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  While trapped in the marshes, the caravan was ambushed by Danakils, who were eager to add fresh trophies to their necks. Undaunted, Hayter forced his men to charge through the warriors’ lines. Several were slain and most of the supplies were lost. Remarkably, Hayter managed to complete his mission, rounding up a hundred Abyssinian baboons. But as they were carried away, a monk put a curse on Hayter for stealing sacred animals. Thinking nothing of it, Hayter loaded the baboons on to a ship bound for London. The animals’ crates were lashed to the deck but one night a storm blew up. The waves that broke over the ship split many of the crates, so freeing the baboons which ran wild. The curse had begun to take effect.

  In the years that followed, Hayter returned time and again to Ethiopia. He was bewitched by the country. Traveling to the most distant outposts, he struggled to earn a living. He worked as a rat-catcher, as a rare butterfly hunter, as a muleteer and as a debt-collector, but it was as a gold prospector that he made his name.

  The 1920s were buoyant times in Ethiopia. Although Menelik II had sought to open up his kingdom to the outside world and to modernize it, the economy was still largely feudal. A handful of Europeans took advantage of the country’s lack of sophistication and introduced luxuries for the few who could afford them, while others leased mining concessions from the government and prospected for gold.

  Frank Hayter spent years panning rivers and digging alone in the untamed reaches of western Ethiopia. The locals nicknamed him Abba Kuta, “The Father of Madness”. They’d never come across a man so set on searching for gold. Hayter was certain that the precious metal had been mined in Ethiopia for millennia and that ancient Egyptians must have worked the region even before the time of Solomon. For Hayter, Ethiopia was the “Land of Sheba”, whose queen traveled to Jerusalem to shower the wise king with gold.

  Somewhere lost in the Simien Mountains Hayter believed there lay a network of shafts from which fabulous quantities of gold had once been mined. He had heard of monasteries built over cave entrances where the monks refused to let foreigners enter the gold-filled caverns: they were waiting for the “Great White Queen” to return.

  Hayter never relinquished his search for what he called “the Queen of Sheba’s mines”, but gradually the curse began to exact its terrible revenge. Each day, he grew a little weaker. A once athletic young man was slowly becoming a physical wreck. Then, after years of solitary prospecting, he stumbled across a series of cave entrances which led to mine-shafts. The doorways, faced with carved stone, stood high on the ledge of a remote mountain called Tullu Wallel.

  Cautiously, Hayter entered one of the portals, fearful of disturbing a wild animal in its lair. Deep in one of the shafts, he said, there lay a fabulous treasure. But before he could cart away the gold and other riches, the curse of the baboons struck for the last time. A river which flowed through the cavern suddenly swelled to a torrent and Hayter was forced to escape. By the time he had returned with fresh supplies, the entrance to the caves had been mysteriously sealed. However hard he tried, he could not break in.

  Samson had never heard of Tullu Wallel; nor had anyone else I asked. But he did agree that Ethiopian curses are something to be taken very seriously. He’d seen with his own eyes a cursed man die a slow and painful death. The spell had been cast by a high-ranking priest on a shopkeeper whose only crime was to enter a church wearing shoes.

  By the time we reached Addis Ababa I was determined to find out more about Frank Hayter and Tullu Wallel, and I knew there was only one man who might be able to help. Dr Richard Pankhurst has spent most of his life in Ethiopia. His grandmother, Emmeline Pankhurst, was the founder of the suffragette movement, and his mother was equally spirited, moving to Ethiopia in the 1930s in order to help support the resistance against the invading Italians. Dr Pankhurst has written extensively on Ethiopian society and history, and is regarded as the foremost expert on all matters Ethiopian.

  Tracking down the distinguished scholar was far easier than I had expected. He lives with his wife and their dogs in a cottage on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. An hour after speaking on the telephone, he pulled the front door wide open and ushered me in for tea.

  We sat in a conservatory at the back of the house, drinking mint tea and nibbling at slices of toast spread with home-made jam.

  Despite this veneer of Englishness I very soon realized that my host had an unusual sensitivity towards the African continent and, in particular, Ethiopia.

