‘Partly I am documenting,’ she said importantly, after we landed and Em and I were tying down the plane while Momma unfastened the camera so she could take it with us. ‘In case there is looting.’
‘What looting?’ Em exclaimed. ‘You mean if Italy invades they’re going to run away with a bunch of standing stones? I’d like to see them try!’
‘What do you think Cleopatra’s Needle is, in Central Park in New York City? Egyptian loot. They took one just like it to London too. And that was more than fifty years ago; it would be easier to transport them now. But you know . . .’ Momma sighed happily. ‘I just like taking pictures of things no one else has photographed before.’
There was a crowd of people who’d seen us overhead and had come to watch us land, and they were eager to help us find a place to stay. When Momma mentioned Ras Amde Worku we were guided to his house right away. He came into the garden to greet us, wearing a shamma edged with gold thread and a short leopard-skin cloak. He looked like a prince out of a story. And he kissed me and cried when Momma told him who we were.
I’m not going to write about that. This is a flight log.
Aksum is not as big as Addis Ababa, but it feels more like a real place. It is so much older. And even though it is in a different kind of landscape and the houses are different, and the people on the street and in the market mostly speak Tigrinya and you can’t understand them, it feels more like Tazma Meda than Addis Ababa. It feels like a real home to the people who live here.
This morning we walked back to the plane while it was still dark so we could be ready to take off right at sunrise to get pictures of the monuments from the air with the light all slanty and the shadows long. I volunteered to fly, just to get Emmy off the hook for the time being. I have not figured out what’s going on in her head about flying. She is the one who got all the Tazma Meda kids to play tag on the radio mast. She is not afraid of heights or of being in a plane. I know she is as daring and as talented as White Raven. So how can she be afraid to fly?
I don’t think about Black Dove in the air the way Em does with White Raven. It’s just me being Teo. What makes me good at it? The Delia in me maybe? Or just me wanting to prove to Momma that she doesn’t need to worry? It’s like that time she let me ride bareback with her, but better because I can do it again and again and I can do it myself. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever done.
Today I got to circle around and around the ancient graveyard in Aksum, very low over the standing stone monuments. Then we made a low pass over Maryam Seyon Church – Mary of Zion, where the real Ark is kept, the Tabota Seyon – which is kind of cheating since women aren’t allowed inside the walls around the church. If we’d been on the ground, neither Momma nor Em would have been able to see over the walls.
The churchmen came out and waved at us (everybody always waves at us). I thought of Habte Sadek’s brother who took his story to Aksum. Amazing to think we might know some of these people, or know people they knew. But I guess none of these connections are coincidences – they all trail back to Ras Amde Worku. It is because of Ras Amde Worku’s brother going to university with Ezra that we ended up in Tazma Meda. Spiderwebs joined together.
Momma says she didn’t take any pictures of Mary of Zion – that would have been cheating. Nobody cares if you take pictures of the ancient gravestones, but Mary of Zion is alive and it’s a private place. Taking photos without asking would be like looting it.
We flew west, over Yeha, and Momma took pictures of the temple that is over two thousand years old. Em says she didn’t know where we were going – Momma was making her take notes so Em could find our way back without Momma’s help when we turned around. We crossed weird, humpbacked mountains and then we were in drier country among high, wide plateaus which are called ambas around here, most of them as bare and empty as the tableland where we’d camped the night before. But then, ahead of us in the middle of nowhere, there was an amba that was full of houses.
As we got nearer it started to look like a real village – all high and remote on the amba tableland, with goats and a stone reservoir like the one at St Kristos Samra on Beehive Hill, and vegetable gardens – very green because the rains only just ended.
‘How do they get up there?’ I yelled through the speaking tube.
‘They climb up a rope,’ yelled Momma. ‘Follow the cliff around; you’ll see.’
So we did, and not only was there a rope, but there was a stone gatehouse at the top of it – carved into the rock like the St Kristos Samra chapel, except this one was stuck halfway up a sheer cliffside.
