In the Land of the Lion of Judah.

The King of Kings, the Power of the Trinity, the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Elected One of God, the Defender of the Faith - these were the titles of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia.  He was also the 225th descendant of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon.

Ethiopia is old beyond imagination.  According to official Ethiopian history, the Queen of Sheba had heard King Solomon praised many times and went to Jerusalem to visit him. Solomon greeted her in splendid style, she admired him and was converted to the true God.  But a few months later, when she announced her departure, Solomon, who was as lusty as he was wise, was stirred with desire. He invited the queen to feast with him all day long and served her only with thirst-making dishes: salt-fish, hot spices. In the evening she asked his permission to go to bed and made him promise that he would respect her virtue. "I swear to you that I shall not take you by force," said the king, "but swear to me in return that you will take nothing from my palace." She promised, but could not sleep. Tortured by thirst, she drank a cup of water, and the king - who slept with one eye open - pointed out that she had broken her oath. Nine months later, back in Ethiopia, she gave birth to a son, Menelek.

It is a charming story, but the dividing line between reality and legend in Ethiopia is very hazy. Historians maintain that the Queen of Sheba ruled over the Yemen and not Ethiopia, and claim that her son Menelek was invented by a thirteenth-century monk, in a book called The Glory of the Kings, in order to legitimize a Solomonite dynasty which wanted to seize the throne. One thing, however, is certain: while more and more Europeans and North Americans followed the sun in winter to Kenya or North Africa, the mountainous kingdom of Ethiopia remained virtually untouched by tourism.

Yet it offers a stunning range of natural beauty: mountains like impregnable for tresses-the mean altitude in Ethiopia is over 6,000 feet; mysterious gorges; silver lakes which are the haunt of ibis, flamingos and marabous; marvelous churches built in the rocks; and timeless villages hidden in eucalyptus forests. A country of living legends which merge into the history of this 2,500-year-old African empire.

The first time you meet an Ethiopian, you begin to understand how it is that these people have had so much success in the Olympic marathon. Tall and incredibly lean, they walk tirelessly, barefoot, head erect, their hands gripping the ends of a pole they carry across their shoulders.

They are very proud of their beauty and explain obligingly:  "When God decided to create man, he made a clay model and baked it in the oven. But he took it out too soon; it was pale and he threw it away to the North where it gave birth to the white race. At the second attempt, the statuette was overdone: he cast it to the South where the black race sprang up. The third time, everything went perfectly: the figure came out golden. God put it in Ethiopia and the Ethiopians were born."

Aksum, the site of the ancient capital, is a good place to begin to get to know Ethiopia.  At Aksum is the church of Our Lady of Sion, which women are not allowed to enter. When Queen Elizabeth visited Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie took her to Aksum but the priests would not let her into the church. The monasteries are also forbidden to both women and female animals. The most beautiful of them, Debre Damo, is situated forty-five miles from Aksum. The home of 150 monks, it is lodged high in a cliff face, and in the flanks of the cliff are small caves where hermit monks live and meditate, receiving their supplies of bread, water, and sometimes meat from the end of a rope.

To gain access to Debre Damo, one must negotiate with the porter monk-negotiate meaning in Ethiopian to pay up. After he has satisfied himself that the visitor is male (a few women have attempted to get in wearing trousers), the monk will throw down a leather rope and haul one up the steep fifteen yards of rock face to the entrance.

Aksum abounds in gigantic necropolises, monolithic steles sixty-five feet high. Once the capital of a great empire, in the 4th century the city was converted to Christianity, today the official state religion. From top to bottom the steles are decorated with carvings representing the facades of the palaces of Aksum.

An hour away by plane from Aksum is Lalibela, the most spectacular site in Ethiopia. In the 13th century, when King Lalibela learned that Jerusalem had fallen into the hands of the infidels, he decided to build a "New Jerusalem" in a spot so inaccessible that "no Muslim would be able to sully it." What remains of this second Jerusalem-10,000 feet up in the mountains - is a group of eleven monolithic churches carved out of one great block of pink sandstone, a stream called the Jordan and a few olive trees.


The churches comprise a fabulous subterranean city, rich in vaulted passageways and tiny courtyards illuminated by shafts of light. At the end of a tunnel stands a green bowl where the faithful are baptized in the Feast of the Epiphany. The passages wind up and down, past wells, altars, sculptures, paintings, colonnades and the skeletons of a monk and a nun who three centuries ago lived together in one of the cavities that were dug out of the rock.

Less than an hour's flight from Lalibela is Gonder, a city of fortified castles and splendid churches, which was the capital of Ethiopia in the 16th century when the Christians, with the help of the Portuguese, defeated the Muslims who for eight centuries had cut them off from the Christian world. 

The church of Debra Berhan Selassie is entirely covered with paintings, executed with such a sense of wonder and such simple candor that they delight the most blase of visitors: the angel Gabriel is shown with immense black eyes, ogres with drumsticks between their teeth, the saints offering their tears for the birds to drink. In all these paintings, the good are painted full face and the bad in profile. This is because it was believed that painting full face might help the figure depicted to appear in real life and the painter wanted to deny that chance to the wicked.

Four miles from Gonder is the village of Falasha. It seems at first sight like many other Ethiopian villages: round huts with thatched roofs, the smell of burning eucalyptus at mealtimes, black women with their hair arranged in a mass of tiny plaits. Yet they have stars of David embroidered on their dresses. The Falashas are Jews. When they were first discovered and told of the existence of other, white Jews, they laughed in disbelief, for they thought themselves to be the only survivors of Israel, and maintained that they had come to Ethiopia 3,000 years ago with the inevitable Queen of Sheba. Historians today believe that they were driven out of Egypt by the armies of Alexander the Great. They practise an archaic form of Judaism, knowing the first five books of Moses, but not the Talmud. There are about 20,000 of them and they live by making pottery.

The countryside around Gonder is breathtakingly beautiful, more beautiful than the famous Blue Nile 'and its waterfalls; but the source of the Blue Nile, Lake Tana, is a miracle of light and purity.

Exotically colored birds follow the papyrus boats which go out to the islands in the lake, where monasteries and churches took refuge in the 15th century. There you will find trees with fantastic tentacle-like branches, chattering monkeys, unknown flowers and little wooden churches.

Two hours' flight from' Lake Tana is Addis Ababa, with its Hilton Hotel and undulating panorama of tile roofs. The most interesting place in Addis Ababa is the "Mercato," the biggest market in Africa, where there is a roaring trade in silver crosses of every period and style. Before leaving Ethiopia, it is worth visiting Harer, in the east of the country, where Rimbaud lived several years as a trader. Harer is a Muslim stronghold, built between the 7th and the 9th centuries, and only discovered by Europeans in the 1880's. Set on a hilltop surrounded by orchards, it is a jumble of rough-paved alleys with wooden forts, ancient gateways and hidden market stalls crammed with every kind of spice. The women, their foreheads adorned with African marigolds, wear silk Turkish-style trousers. The men chew tchat green leaves which induce euphoria. Apart and proud, the Hassi, Somali nomads, put bunches of herbs in their hair, which they smear with red mud. They wear rings round their necks and never venture out without a spear.

Homer wrote of Ethiopia' that it stood at the edge of the world, and in the splendid isolation of the magnificent mountain landscapes and the unchanging rhythm of life of its remote, hidden villages, one might say the same today and hope for it’s future.