'Here is waterfall number two, about a hundred and twenty miles upstream
from the Sudanese border. However, there are a number of factors we have
to consider, not least the fact that the river may have altered its
course during the last four thousand years since our friend, 'Taita,
visited it.'
'Surely it could not have escaped from such a deep canyon, four thousand
feet,' she protested. 'Even the Nile must be held captive by that?'
'Yes, but it would certainly have altered the existing bed. In the flood
season the volume and force of the river exceeds my ability to describe
it to you. The river rises twenty metres up the side walls and bores
through at speeds 3; of ten knots or more.'
'You navigated that?' she asked doubtfully.
'Not in the flood season. Nothing could survive that.
They both stared at the photograph in silence for a minute, imagining
the terrors of that mighty stretch of water in its fury.
Then she reminded him, 'The second waterfall?
'Here it is, where one of the tributary rivers enters the main flow of
the Abbay. The tributary is the Dandera river and it rises at twelve
thousand feet altitude, below the peak of Sancai Mountain in the Choke
range, here about a hundred miles north of the gorge.'
'Do you remember the spot where it joins the Abbay from when you were
there?'
'It was over twenty years ago, and even then we had been almost a month
down there in the gorge, so it all seemed to merge into a single
nightmare. The memory bluffed with the monotonous surroundings of the
cliffs and the dense Jungle of the walls, and our senses were dulled by
the heat and the insects and the roar of water and the repetitive,
unremitting toil at the oars i But, strangely, I do remember the
confluence of the Dandera and the Abbay for two reasons.'
'Yes?' She sat forward eagerly, but he shook his head.
'We lost a man there. The only casualty on the second expedition. Rope
parted and he fell a hundred feet. Landed on his back across a spur of
rock.'
i am sorry. But what was the other reason you remember the spot.'
'There is a Coptic Christian monastery there, built into the rock face
about four hundred feet above the surface of the river.'
'Down the re in the depths of the gorge?' She sounded incredulous. 'Why
would they build a monastery there?'
'Ethiopia is one of the oldest Christian countries on earth. It has over
nine thousand churches and monasteries, a great many of them in
similarly remote and almost inaccessible places in the mountains. This
one at the Dandera river is the reputed burial site of St. Frumentius,
the saint who introduced Christianity to Ethiopia from the Byzantine
Empire in Constantinople in the early third century. Legend has it that
he was shipwrecked on the Red Sea shore and taken to Aksum, where he
converted the Emperor Ezana.'
'Did you visit the monastery?'
'Hell, no!' he laughed. 'We were too busy just surviving, too eager to
escape from the hell of the gorge to have any time for sightseeing. We