‘Monastery!’ Momma shouted. ‘Debre Damo! Like the hermitage at home. But here no girls allowed, like Mary of Zion in Aksum. Not even girl goats allowed here. Not even chickens!’ She shouted something else which I didn’t hear all of, but it was about how much Delia had wanted to see this – how the idea of it being banned for girls drove Delia crazy.
I was beginning to think the photos were just an excuse. This whole trip was just a Delia pilgrimage – the monastery Delia had wanted to see, my father’s old boss from their days in France, Delia’s Dream in the empty sky. Momma was all happy and excited. You can tell by the tone of her voice, even distorted and shouty through the speaking tube over the roar of the engine. She was here because this was a thing she had wanted to do with Delia, and now she was doing it with us. Delia is in her head, running the show, the way White Raven runs the show for Emmy.
Momma said afterward that she hadn’t told us about going to Debre Damo ahead of time because she hadn’t been sure she’d be able to find it. She wasn’t worried about getting lost – she just knew that finding this one tiny monastery on top of an amba plateau would be a little like looking for a needle in a haystack.
She got me to fly in a circle around the edges of the amba, very close. We could see everything – a boy wearing a thin shamma pulled over his face like an Egyptian mummy, taking honey from a beehive hung in a tree; another two boys drawing water from the big green stone cistern, and a very old stone church that looks a lot like the house we are staying in – like the carvings on the ancient pillars in Aksum. That church on that amba is supposed to be almost as old as the standing-stone pillars in the ancient graveyard.
Of course, everybody stopped work when the plane flew overhead, except one old man we decided was deaf and couldn’t hear the engine, and they all came rushing out to get a look. I don’t think they knew, or even guessed, that Em and Momma were forbidden women. They couldn’t see anything but our goggles and waving arms.
But I felt guilty. Like a colonist again. It is a kind of looting, being able to nose down on things from the air. A kind of invasion. Like – like poking through Aunt Connie’s drawers when she told us not to. Like pilfering Mrs Sinclair’s tinned cherries. We haven’t set foot there of course. But we’ve seen it.
On our second pass around the amba, a tall man loped calmly across from the old church, carrying a spear. He didn’t hurry, but he timed his pace so his path crossed ours. Then, just ahead of us as we passed low, waving at everybody along the edge of the amba, he threw his spear at us.
Em and I agreed afterward that it was the most beautiful throw we’ve ever seen. The spear soared high in a perfect arc, out over the edge of the amba, and passed us about fifty feet ahead of the Romeo’s nose. If I’d been flying a couple of seconds faster we’d have hit it – or I guess it would be right to say it would have hit us. That’s how close to the edge of the amba we were.
But the spear missed us, and I watched it fall away to our port side, over the edge of the amba, down, down, down toward the valley floor until it was a black speck lost against the yellow stone and grey-green shrubs of the landscape.
It seemed to fall forever.
I thought of Habte Sadek, younger than me, rescuing his church treasures from the British army, his spear against their rifles.
I pulled the nose of the Romeo up and slowly turned back the way we’d come, calm as anything. Behind m
e, I could hear Momma laughing her head off.
‘Guess he told us!’ she yelled.
‘He could have taken our propeller off !’ Em screamed at her from the rear cockpit.
‘He wasn’t trying to hit us,’ Momma said. ‘Or he would have. He was just telling us to get lost! Bet they don’t get many air shows around here! Put Teo on track for Asmara, Em! Don’t worry, we’re not going all the way into Eritrea, but it makes a good place to aim for on the map.’
That’s how close to the border of Italian territory we were – we were using their new colonial city as a navigation point. I love Momma and will follow her anywhere, but I am beginning to . . . WORRY. I think she is too sure of herself and of her ability to charm people. I think she is ignoring too many rules about international diplomacy. I am not sure she even knows what they are.
And the local laws. Do they apply to Momma? Or to Em? Because they seem to apply to me.
Em yelled the heading for me to take, and I think we crossed the border into Italian Eritrea anyway.
