny shrubs, there appears every now and then a single, solitary, magnificently branching tree. Its canopy is lush and vibrant, of so intense and saturated a color that it is visible from far away, a pronounced, vivid stain on the horizon. Its leaves, with no apparent trace of wind, move and shimmer. What is this tree doing here, in this dead, moonlike landscape? Why in this precise spot? Why only one? Where does it draw its juices from? Sometimes you will have to travel many kilometers before encountering another one like it.