The Chains of Heaven: An Ethiopian Romance

The next day we reached the bottom of the deepest gorge. Bisrat and Makonnen watered the mules and I lay on a slab of flood-smoothed granite. We were in shadow. High above me I could see sunlight catching tufts of clifftop grass.

The air was still. Heat pressed down into the narrow space between the cliffs. It was a heavy heat, not the familiar thin heat of the highlands. These chasms were like another element. Beneath them is a region known as maq where the bodies of sinners fall after burial (in Ge’ez, the Hebrew equivalent ‘Sheol’ is also used). Down there too is weqniyanos, the vast primal ocean into which flow all the rivers of the world. There was a time, according to the Ethiopians, when the earth itself was entirely smooth—but then came the flood, and in its wake it left the broken terrain that man struggles to live in now.

Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth puts forward a similar notion. I had stumbled on this wonderful piece of seventeenth-century literature years earlier in the British Library. I was chasing a reference to something called ‘the Abyssinian Philosophy’—which turned out not to be a piece of forgotten Ethiopian wisdom but a description of Burnet’s theory, turning as it did on the role of the ’abyss’.

Several things convinced me to carry on with Burnet. Could a notion of the ‘abyss’ have crept into the perception and spelling of Abyssinia, the name used for Ethiopia for many centuries? Was this another instance of Ethiopia representing an idea as much as a place? I was also hooked by Burnet’s extravagant imagery, his prose, and a sense of that heady freedom of thought possible in the early years of the Enlightenment when the world was still waiting to reveal its secrets.

In 1711 Joseph Addison discovered Burnet’s writings, and he too was ecstatic. In the Spectator

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