It is impossible to see where the border is. It’s just more of the same yellow and brown mountains, dusted with green, seeming like they go on forever. There’s no fence, no road – no boundary. It’s like crossing from Pennsylvania into Maryland – nothing changes. I don’t get the navigation because there doesn’t seem to be anything to navigate by, nothing but ambas and valleys in between with temporary green river bottoms. Sometimes little villages clustering together. We weren’t flying very high, and from time to time we’d see the terraced fields of farms, or goats high up the sides of the valleys or on top of an amba that wasn’t too steep to climb.
The world is too huge to find your way in from three thousand feet above the ground. Em keeps telling me it is easy if you do it accurately, even if you don’t know what you’re looking at. ‘Teo, don’t worry about matching everything up. All you have to do is follow the compass heading.’
It is true that accuracy is not my strong point.
The landscape below us was all so same, same, same for a while that one strange difference stood out like a scrawl of red crayon in a black-and-white newspaper. An airfield.
Not just a flat place where the grass has been scythed, like at Aksum. Not just a landing field with one plane in it and a shed made of sticks with a corrugated-iron roof like at Beehive Hill Farm. This was a real airfield with more planes than there were at the new Imperial Ethiopian Air Force base at Akaki the last time we were there. This was a real airfield, and it was right on top of one of the empty amba tablelands.
The amba was wide and flat and grassy, much bigger than the tiny ridge we’d landed on in the Simien Mountains and named Delia’s Dream. Unlike that ridge, this amba wasn’t empty. There were wooden huts all along the edge, and there were planes parked everywhere – smart rows of Italian planes of the Regia Aeronautica with the Italian flag painted on their tails.
So this was where Papà Menotti was stationed – on an amba airfield on the Eritrean border, half an hour’s flight from the holiest city in Ethiopia. If there is a war, Aksum has not got a chance of protecting itself.
‘How do they get there?’ I yelled, which was a dumb question – obviously they flew there. ‘I mean how can they manage to stay there?’
It was one of the sheer-sided ambas you couldn’t have scaled without ropes and picks. You couldn’t have climbed to it without cutting stairs into the side of the cliff. They couldn’t take trucks full of fuel there, or even carry it on muleback. They’d have to fly it in.
I glanced over my shoulder at Momma. She was calmly unfastening the camera from the mount.
‘Go on, fly closer! Right around the amba!’ Momma yelled. ‘Beautiful!’
She’d come here on purpose. She’d known what she was going to find.
She didn’t seem worried about it, so I tried not to be worried either. I pushed the nose down and cut the power a bit and glided lower.
The top of the amba was as green as the lawn at the British Legation, since the rains had just ended. There was a great big water tank, and goats like they had at the amba monastery we’d just seen, except that the goats were penned so they wouldn’t get in the way of landing aircraft. By the time we’d finished our second circuit around the amba, there were a couple of dozen people running around and waving and pointing.
‘Go ahead and land!’ Momma yelled. ‘And we’ll refuel! This is Orsino’s air base, and we have photographs to deliver!’
So I started to circle around again because I wanted to get as long a landing run as I could. As I was levelling out the plane lurched in a heart-stopping way it wasn’t supposed to. I glanced back over my shoulder again and thought my blood was going to freeze.
‘Fly the plane!’
Momma shouted the order in the voice that no one disobeys, and I whipped my head around forward and steadied the plane in level flight.
Behind me, Momma was climbing out of her cockpit. When I’d looked over my shoulder at her she was on her feet. She had unbuckled her harness and was standing on her seat, bracing herself upright by holding on to the sides of her windshield. Her getting up had made the plane jolt.
‘What are you doing?’ I screeched into the wind.
She didn’t answer. I glanced back at her again, holding the plane as steady as I could, and saw her step up out of her seat and set a foot calmly on to the body of the plane. She wasn’t wearing a line or anything – she wasn’t even holding on to one of the straps from her seat. I ground my teeth together, aware of her reaching up into the wires that criss-cross between the lower wing and the upper wing. I snatched another glance backward and she was standing on the fuselage behind me, hanging on to a wire with one hand and waving at the men below with broad, happy sweeps of her other arm.