  Dr Pankhurst has spent most of his life traveling in the country’s remote areas and he speaks faultless Amharic. I was worried that he might regard my search for Solomon’s gold as frivolous. I did not know much about Ethiopian culture and so far I’d only been as far as Harar. So when I was invited to talk about my project, I gave the details uneasily.

  Pankhurst stared into space for a few moments.

  “Ethiopia has a great history of gold,” he said at last. “Herodotus, Cosmos, Agathachides, Barradas – they all spoke of it.”

  I asked if he’d heard of Tullu Wallel or Frank Hayter.

  “Tullu Wallel is not far from Beni Shangul, as I recall,” he said. “Historically the area was renowned for the quality of its gold. Menelik seized the province in 1886 to exploit its rich mineral resources. The most valuable licence was granted to a prospector called Ilg. He found what he believed was an ancient Egyptian gold mine at Nejo. As for Frank Hayter,” he continued, “yes, I know the name. He wrote some letters to my mother. Like her, he was against the Italian Fascist invasion of Ethiopia.”

  Pankhurst paused to sip his tea.

  “Even so, as a credible point of reference, I’d have to say that Hayter is rather unreliable.”

  Later that day I thumbed through my books, searching for the references that Pankhurst had mentioned. Agathachides, a Greek geographer writing in about 140 bc, told how prisoners-of-war were used to mine gold. “Vast numbers of them are bound in fetters,” he wrote, “and compelled to work night and day without pause, with no hope of escape. For they are under savage soldiers who speak a foreign tongue.”

  Cosmos, a Greek-speaking merchant — writing seven centuries after Agathachides — said that “a land of frankincense and gold lies at the farthest end of Ethiopia”. Arriving at the Axumite port of Adulis in about ad 524, he heard that gold was mined by the Agau people in the west and bartered through a system known by anthropologists as “dumb commerce”. Every other year, the king of the Axumites sent forth his agents to trade with the Agau. The agents arrived with a great entourage, bringing oxen, iron, salt and other merchandize to exchange for gold. They would set up camp, and surround it with thorny fences. Oxen would be slaughtered and the meat hung on the thorns along with other goods. During the night the Agau would take what they wanted and leave nuggets of gold in their place.

  A thousand years after Cosmos, the Spanish explorer and patriarch Juan de Bermúdez traveled west along the Nile. Bermúdez, nicknamed “the Lord of Wealth”, had become famous for discovering the Caribbean island of Bermuda which is named after him. (He actually found the island by chance, when he was shipwrecked on a voyage from Virginia.) In his chronicles of Ethiopia, he wrote that the land was barren but that the soil was red, for it was two parts gold and one part earth. The precious metal was more common than iron, and was fashioned into wondrous objects by the locals.

  From the earliest times explorers have been fascinated by Ethiopia and particularly by its western regions and the barbarous tribes who once inhabited them. Famed for their strange rituals and their expertise in mining gold, the tribes of Wollega and Beni Shangul are the stuff of legend. It is no surprise that for people like Frank Hayter — who was inspired by Rider Haggard’s novel – western Ethiopia was an obvious place to search for King Solomon’s mines.

  Though Pankhurst had dismissed Hayter as unreliable, I was gripped with an overwhelming desire to follow in his footsteps. I knew that my chances of success were slim, but the idea of seeking out the mountain seemed important. I searched for
Hayter in my other books but only one mentioned him. In the Land of Sheba, written by Captain E.J. Bartleet, Hayter’s contemporary and friend, tells the story of Tullu Wallel. Opposite the text, there is a black-and-white photograph of a cave and a shaft entrance. Beneath it, the caption reads: The entrance to the Queen of Sheba’s caves.

  FOUR

  The Mines

  “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

  Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu

  We must have been mad to swap the comfort of our beds for the snarl of the bus station. Long before dawn we turned up to search for the bus heading south to Samson’s home town of Kebra Mengist, walking through ankle-deep mud and wishing we were anywhere but here. A dozen battered buses were being mobbed by crowds of would-be passengers, all of them frantically trying to get aboard. Their belongings were wrapped in blankets and held above their heads, as if they were wading through a flood. The engine of each bus roared wildly in competition but, as I’d already discovered, noise had nothing to do with reliability.

