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Testament fate, allegedly, of those who approached it too closely. The Kebra Negast, the national fourteenth-century epic, confirms Aksum’s claim to the Ark. This maintains not only that the Queen of Sheba was Ethiopian, but also that in 1000 bc she visited Israel’s King Solomon. He immediately wanted to make love to the enchanting virginal queen, but assured her he would take nothing from her so long as she took nothing from him. Nonetheless, after eating his specially prepared spicy banquet, that night she drank a glass of water that the crafty king had placed by her bedside. Solomon demanded his side of the deal and Sheba returned home bearing his child, future King Menelik. Still, she had her revenge; twenty years later Menelik visited his father in Jerusalem, before making off with the Ark and establishing the Solomite dynasty that reigned for 3,000 years until Haile Selassie’s overthrow in 1974. On the other side of the road was Aksum’s remarkable Northern Stelae Field, containing 120 stone obelisks erected in north-east Africa millennia ago. The stelae were used by local rulers as tombstones-cum-billboards to proclaim their power. Sculpted from a single piece of granite, complete with windows and doors, some resembled mini-skyscrapers. The 33metre-high Great Stele, which, at 500 tons, is the largest stone block humans have ever attempted to erect, now lay broken on the ground after toppling over. To Haile’s intense regret, the Rome Stele, at 25 metres high the second largest, was no longer among the obelisks. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ he spluttered. ‘It was shipped to Italy by Mussolini in 1937 during the occupation, where it’s been ever since, in spite of all our requests for its return.’ Afterwards, Haile led me to the Queen of Sheba’s Bath, a 2,000-year-old rock reservoir where naked boys were splashing and women were washing clothes. Beyond were paths that climbed two kilometres to brown plateaux and, overlooking Aksum, King Kaled’s sixth-century ruined palace, with its barely excavated underground vaults and sarcophagi. ‘Va bene?’ ragged children shouted from nearby thatched huts. ‘Those are the only Italian words young people know these days,’ explained Haile, as we explored the vaults. Then he pointed proudly to distant rocky pinnacles. ‘But over there was battle of Adwa in 1895.’ At this battle, Emperor Menelik II inflicted on Italian invaders the biggest defeat suffered by a colonial army in Africa, thus saving Ethiopia from the Europeans until the arrival of Mussolini. Two days after I arrived in Aksum, I hired a driver and decrepit four-wheel drive Toyota and set off to spend the night in remote Debre Damo, Ethiopia’s most famous monastery. The rutted dirt road wound east through dreamy, mist-shrouded valleys to Adwa, a little town at the foot of the peaks, where we bought coffee and honey (the customary gift for the monks). Thereafter the track zigzagged interminably upwards until it passed near Yeha. Ringed by protective mountains, this village was the birthplace of the country’s earliest civilisation, and its ruined third-century Temple of the Moon, with its immense red walls, 122