A PASSAGE TO ETHIOPIA : AFTER YEARS OF CIVIL WAR, AFRICA’S POOREST COUNTRY IS REDISCOVERING ITS HERITAGE--AN ANCIENT CULTURE THAT CLAIMS DESCENT FROM SOLOMON AND THE QUEEN OF SHEBA

THE STILL WATERS OF LAKE TANA, 8,000 FEET HIGH ON AN ETHIOPIAN plateau carpeted with juniper and spruce, are parted by the prow of a gray steamer paced by cormorants skimming the surface.

On deck, Adey Befecadu considers the treasures she is leaving behind on an island capped by the round thatch of an ancient monastery. With her sisters and some European friends, she had climbed a dirt path to the island summit in the translucent light of virgin forest.

The monks obligingly had hauled out their treasure: filigreed crowns and cups, illuminated Bibles and sagas of St. George bound in leather and gold, donated for safekeeping on the remote island by a succession of emperors going back 600 years. The centerpiece was the crown of Emperor Adam-Seghed, a huge domed headpiece worked in silver tiers like a balustrade. One of the tiers was hung with dozens of tiny pendants that quivered with the slightest jar, resounding with a pure tintinnabulation. Adey’s sister Rosemary, reaching out to it, drew a sharp rebuke from the head priest; it was not to be touched by a woman.

Adey and her sisters trace their family as far back as 1868, when their grandfather was picked up as an orphan by invading British troops and given a medical education in India. He returned to his native country as its first Western-trained physician. Dr. Hakim Workneh’s children in their turn became doctors, diplomats and philanthropists; Adey earned a political science degree at Addis Ababa University, an institution of enduring distinction even in the Marxist era that came after the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974.

The arrival of the Marxist “Dergue” and the emergence three years later of Mengistu Haile Mariam as the country’s supreme ruler brought civil war and repression. Travel to the country’s historical shrines became unsafe when not forbidden outright. In that time, the shrines’ lessons about Ethiopians’ common history were lost in ethnic discord.

But the war ended with Mengistu’s ouster in May, 1991. Now Adey has come north, searching for an answer to the riddle she says has burdened her generation: “You wonder why it is that a country with such a long and great history should be so backward today.”

Ethiopia’s pride in its heritage is well placed, but so is a sense of shame at its miserable present. With the exception of Egypt, this land boasts the oldest written history in Africa, a testament to its stature as a crossroads of trade and a place where Islam, Christianity and Judaism converged. Its north and east harbor the remnants of ancient cities whose wonders rival the pyramids: Lalibela, whose 11 churches hewn directly out of rock are so exquisite that they are said to have been created by angels; Harar, with its 14th-Century Moorish gates and walls; Aksum, the spiritual capital of Ethiopia, home to a cult of the Queen of Sheba, the country’s legendary matriarch, and also purportedly to the Ark of the Covenant, the casket said to hold the original tablets of Moses.

As the epitome of remote civilization, Ethiopia has long cast a spell over the West. Homer wrote in “The Odyssey” of “the distant Ethiopians, the farthest outposts of mankind.” The author of the Psalms, searching for a trope to suggest the immeasurable breadth of divine allure, sang, “Let Ethiopia hasten to stretch out her hands to God.” In the Middle Ages, the search for a legendary Christian emperor named Prester John, said to live beyond the Red Sea amid unimaginable wealth, inspired Europe’s great era of exploration and brought Portuguese caravels to the shores of the land then known as Abyssinia.

But no African country has sunk so far from glory as this one. Nearly two decades of civil war--killing hundreds of thousands--drought and socialist mismanagement have made it one of the poorest nations on Earth. Once an exporter of grain and livestock, Ethiopia today depends on the outside world to feed its people with donations of 1 million tons of food a year. By 1987, per capita income for the more than 50 million Ethiopians had fallen to $130 and is undoubtedly much lower now.

