'Memoirs and Recollections of An Officer of the Indian Political Service' [‎8r] (15/156)

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CHAPTER 3: ETHIOPIA 1935
At the end of May 1935, I left Aden by coastal steamer for Djibouti in French
Somaliland, the maritime terminus of the French owned and managed 500 mile metre
gauge railway which climbed the central plateau of Abyssinia to Addis Ababa. Djibouti
was even hotter and far less civilised than Aden. The down-at-heel Greek owned hotels
were starting to fill up with foreign journalists, waiting, like me, for the twice-
weekly train to take them into the interior. It being the rainy season, the trains
only ran in daylight, so we spent one night in another Greek owned hotel on the
way up in a place called Dire Dawa, where I shared my room with an English fellow
traveller. He turned out to be a salesman for military equipment, one of whose suit
cases contained a complete set of British Army khaki webbing equipment, with the help
of which he was hoping to obtain an order for several thousand sets from the Ethiopian
Ministry of War. The rest of the white passengers also looked as if they were bent on
making a killing for themselves when war came to the Lion of Judah. It was all very
"Evelyn Waugh" and an eye-opener to me.
Addis Ababa itself, which is situated on the high plateau at a height of 8,500 feet
above sea-level, was cool and damp after the heat of the Red Sea. It was the middle
of the monsoon season, and the rain fell incessantly, transforming the rolling downs
of the countryside into a morass of mud and slush. In the interior communications
were primitive in the extreme. The few highways were unmetalled, and the road to the
North, which passed through mountainous country was hardly fit for motor traffic in
the dry season and virtually impassable during the rains. The single line railway to
Djibouti constituted the only practicable link with the outside world. No scheduled
air services then existed, and in any case even the most powerful civil or military
transport aircraft of the day found it impossible to load and take off at the high
altitude of the grass air strip in the capital. This inaccessibility was something
which, as I shall show, provided us in the British Legation with our single most
intractable problem.
For the first few days, I was the guest of the Minister in his small but imposing
Legation Residence, which also contained the offices of the Chancery. With the
exception of the Americans, all the foreign Legations were situated in a specially
designed diplomatic quarter some miles to the north of the city, to which it was
connected by a paved but execrable road coming down from the north. The British
Legation and the various houses of the staff, the Consulate building and the stables
and barracks of the Cavalry Escort were enclosed in the large wooded grass compound
covering an area of about one square mile. We were the most northerly of the diplomatic
compounds. Around the perimeter of the Legation there ran a fence of a sort. The
Minister's house was built on the slope of a steep hill which continued to rise behind