  Our vehicle rolled up at high speed, its single headlamp lighting the way. A sea of pickpockets and ticket touts, priests, soldiers and porters lurched towards it. Behind them all, soft-spoken Samson and I tiptoed through the mud as bravely as we dared.

  A few birr were sufficient to give us the pick of the wooden benches. As all Ethiopians know, the best place to sit is at the front, and the worst is beside the rear door. We stuffed our bags under our seats. Samson had spent his first wages on a Chinese-made tartan bag. He winced when I made fun of the purchase but he wasn’t dispirited. The case had somehow transformed him. He was no longer a taxi-driver. Instead he had become a traveler. As he drew my attention to the bag’s stitching, a tidal wave of people swept up into the bus. At first I couldn’t make out individual passengers, for it was still dark. But gradually the dawn brought detail to their faces. Many looked fearful at the thought of the journey ahead, as they struggled to find space for their children and their baggage. No one but me seemed to care about the bus’s dilapidated state, or that its driver looked like an axe-murderer.

  At home I’m the first to complain at the prospect of a road trip. The hum of radial tires on tarmac and the tedium of the motorway are enough to drive me to road rage. But elsewhere in the world a long drive is quite different. The wooden seats, the exhaust fumes, the loud discordant music and the press of passengers, fattened chickens and dingy sacks are only minor irritants. What matters is survival.

  On an African road trip you’re a gambler. Every passenger has a lump in his throat, like the man who slips one bullet into the chamber of a revolver, spins it and holds the weapon to his temple. You pay your money and you take your chances. As in Russian Roulette, the thrill lies in surviving.

  Peer out of the grimy windows if you dare, and you will see the wreckage of those who have lost the gamble. A great truck laden with crates hurtles past. Minutes later you pass the same vehicle, lying on its side at the foot of a ravine. Its crates have been reduced to matchwood and their contents lie strewn across the ground. The drivers body sprawls out of the cab’s open door. The vultures begin to descend, and soon locals from the nearest village swarm down like locusts to pick the wreckage clean. Within a matter of hours everything that can be carried away has gone. The merchandize is the first to go. Then the splinters of wood from the crates are taken and the diesel is siphoned from the tank. The wheels are plundered, then the truck is stripped of its engine, its bodywork, wiring, wing-mirrors and seats. Soon all that is left is the chassis. Ethiopian hillsides are littered with them. A serious crash is something to be relished, an unexpected bounty for the whole village to share.

  There was a time when Ethiopia’s roads were safe, but Menelik II, the great modernizer, heard news of a new-fangled invention. The electric chair might have been a disappointment, but he’d been told of another toy — the motor-car — and he wanted one desperately. Word spread far and wide that the first man to drive a car to the Emperor would be rewarded beyond his wildest dreams.

  Three thousand miles away an Englishman called Bede Bentley heard of the challenge. He was already a respected adventurer and had fought against the Boers and against the infamous Mad Mulla in Somaliland. He’d even proposed building a motorized armoured vehicle, which he called a “tank”. But he’d made the mistake of sending the designs to Lord Kitchener, who thanked him politely and promptly stole them.

  In 1907 Bentley bought the newest model of Siddeley motorcar and had it painted in green and white stripes. The expedition’s party included Bentley’s uniformed chauffeur Reginald Wells, a Somali gentleman who went by the name of George, and a brindle bulldog called Bully. A few supplies were loaded up, and the adventure began. Soon after leaving England, Bentley heard that a German team had set off at the same time and were racing them to reach Menelik first.

  After covering the roughest terrain ever navigated by a motor-car, Bentley, the chauffeur, the Somali and the brindle bulldog arrived at Menelik’s palace in Addis Ababa. The journey had taken them many months, but they’d beaten the Germans and upheld British honor. Best of all, the Emperor was delighted with his new toy.

