Читать книгу The Barefoot Emperor: An Ethiopian Tragedy - Philip Marsden - Страница 12

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Walter Plowden lay on deck. It was April 1847. A warm wind filled the great lateen sail above his head; beneath him the dhow pitched to the short swells of the Red Sea. Far astern, to the south, he could see the distant rise of the Ethiopian highlands. Four years he’d spent there among its mountains, its roving courts, shifting from fief to fief, from battle to battle. He drew on his pipe, leaned back against the alga, and was filled with the reckless joy of parting.

‘Once more on the free waves,’ he wrote, ‘my heart beat lightly.’

Plowden was on a mission. He had persuaded Ethiopia’s ruler, Ras Ali, that there was one thing a modern state could not be without, and that was a trade treaty with Britain. Ras Ali himself couldn’t see the point. How would a trade treaty keep Dejazmach Wube to heel? Or the peoples of Wag and Lasta? What use was it against Biru Goshu, who had made off with his wife and who every year slaughtered the governors he appointed in Gojjam?

But all right, isshi, he would send an envoy with the young Englishman.

And here he was, the envoy, a poor highlander who had never before laid eyes on the sea, squatting in wide-eyed terror in Plowden’s cabin. With him were the gifts Ras Ali had selected for Queen Victoria – some rusting lances, a few bolts of homespun cotton and three very rare gazelle calves. The gazelles were also strangers to the sea. Plowden had bought them a nanny-goat for milk, and whenever they heard her bleating they would tug at their halters, squeak and whinny, and the deck would tip-tap with the sound of their delicate little hooves. Such was Ethiopia’s first embassy to Britain – a menagerie of the terrified, the untamed and the hopeful, despatched in indifference by a war-weakened ruler.

Plowden passed the days in impatient idleness. He lay on deck. He smoked his pipe. He drank beakers of coffee. Stretching his long limbs over the alga, he closed his eyes and felt the desert wind warm on his face.

Four years earlier, in his early twenties, he had been sailing the same waters. Then too he had been heading for England, fleeing India and a death-in-life job at Carr Tagore & Co. of Calcutta. But in Suez he met John Bell, a Scottish sailor as footloose and impulsive as himself. According to his brother, Plowden’s ‘ardent and ambitious temperament induced him, on the spur of the moment, without preparation and with limited funds, to join that gentleman in an expedition’. To Plowden, Ethiopia was rich with classical and biblical associations, a mountain enclave of Christianity in a Muslim region. Bell’s plan also had the whiff of antiquity around it – they would hunt the source of the Nile, whose annual flood had spawned the great civilisation of ancient Egypt.

The two set off overland and entered Ethiopia posing as elephant hunters. Within weeks they had been sucked into the country’s dramas. They forgot about the Nile. With each battle, each tented court, each chief who wooed them, they found the outside world receding. John Bell married a local woman and became a general in Ras Ali’s army. Neither he nor Plowden ever escaped the strange spell of the upland kingdom.

Plowden in particular found a fascination in Ethiopia’s medieval pageantry, in the ‘foppish’ self-love of the warrior caste, the ‘strain of feudal glamour’. For him Ethiopia’s antiquity, isolation and uniqueness were counters to the unsightly spread of modernity: ‘there is no parallel to it in this steaming and telegraphing world’. He grew to love the troubadour traditions of the quick-witted azmari, the recital of battle deeds in the doomfata; he learned to play the battle-polo of gugs, a game as deadly as any skirmish. With an ethnographer’s eye he began to record his observations, ‘Notes on Peculiar Customs’– ‘the Galla find the eating of fish disgusting, as do the Shoho … On waking, Christians utter a prayer to stop the devil entering their mouth … the shadow of a man who has slept with a woman the previous night is considered harmful …’ In Tigray he heard a host of proverbs convincing people that ‘relatives were of no use till after death’. He noted the prevalence of female circumcision among the peoples of the north.

