A far country : travels in Ethiopia

Philip Marsden-Country

Published by Century, hardcover with dustjacket

To the Ancient Greeks Ethiopia was 'a land far off, a remote, exotic place, source of spices and slaves – and the Nile. In medieval Europe it became the land of Prester John and was even supposed by some to be the site of the Earthly Paradise. Both Dr Johnson and Coleridge charged their work with images of Ethiopia. More recently, it has become, for Rastafarians, the symbol of a vanished Africa. Now it embodies our current horrors: famine, civil war and a climate no longer stable.

Drawn by the diversity of these images, Philip Marsden-Smedley set out to discover the place that inspired them. He describes a country of breathtaking beauty: a natural fortress of mountains, a landscape of lakes and gorgel and wildlife found nowhere else. He witnesses the crowning of a new Patriarch, the head of a Christian church that dates back to the fourth century and centres its peculiar ecstatic worship on the Ark of the Covenant. He visits monasteries on remote mountain-tops, and on the isolated islands of Lake Tana. But his journey goes beyond the Christian heartland, to the walled Moslem city of Harar where the poet Rimbaud spent the last years of his active life, to a village of Ethiopian Jews, and to the Bale Mountains to search for the world's rarest wolf.
A Far Country is the portrait of a remarkable nation, of one of the world's most
independent peoples. But it deals too with the idea of place, with myths of Paradise and images of a promised land. Philip Marsden¬Smedley has explored the way that individuals – and whole races – idealize far places and how this prompts dreams of returning.