The Quest of an Afghan in Ethiopian

In a curio shop in Jerusalem, a very up-to-date British-Afghan wanderer finds a map about ancient Ethiopian gold mines. With a Bible-hugging local taxi-driver, he sets out along difficult roads on a lively and dangerous quest. He takes the reader to hyenas that are reputed to be devils, and contemplative monks, and a vast open pit from which hungry masses try to extract a few grains of gold. I feel that he is following Bruce more and more closely as his obsession takes him past bogs, dysentery and worms, insects and snakes, and obstructive miracle-workers whom he circumvents by producing his own instant chemical-based miracles to rival theirs. He passes through a region in which - as recently as the 1930s and in spite of the disapproval of the Emperor, Haile Selassie - a 'Mad Sultan' forced rhinoceros-whipped slave children to toil long hours at his gold mines and punished offenders by wrapping them up like mummies in tallow-dipped cloths and burning them as 'human candles'. There were hardships, and bad rumours, and local assurances that the huge cave with a square man-hewn entrance for which he was looking did not exist. Villagers said that the devils who lived in the cave in the mountain cursed terribly anyone who came. But Shah and his Bible-proud taxi-driver friend Samson persevered - until foul weather and their supplies' exhaustion forced them to give up. Shah laughs at Bruce. He dismisses him as a towering red-head whose nose bled spontaneously at any provocation and who went home only to write a 'ponderous' book and die falling down his own stairs. And yet Shah is a true Bruce follower.

WRITING

How does one reduce all the marvellous sprawling ideas that one's mind feel that it has mapped, into a linear sequence that readers can follow?

I want to tell you all about James Bruce. He was known as 'The African Traveller' and 'His Abyssinian Majesty'. I believe that he has been misunderstood, and Iwant to tell people that.

I want to tell everybody why he was important, and why he should not be laughed at for being - perhaps? - a fat dead white male. He had brilliant insights into Ethiopia.