A Far Country

Ethiopia is known today for famine, relief aid and an intractable civil war, but it is also the background to one of the richest and most historical of African cultures. Home of the original Garden of Eden, it is the oldest Christian country and the source of the Blue Nile, and was an inspiration for Dr Johnson and Coleridge and the last home of Rimbaud. Despite its current sufferings, the country still exerts a powerful fascination, as Philip Marsden-Smedley discovered when he set out to trace the physical and cultural map of a surprising and uneasy paradise. This is his account of a journey on which he witnessed the crowning of an Ethiopian Archbishop, was received at ancient monasteries, gazed at the bones of a 14th-century king, talked to Rastafarians and visited the Harenna forest.