Much of this disaster can be blamed on Mengistu, who built the largest army in sub-Saharan Africa to battle the insurgent groups in the north. The military machine consumed almost three-quarters of the country’s output but lost the war. Worse, when Mengistu fled the country he left behind a shambles. The economy is at a dead stop. The army has evaporated. The new government, drawn from the rebel group that seized the capital of Addis Ababa a year ago and from the two dozen ethnic parties invited into a transitional government, is powerless to keep armed bandits from roving the countryside, making former imperial capitals such as Harar unsafe for visitors and cutting off overland access to shrines such as Lalibela. In just the last month, ethnic animosities within the fledgling government have threatened to erupt anew into civil war.

But people like Adey Befecadu are going anyway.

Under Mengistu, the Christian festival of Timkat, the Ethiopian Epiphany, was a relatively desultory affair. At the Church of Debre Birhan Selassie, on a hilltop in the medieval stronghold of Gondar, there might be 20 celebrants. In January, post-Mengistu, the streets and alleyways teemed with thousands of worshipers, a sea of white homespun and embroidered red and yellow finery.

These were not only Christians, who lay claim to the country’s oldest organized religion, but also Muslims, who may account for as much as 40% of the population. In a mass, they proceeded to the legendary Fasilidas Baths, a great pool built in Roman style by an emperor of the 17th Century, and there, as the pious had done for 1,000 years, they launched lighted candles across the water in celebration of a new freedom.

Ethiopians today are rediscovering something subsumed beneath the ethnic and political divisions that set them fighting among themselves for decades, something that could again bring them together: their glorious history.

“The religious sites and relics are definitely a coherent binding influence,” says Graham Hancock, a British journalist and the author of a recent book aimed at establishing Aksum’s claim that it has the true Ark of the Covenant. “The proof is that even at the height of the civil war, these places were never shelled by either side.”

That required exceptional restraint; Aksum was taken by rebels in 1988, and Lalibela changed hands repeatedly during the years of warfare. But Mengistu knew better than to expose himself to national obloquy by risking their destruction.

What Mengistu and his ruling council, the Dergue (from an old Ge’ez word for “committee”) did achieve was to isolate the north. To travel anywhere in its historic crescent required as many as three separate travel permits from ministries all resolved to say no. This was hardly surprising; the same region that gave birth to the nation’s glimmering empires had also produced its most determined rebels. Ethiopia’s heritage was out of reach of most of its own people.

Now that has all changed. The search for historic Ethiopia being undertaken today by a growing number of its war-weary and curious citizens is a search for the national character, for an understanding of the affinities and differences that could bring them together--or sunder them again. It should begin, as did its very civilization, in Aksum.

ONE DAY RECENTLY, THE STILLNESS OF A DRY AKSUMITE AFTERNOON WAS RENT by a rhythmic clanging, like a biblical call to prayer. Outside the Church of St. Mary of Zion, men gathered the folds of their white linen shawls, slipped thongs back on their feet and closed the palm-sized, leather-bound books in ancient Ge’ez from which they had been murmuring devotions.

The compound they had been summoned to cross was streaked by lengthening shadows cast by a field of monoliths at the verge of the glade, granite obelisks likely dating to the age of Christ, the last works of a pagan people soon to be converted.

The monks began their procession, three times around the church every afternoon between Ash Wednesday and Easter. They were paced by acolytes lugging immense crosses of labyrinthine metalwork, trailing silken ribbons in yellow, purple and red. Overhead bobbed colored parasols of gold-embroidered velvet.

As befits the spiritual center of the Ethiopian Christian Church, Aksum is perhaps the shrine of most concentrated power, encompassing monuments from four periods of Ethiopian history. The obelisks represent the oldest, the Aksumite Empire of the 1st and 2nd centuries.

Seven immense granite stela, from 20 to 100 feet tall, each hewn from a single imposing block, stand on the edge of the compound of St. Mary’s. Their creators sculpted the surfaces to suggest latched doors and windows, endowing monoliths weighing several hundred tons with a slender elegance.