It is true that we have written about Black Dove and White Raven doing exactly this in the air. But writing about it is not the same thing at all as trying to fly a plane while your mother is standing on top of it, waving at people.
I couldn’t see her face because she’d turned it away from the wind. But she was absolutely calm as could be. I imagined her beaming smile.
‘Jumping cats! What the heck, Momma!’ came Emmy’s scream through the speaking tube.
But Momma couldn’t hear her with her head up there in the wind. She was busy waving to her audience, who must have seen the Italian registration on the tail by now. Maybe they even knew who we were. I could see them cheering and waving handkerchiefs.
I flew like I was balancing egg crates on the wings. I didn’t dare to turn. When we reached the other end of the amba I just kept flying straight ahead.
I felt the faint shifts of weight in the airframe as Momma climbed back down into the middle cockpit. And then I heard her voice through the speaking tube, as if everything was completely normal.
‘Gee whiz, this is fun!’ she said cheerfully. ‘You can turn around now. I want to land there and pick up some fuel. They’re bound to have a good supply! Jiminy Christmas, if I thought it would get me wing walking again I’d have taught you both to fly a long time ago! Barnstorming in Ethiopia –’
‘Why, Momma?’ Em yelled.
‘Just wanted to make sure they recognised us before we landed –’ She cut herself off with a laugh. ‘Teo, you fly just like your mother,’ she said warmly.
All I really wanted to do was put my fingers in my ears so I could concentrate on landing without having to listen to her babbling. But I needed my hands to fly with and my ears to hear the wind in the wires.
Flight Log Entry
Date: April 17, ’35
Type of Machine: Romeo Ro.1
Number of Machine: I-STLA
Airfield: Amba Kwala to Aksum
Duration of Flight: 40 min
Character of Flight: Cross-country
Pilot: Momma
2nd Pilot or Pilot Under Training: Me (Em)
Remarks:
Momma prattled away sounding very happy and pleased with herself. Every n
ow and then Teo glanced back to make sure she wasn’t about to do another crazy stunt. But she was fine – she’d even strapped herself in again. I saw Teo’s shoulders relax a little.
I am getting very good at reading Teo’s shoulders.
I saw why Momma decided to show those soldiers she was a harmless, barnstorming lady pilot and not an Ethiopian spy plane. And that is pretty much what she thinks she is, a harmless, barnstorming lady pilot, scraping a living so she can keep herself in the sky.
I didn’t think Teo saw what Momma and me had seen though, the thing that made her scared. The Italians should have known who we were and they didn’t recognise us at first and it scared her. I didn’t want to tell Teo. Not until we got out of there safely.
He did another of his beautiful, bumpless touchdowns. Momma told him to cut the power and he did, and soldiers came running up to greet us – all white. Momma asked in Amharic, ‘Can we buy a full tank of fuel from you?’
We can only talk to the Italians in Amharic!
Papà Menotti wasn’t there. He was switching back and forth between bases. His friend Captain Adessi wasn’t there either, but apparently we’d just missed him. When we realised that we might get stuck having to visit with Adessi and not with Papà, we decided not to hang around there too long.
Momma gave them greetings from Ras Amde Worku and told them that he would pay for our fuel.
Ras Amde Worku owns that amba. It’s called Amba Kwala. The Italians pay him rent for it.
‘Doesn’t it bother him that there are possible enemy aircraft parked so close to his hometown?’ I asked Momma while the soldiers were filling our fuel tanks. ‘He is an Ethiopian general!’
‘He seems to think that it will keep him safe. Not because they are on his side, because they’re not, but just because they have a business deal. Kind of like me giving the Italians photographs of possible airfield sites so they let me hang on to my plane!’
So Teo turns out to be right about people owning land that looks like it doesn’t belong to anybody.