LITMIR.BIZ

       Prologue

      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

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