The tallest obelisk still standing, a finger of rock 75 feet high, dominates the center of the glade at a slight tilt, capped with a semicircular headpiece thought to represent the sun. But two were once taller. One, 110 feet high, was felled by Ahmed Gragn, a Muslim marauder of the 9th Century, and lies across the field in five gargantuan pieces. It is considered the largest once-standing monolith erected anywhere in the world. A second reposes in Rome, where it was taken in pieces by Mussolini’s occupying army in 1937. The United Nations’ 1947 peace treaty with Italy required the return of the obelisk to Aksum, but the Italians have stalled ever since, and Ethiopia is now too humble and dependent to hold its present-day benefactors to their promise.

Not far from the obelisks are the stone foundations of what was once the oldest Christian church in sub-Saharan Africa, the original St. Mary’s, built in the 4th Century and razed by Gragn centuries later. Long after the vandals withdrew, the emperor Fasilidas financed a fortress-like church with thick stone walls and crenelated gun ports on the roof; it is known locally as the “new” St. Mary’s, even though Haile Selassie supplemented it in 1964 with a separate domed structure and bell tower.

Next to Selassie’s dome and of the same late vintage is the centerpiece of the compound, a small, cube-shaped stone house under a weathered green dome. Within, according to national tradition, is the predominant relic of the Ethiopian Church: The Ark of the Covenant, the Lost Ark, in which are said to rest the tablets of Moses. Only a high priest and a guardian are allowed to see the Ark and its contents.

Generations of hunters, raiders and worshipers have sought to learn the fate of the Ark, as exemplified most recently by Hollywood’s Indiana Jones. The Bible is silent on its fate, indicating only that it disappeared mysteriously from Solomon’s Temple. Only Ethiopia claims to have preserved it, for 3,000 years, in glorious isolation.

The Ark is the paramount symbol of this culture’s antiquity and the focus of the religious cult that binds together a fractious mosaic of tribes speaking more than 80 languages. It is said to have been brought to Aksum by the first emperor, Menelik I, who by Ethiopian reckoning was the son of Solomon and Sheba, regarded as an Ethiopian queen. In his youth, it is said, Menelik returned to Jerusalem to confront his father and, accompanied by a detachment of Israelites, stole the Ark and returned to Ethiopia.

It is a story protected fiercely by guardians of Ethiopian tradition. Questioned about its departure from the sketchy version in the Bible, Berhane Bihon, a curator of Aksum’s archeological museum, replies, “This is not the Bible; this is history.”

In fact, most biblical archeologists believe the historical Sheba to have come from southern Arabia, near a town known today as Saba; Aksum didn’t even exist until centuries after Solomon’s death. In the words of Edward Ullendorff, one of the leading Western experts on Ethiopia and the Bible, “her appropriation as the national ancestress of the Ethiopian people” dates from well before medieval times.

Elements of the Ethiopian version would help to explain the unique features of Ethiopian Christianity, one of which is its “fantastic Jewish influence,” says Richard Pankhurst, director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University. Ethiopian Christians follow Old Testament dietary laws that resemble the kosher practices of Judaism. They observe the Jewish day of sabbath, begin traditional church education with the Psalms of David and in general regard the Old Testament to be as important as the Gospels. All this could be explained by the arrival of the Ark in Ethiopia accompanied by a cadre of believing Israelites.

IF AKSUM IS THE CENTER OF ETHIOPIAN heritage, the wasteland around it exemplifies the unpromising future of modern Ethiopia. The terrain here says much about the sheer tenacity of the people native to it.

To one side looms a bank of steep red cliffs, devoid of vegetation; in the opposite direction, a wasteland reaches flatly to the horizon, dotted with widely spaced, solitary crags. This land is Tigray, whose harshness has hardened its people to adversity.

From Tigray, Menelik II drew the army that became the only sub-Saharan African force in modern times to defeat European troops, repelling an invading Italian army in 1896. From the vacant terrain, crossed by rocky paths, the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front--the core of the rebel army that forced Mengistu out of power--drew the strength to fight hopeless battles for more than 10 years.