During those early years he passed through the courts and camps of dozens of minor nobles, warlords and great regional chiefs. He rode with them, was captured by them, campaigned with them. He made many friends, and found himself offered horses, land and gifts. Some offered him their women ‘as one might offer the loan of a horse’. One ruler promised him his sister and two provinces. ‘For a moment I was tempted, having my full share (and a little more) of youthful folly, loving adventure, not being averse to war.’ But he moved on, to other valleys, other forested regions, other noble feuds.

War, he found, drove the ambition and passion of every Ethiopian highlander. War was a way of life, an end in itself. When the big rains finished in September, the month of Meskerem, and the rivers began to recede, the entire country stirred to the sound of the negarits, the recruiting drums. In tens of thousands, men then flocked to their shum, sitting astride his caparisoned mount in a thigh-length shirt of coloured silk, with a lion’s-mane cape over his shoulder.

Plowden’s enthusiasm for this world bubbles from every page of his writing. He was intrigued by its unseen codes and hierarchies. Followers outnumbered the fighting forces by as many as two to one. When Ras Ali moved to war, more than 150,000 people accompanied him. Eighty-eight drummers went before him, under a head drummer who enjoyed a host of enviable privileges because, if captured in battle, his life was never spared.

Apart from the soldiers (each possessing his own rank according to numbers of men killed) there were the keepers of the tent; the ‘mouth of the king’; the head of the advance guard; the chief of the night guards; the guard of the women’s quarters; the female providers of honey for the tej; the hundreds of tej-bearers, all women, with their own chief and their own hierarchy; the grass-cutters, wood-cutters, herdsmen, drummers and minstrels, butchers and maidservants. ‘So minute are the particulars of all these minor posts,’ Plowden wrote, ‘that they would fill a volume.’ When an ox was slaughtered in camp, he watched the meat being divided into a hundred pieces and distributed, each cut of the carcass corresponding to a different rank.

War was poetic and chivalric. Every year Ras Ali would march his tens of thousands to the province of Gojjam to do battle with its rogue ruler, Biru Goshu, who had taken the ras’s wife. Every year Biru would present Ras Ali with a cape to award to the governor the ras left behind. As soon as Ras Ali was gone, Biru killed the governor, took the cape and waited for Ras Ali to return again after the following rains. War was also brutal – the ‘warrior is bred to consider killing (geddai) as the great object of existence’. Musket stocks were hung with ‘disgusting trophies’, the leathery testicles of slaughtered enemies.

In good Victorian style, the young Plowden was both drawn to the wildness of Ethiopia and motivated by an urge to improve it. As the years passed, his enthusiasm began to veer away from the country’s medieval colour towards its worldly prospects. He wrote lovingly of a climate which could bear ‘comparison with any in the world’, a soil ‘fitted for every crop’, diversity of flora to amaze botanist and herbalist alike, green slopes for the tea-planter, gold, copper and saltpetre for prospectors. Ethiopia’s vineyards could challenge any in Bordeaux. It was India, on a smaller scale, but untouched. The country’s problem, Plowden said, was leadership. Calm and conciliatory diplomacy would unite its eternally squabbling chiefs, while those who resisted, who held out on the mountaintops, ‘would soon yield to the persuasion of some howitzers, or bombs of larger calibre’.

He puffed at his pipe, sipped his coffee, and shifted his legs on the alga’s leather grid. The breeze was good and the sails full. He was impatient to reach England, yet could not forget what he’d left behind. Sometimes during those languid days he thought he could ‘hear in fancy, the wild war-cry of the half-naked Galla … mingling with the murmur of the restless ocean’.

His mission soon ran into difficulty. The dhow’s captain proved to be an idiot. When the goat’s milk dried up, the first of the gazelles died. Another was killed leaping from a window in Jeddah, the third when the dhow was wrecked on a coral reef. Plowden alone struggled ashore from the wreck. For days he staggered through the Sinai desert, weakened by thirst, close to death, wondering whether ‘it were not better to die at once on my lance’. But after a week or so he reached Suez. There he found that the rest of the embassy had been rescued from the reef. All the presents had been lost or destroyed, and the envoy himself refused ever to go near a boat again. Plowden continued to London on his own.