heart. Then I know God is everywhere. One night I cannot sleep. I
climb over the fence and come home. I take this drink of God with
me.”
“What about the ark? Did you look inside?” Roy’s hands were
shaking.
“The ark is empty,” the Abba admitted.
Roy pressed him, “But what about the tablets? No ten
commandments?”
Maryam let a shy smile escape. “I sometimes put the drink
inside. To share with God. To take his blessing. But the ark, it is just
a box.” He thumped on his barrel-shaped chest. “This is also a box.
This also is ark of the covenant. We must fill this box with blessings.”
Weeks later, after he was restored to health, Maryam gave Roy a
shamma and some old clothes and a tiny amount of money to help
him get to where he needed to go. In all the time he had been there
he had spoken very little with the people of the village, but he had
received a grand new literature nonetheless. The Abba showed Roy
how the divina coffeawas prepared, how to serve it. Roy had found
each sip to be evidence of pure magic. He held this to be the fabled
fruit that freed man from the his paleolithic kindergarten, from the
long dumb nowhere. The catalyst that gave him poetry and progress,
the key to the gate around the garden. But not a key to go in; a key to
let himself out.
In 1759 Samuel Johnson published a book that was in many ways a
twin of Voltaire’s more famous Candide. Rasselas, Prince of
Abyssinia featured a prince in a privileged position who realizes
there must be something more profound past the borders of his
pampered existence. He decides that to be without want is to suffer a
kind of living death. “I have already enjoyed too much: Give me
something to desire!” he demands of his beloved teacher, who
explains that if he knew the misery of the world he would appreciate
his paradise all the more. “Now you have given me something to
desire!” Rasselas rejoins excitedly, “I shall long to see the miseries of
the world, since the sight of them is necessary to happiness.” And
though he decides to leave, he can not, for he lives in the Happy
Valley, a paradise ringed with impassable mountains. Here Johnson
was clearly inspired by the ambas, or royal mountaintop prisons in
which Abyssinian royal families enjoyed every pleasure but to which
ABYSSINIA
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