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Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

‘Haile Selassie, former Emperor of Ethiopia, who was deposed in a military coup last year, died in his sleep here yesterday aged 83. A statement by Ethiopian radio said he died of an illness after a prostate gland operation two months ago. He was found dead by attendants yesterday.’

The Times, 28 August 1975

April 1976

North and east of Addis Ababa lies one of the hottest places on earth. Known as the Afar or Danakil Depression, after two local tribes, it points like an arrowhead tempered by the desert sun southwards from the Red Sea towards the narrow gash of Africa’s Rift Valley.

For hundreds of square miles the plain is unbroken but for scanty bushes whose images shimmer above the scorched ground. Occasionally here and there a gazelle browses, wandering between meagre thorn bushes across rock or sand streaked with sulphur from the once volcanic crust.

Even in this appalling wilderness, far from the temperate and beautiful highlands more often associated with Ethiopia, there are inhabitants. Most are herders who wander the scattered water-holes. But some make a precarious living trading slabs of salt levered from the desert floor – some five million years ago the depression was a shallow inlet of the Red Sea and its retreat left salty deposits that still cake the desert with blinding white. Camels transport the blocks to highland towns.

Soon after dawn on the morning of 19 April, a caravan of ten camels, groaning under grey slabs of salt done up in protective matting, set off from their camp along unpaved tracks towards the highlands. There were three drovers – two teenagers and their father, a bearded forty-five-year-old whose features seemed parched into premature old age by the desert sun. His name was Berhanu, not that it was known to anyone much beyond his immediate family.

Yet before the week was out it would be known, briefly, to a number of the Marxists who had seized power from the Emperor Haile Selassie eighteen months previously, and most importantly to Lieutenant-Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, then number two in the government but in effect already the country’s implacably ruthless leader. A record of Berhanu’s name may still exist in a Secret Police file in 10 Duke of Harar Street, Addis Ababa, along with a brief description of what Berhanu experienced that day.

The caravan had just rounded a knoll of rock. It was approaching midday. Despite a gusty breeze, the heat was appalling – 120 degrees in the shade. Berhanu, as usual at this time, called a halt, spat dust from his lips, and pointed off the road to a small group of doum-palms that would provide shade. He knew the place well. So did the camels. Nearby there was a dip that would hold brackish water.

With the camels couched, the three sought relief from the heat in the shade of the trees. The two boys dozed. It was then that Berhanu noticed, in the trembling haze two or three hundred yards away, a group of circling vultures. He would not have looked twice except that the object of their attention was still moving.

And it was not an animal.

He stared, in an attempt to make sense of the shifting image, and realized he was looking at a piece of cloth being seized and shaken by the oven-hot gusts. Unwillingly he rose, and approached it. As he came nearer, he saw that the cloth was a cloak, and that the cloak seemed to be concealing a body. It had not been there all that long, for the vultures had not yet begun to feed. They retreated at his approach, awaiting a later chance.

The body was tiny, almost childlike, though the cloth – which he now saw was a cloak of good material – would hardly have been worn by a child.

Berhanu paused nervously. Few people came to this spot. It was up to him to identify the corpse, for he would no doubt have to inform some grieving family of their loss. He walked over to the bundle, squatted down and laid the flapping cloak flat along the body, which was lying on its face. He put a hand on the right shoulder, and rolled the body towards him on to its back.

The sight made Berhanu exhale as if he had been punched in the stomach. His eyes opened wide, in shock, like those of a frightened horse. For the face before him, sunken, emaciated, was that of his Emperor, Haile Selassie, the Power of Trinity, Conquering Lion of Judah, Elect of God, King of Kings of Ethiopia. Berhanu had known little of Ethiopia’s steady collapse into poverty, of the reasons for the growing unrest against the Emperor, of the brutalities of the revolution. To him, Selassie was the country’s father. As a child he had honoured the Emperor’s icon-like image on coins and medals inherited from his ancestors. And eight months previously he had ritually mourned the Emperor’s death.

Berhanu felt panic rising in him. He fell to his knees, partly in adulation before the semi-divine countenance, and partly in a prayer for guidance. He began to keen softly, rocking backwards and forwards. Then abruptly he stopped. Questions formed. The presence of the corpse at this spot seemed miraculous. It must have been preserved, uncorrupted, for the best part of a year, and then somehow, for reasons he could not even guess at, transported here. Preserved where? Was he alone in seeing it? Was there some plot afoot upon which he had stumbled? Should he bury the body? Keep silent or report its presence?

Mere respect dictated that the body, even if divinely incorruptible, should be protected. Then, since others might already know of his presence here, he would show his innocence by making a report. Perhaps there would even be a reward.

Slowly, in the quivering heat, Berhanu gathered rocks and piled them in reverence over the body. Then he walked back, still trembling. He woke his sons, told them what he had seen and done, cursed them for unbelievers until they believed him, and hurried them on their way westwards.

Three days later, he delivered his consignment of salt, which would be sold in the local market for an Ethiopian dollar a slab. He collected his money, and went off with his sons to the local police chief.

The policeman was sceptical, and at first dismissed Berhanu as a madman. Then he became nervous – for peculiar things had been happening in this remote part of Tigré province over the past two years – and made a telephone call to his superiors in Addis.

From there, the bare bones of the report – that deep in the Danakil a local herder named Berhanu had found a corpse resembling the former Emperor – went from department to department. At each stage a bureaucrat decided the report was too wild to be taken seriously; and at each stage the same men decided in turn that they would not be the ones to say so. Within three hours the éminence grise of the revolution, Mengistu Haile Mariam, knew of it. He also knew, for reaons that will become apparent, that the report had to be true.

For the sake of the revolution, both the report and the evidence for its existence had to be eradicated. Mengistu at once issued a rebuke to every department involved, stating the report was clearly a fake, an error that should never have been taken seriously.

Secondly, he ordered the cairn to be visited and the contents destroyed. The following morning, a helicopter containing a senior army officer and two privates flew to the spot. The two privates unloaded a flame-thrower, and incinerated the cairn. The team had specific orders not to look beneath the stones, and never knew the purpose of their strange mission.

Thirdly, Mengistu ordered the disappearance of Berhanu and his sons. The police in Tigré had become used to such orders, and asked no questions. The three were found, fed, flattered, transported to a nearby army base with promises of money for their excellent work, and never heard of again. A cousin made enquiries a week later, but was met with bland expressions of sympathy.

The explanation for the presence of the Emperor’s body in the desert in a remote corner of his country eight months after his death had been officially announced might therefore have remained hidden for ever.

There was, as Mengistu himself well knew, a possible risk. One other man knew the truth. But Mengistu had reason to think that he too was dead, a victim of the desert.

The existence of this book proves him wrong.