Aksum may have been the seat of a great empire in antiquity, but Tigray today is exhausted and forlorn. Its youths had grown up in a land of such slender promise that they found the hopeless routine of guerrilla warfare in the bush undaunting. One can also see how little they have in common with the Ethiopian elite they supplanted in Addis Ababa, where the young rebel soldiers with their wild Afro hairstyles are still viewed as an occupying army of provincial rubes.

One afternoon, a modest procession comes down the hill behind a stony ruin known as the Queen of Sheba’s Palace. This one lacks the self-importance of the Lenten parade at St. Mary’s. At its head is a scrofulous donkey burdened with a pack of twigs. Another donkey follows, bearing a few sacks of grain. Bringing up the rear is a patriarchal 80-year-old who introduces himself as Berhe Gebre-Selassie.

Berhe’s old body has a stringy peasant toughness, and he confirms that he has lived on this hill all his life--with the exception of a few years when the Dergue maintained its characteristic rule by terror in Tigray province.

“By this time of day, under the Dergue you had to be back in the city,” he says through an interpreter. “You couldn’t move from the city to the countryside. Life was good here under the Emperor until the beginning of the Dergue,” he continues. “I can say things were the best under Haile Selassie, when we had peace and food. But he was not for all the people; he favored a few who were close to him.”

Asked his opinion of the Dergue, Berhe launches into a long disquisition in his native Tigrinya, at one point putting his hands to his neck and uttering a guttural rasp.

“The Dergue killed so many people,” explains the interpreter simply. “But with the TPLF, no one will try to cheat people.”

That is not a faith shared by everyone. For the opposite view, one should visit the far end of the historical crescent, the region of Gondar.

TAKING THE THRONE IN 1632, EMPEROR FASILIDAS SELECTED A SEAT OF SUCH great natural beauty that none of his four successors felt compelled to establish their own capitals, giving Gondar unparalleled durability as a royal headquarters.

The town is situated on a wooded hillside that curves around a great central basin like a tiered amphitheater. The province’s land is rich with agricultural potential, characteristically underused during the Mengistu regime. The hillsides are lush with juniper, olive and cedar.

Not for Gondar the monolithic grandeur of Aksum; this is a place of exquisite palaces and vibrant liturgical art, with a distinctly medieval air. Children struggle with huge timber wheelbarrows, and horse carts menace people squatting along the roadside. It is a place where the view of recent history is very different from that in the rebel stronghold of Tigray.

“At this moment, the people don’t feel properly that they are free.”

The speaker is Gebre Kassa Yegezaw, one of Gondar’s leading citizens. During the Mengistu regime, Gebre had been an official of the famine-fighting Relief and Rehabilitation Commission and of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Like most citizens of Gondar, he is an Amhara, the tribe that is perhaps Ethiopia’s proudest, most elitist and most resentful of the rebel victory.

Under Haile Selassie and Mengistu, the Amhara dominated Ethiopia’s civil service. But many of them had come to feel that they were the rulers of Ethiopia by right, and a pridefully misplayed hand by Amhara officials at peace talks in London just after Mengistu’s flight ended up depriving them of any role in the new government.

So in Gondar, resentment of the new rebel government seems thicker even than disgust with the Dergue. “Nobody trusts them, nobody,” Gebre says of the Tigrayans. “Things were much better under Mengistu. I was against the government, but politically I don’t see an improvement.”

Despite its 44 churches, Gondar’s glories are secular as well as religious. The latter is exemplified by the Church of Debre Birhan Selassie (“Light of the Trinity”). Built in the 1680s, it is surmounted by a great Gondarene cross crowned with seven golden balls representing the seven days of creation.

But its exterior is pedestrian compared to the explosive color of its interior. Every inch of wall in its spacious central chamber is covered by remarkable devotional art. Ethiopian church decor is heavy on Old Testament gore, replete with beheadings and dismemberments, and the walls of Debre Birhan Selassie are no exception. Nineteen Ethiopian martyrs are among the subjects, many of them depicted in the throes of mortal torment. St. George, the national patron saint, is also shown slaying his dragon, and many panels are devoted to familiar scenes from the Gospels.

