Today was not a day of sightseeing, but of travel and catching up with things. We woke in Axum to the alarm at 5:30 am, and after an excellent breakfast, went to the airport by bus to catch our flight to Addis Ababa. We were scheduled to get a direct flight in a Boeing 737 jet, but the low passenger numbers meant that we were allocated a much smaller and slower Fokker F- 50, and instead of a direct routing, we flew via Gonder to pick up some extra passengers.
I had an interesting conversation with a fellow passenger at Axum Airport before our departure. He was a theologian from Princeton, New Jersey, and he had come to Ethiopia to join the celebrations for the Ethiopian millennium (in the Ethiopian calendar, 2008 is the year 2000). He had been featured as a visiting scholar on Ethiopian television during his visit, but the interesting point of our conversation was that he had met the hermit who guards the Ark of the Covenant yesterday afternoon – a very rare experience indeed! He described him as a largely inarticulate man with pale, wrinkled skin, whose hair and beard had been let grow over many years, who never left the dark interior of the small chapel where the Ark is kept, and who remained largely hidden under a large cloth-like robe. I asked whether the hermit seemed to have had very much theological training, and the American visitor felt that he had probably had no education of any sort at all, and that he was extremely difficult to comprehend. He did mention, however, that Moses had visited him the day before yesterday, as he frequently does, to make sure that the Ark of the Covenant was okay, and that Enoch also calls in from time to time.
It is interesting to reflect on the mix of reality and legend that surrounds the Ark of the Covenant today. The visiting scholar from the US felt that the Ark’s presence in Ethiopia was probably the result of a myth that began during the Middle Ages, although it is conceded that no other nation currently claims to possess the original Ark, adding some credence to Axum's claim. And as the visiting scholar said, myth and reality start to become enmeshed when you see the powerful impact for good that the belief in the Ark's presence has among local people in Ethiopia. Whether the Ark is physically present or not, it does seem to work as a very powerful agent to promote peace, brotherhood and love among the Christians in Ethiopia.
Our flight to Addis Ababa took two and a half hours, including the 10 minute stop-off in Gonder to collect passengers - a stop that transformed a one-third-full plane to an absolutely full one. The flight into Addis Ababa was somewhat bumpy because of the storm clouds in the immediate vicinity, clouds which burst into steady rainfall just as we reached our hotel.
Our original plan was to have some lunch and then visit the markets in Addis Ababa. The rain changed that plan, however. We had a light buffet lunch at the hotel, and then connected to the internet, as lack of access had meant I had several days of this diary to upload. As I did so, I began attending to the 155 e-mails that had built up during our time in northern Ethiopia. Spending a cool, wet afternoon in Addis Ababa answering over a hundred work-related e-mails is a hell of a way of spending one's summer vacation, but the messages were almost all important and in some cases quite urgent, and it was certainly necessary that they be done.