  The landscape flattened once we descended from Addis Ababa and we drove through rolling ranges of farmland, edged with eucalyptus trees and peppered with low tukul, traditional huts. In the yellowing afternoon sunlight oxen pulled ploughs, goaded on with pointed sticks by farmers who had worked since dawn. The fields were tiny, divided up again and again as each generation received its inheritance. In some, tall strands of maize rustled in the breeze. In others grew teff, the grain from which injera is made; it was feathery like pampas grass, swaying as the wind rippled through its long stems. Young girls, some of them no more than four or five years old, trudged barefoot along the roads and across the fields, stacks of firewood on their heads. For them, childhood is an apprenticeship for a life of extreme hardship. In Ethiopia it is the women and children who do most of the work.

  The bus passed a small town’s quarry. Its ragged laborers were all old women ferrying blocks of dusty stone on their heads. Nearby their overseer, a man, sat primly on a cushioned chair. When I commented on the plight of the women Samson made excuses. The government was rotten, he said. It encouraged men to do nothing.

  “It is the way of our country Old ways cannot change.”

  From time to time the bus would stop on the outskirts of a village. Soldiers would frisk everyone and then pillage their luggage. Sometimes they would seize a passenger at random and beat him. Samson said that the ploy was used to frighten all the rest. If so, it worked. The other passengers shuffled their feet and stared down at the ground, too frightened to stand up for the innocent.

  Sometimes the stops were more pleasant. Droves of hawkers would come crowding up to the windows, holding up their wares for sale. The passengers would buy all they could afford: baked maize and peanuts sold in twists of paper, hair combs and oranges, unripe plums and roasted barley, rubber shoes, cooking pots and packets of seeds.

  The highlight of the bus journey was the fight. As anyone who’s ever taken an Ethiopian bus knows, there is an unwritten rule that the windows must remain firmly closed. I was never quite sure of the reasoning behind this, but the only time I opened a window Samson told me to shut it quickly before I was beaten up. Late in the afternoon, a quiet, unassuming man decided to open the window beside him just a fraction to let in a little fresh air. The man next to him immediately leapt up and began to shout. At first the two men just yelled at each other, but then they started to brawl. Within seconds, fists were flying, nails were slashing and sticks were raining down. The commotion, which had begun at the far end of the bus, spread like wildfire as all the other passengers took sides. The driver looked in the mirror and clapped his hands. If they didn’t stop at once, he shouted, he’d drive the bus off an approaching cliff.

  Despite the brawl, the cramped seats and the lurching moti
on of the bus, I found myself brimming with energy. Frank Hayter’s story and his discovery of a mine-shaft could have come from Rider Haggard’s own pen. Hayter’s book spoke of ferocious tribes and ravening wild beasts, of hunters without fear, of treasure maps and gold beyond measure.

  From what I could make out, Hayter never prospected in the south of Ethiopia, perhaps because the rich southern seam, known as the Adola greenstone belt, was not discovered until after the Second World War. In Hayter’s time, prospectors worked the rivers and mountains of the west, and the great gold seam on the Eritrean border.

  The problem with searching for ancient gold mines is that, like any mineral, gold can be mined out. Hundreds of thousands of slaves would have been able to work through entire hillsides, extracting almost all the ore. In the same way, a man in search of oil wells in three thousand years’ time will probably find not a trace of oil left.

  As we drove Samson rambled on about Kebra Mengist. He said his home town was the finest place in Ethiopia, blessed with the best food, the cleanest water, the most beautiful girls and the most chivalrous townsfolk. As for the gold mines, he claimed they were very extensive indeed. I was nervous that a foreigner arriving on the scene, even escorted by a local, would be regarded with suspicion. Samson said that Kebra Mengist was his town, and the miners were his people. They knew him and he knew them. He would protect me.

  Late afternoon became early evening, and the bus rolled on. The earth turned from red clay to sand and back to red clay again. Gradually the scenery changed. The land became more fertile, dotted with banana plants and tall trees bearing flame-red flowers. The huts were different, too, their walls fashioned from wickerwork, with a pot woven into the apex of each thatched roof. Until then, most of the huts we had seen were made from wattle and daub.