At one end of the hall is a grand mural of the Holy Trinity, shown as a trio of sagacious men with lustrous white beards. From this panel, one’s eyes are drawn upward to the hall’s crowning glory: a ceiling filled with the faces of angels, as if to relieve the eyes from the horrors on the walls.

At the far end of town from the church is its principal secular attraction. Five birr (about $2.50) buys admission to the compound, where the Romanesque castles, palaces and libraries of six Ethiopian rulers stand in a huge cluster.

A young guide named Johannes Kalkey leads visitors around the stone staircases and reception rooms of the compound, most of them bare but airy and sunny. As he stops at a balcony overlooking Fasilidas’ broad courtyard, he enunciates an Amhara preoccupation that Mengistu manipulated quite efficiently: Ethiopian unity. The rebels who overran the northern province of Eritrea are poised to declare its independence from Ethiopia, a development most observers consider inevitable but which rankles the Amhara soul.

“Mengistu was not a good person, he was a fascist person,” Kalkey says. “But he believed in unity.”

Kalkey articulates the deep ambivalence with which people here view the expulsion of Mengistu and the resulting political disorder. During the Dergue years, Kalkey fought in the bush as a member of the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Party, a long defunct Amhara rebel group, for which he spent two years in prison. The torture he suffered there has left his left leg paralyzed.

“For unity, the people think they need Mengistu back at this time,” he concludes before leading the way out to the castle gate. “For me, if he came back, I would go back into the bush.”

ELEVEN LARGE ISLANDS AND 40 SMALL ones dot the surface of Lake Tana, containing 20 monasteries and churches, some 600 years old. These thatched structures occupy the crests of the islands, a defensive position that has enabled them to preserve treasures cached by generations of emperors.

Today the islands communicate with each other and the mainland by a single launch, the Dahlak, which can be hired in the town of Bahir Dar for $100 an hour.

This is the boat Adey Befecadu uses to visit the monasteries. A few poverty-stricken monks line the path to the monastery to offer for sale their leather-bound Bibles, illuminated and written in Ge’ez script. Adey is struck by the sight of her culture’s guardians hawking their patrimony for a few sorry birr.

“It’s sad we haven’t been exposed to our own history, but it’s even sadder to come to these places and see how the people live in such destitution,” she says.

At the path’s end, near the very summit of the island, is the monastery of Ure Kidane-Mereth. A deacon opens a pair of 10-foot doors with a massive, claw-like key to admit his visitors to the painted sanctuary within. There is more grand guignol in bright primary colors but also more standard devotional figures. Regarding with perplexity a depiction of Madonna and Child, Adey realizes that the medieval artists had inserted a hidden lesson in their work.

“When you look at them,” she remarks, “you don’t see a happy face, at all. They’re so very sad.”

It is true; amid the forthright gore of the frescoes in monasteries and churches across the land, this is a common element. Even the heroes of Ethiopian history and biblical legend have a careworn, preoccupied expression. On the wall at Ure Kidane-Mereth, the Ethiopian Madonna examines her child not with tenderness, but with a sort of foreboding, as if the artist knew that the empire in which he lived was destined to crumble amid brutality and civil war.

Adey is troubled. Ethiopians of all tribes might be united by history on view again, after so many years, in Aksum, Gondar and Lake Tana, but these artifacts are saying that the country’s heritage itself bears a baleful warning.

Adey considers the task confronting the transitional government, of reuniting the country after 17 years. All of Mengistu’s manipulation of the symbols of cultural unity had been aimed at driving Ethiopians apart, and the gulf seems too great to be bridged by a group of mistrusted provincial rebels, even though they were born in the very cradle of Ethiopian civilization.

“It’s true we have free discussion now--people are finally meeting and talking freely, unlike before,” she says. “But our problems are not being solved. Even the people we went to school with--we can’t talk to them now. They’ll just say, ‘Oh, you think like that just because you’re Amhara.’ But when you see these places, you realize we’re all the same people.”