In the restroom where we took our morning and afternoon tea-breaks there were no fans, but there we were allowed to remove our jackets and to roll up our sleeves.
Brian, a middle-aged clerk with a close-cropped sandy beard, never rolled up his sleeves, no matter how hot or still the air in the restroom. He was a middle-ranking clerk, quite old for his position, and he had been at the same level for many years now, far longer than most. I was never quite sure whether it was for golf reasons or for the quality or fabric of his suitage or for some other cause that he had never progressed, but he had not done so, nor did it seem to bother him, particularly.
One day we were sitting together in the restroom sipping vending-machine coffee from plastic cups when I asked him about his sleeves and why he never rolled them up.
‘Do you really want to know?’ he said.
I said that I did; and with this he put down his cup and beckoned me to follow him outside, into the corridor. There, after checking in both directions, he undid both cuff-buttons; then, looking me in the eye, he pulled back first one sleeve and then the other.
‘There,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’
His arms, both of them, right down to the wrist, were covered, with barely a patch of flesh to spare, in blue-green tattoos. Mostly they were of skulls and motorcycles, and skulls in Second World War-German-Army-style motorcycle helmets, and motorcyclists with fleshless skulls for heads. There were also the logos of the old British motorcycle manufacturers surmounted by skulls, or just in the general vicinity of skulls. And, on one arm, a naked lady wreathed in a large snake.
‘Gosh!’ I said, or words to that effect.
‘I’m a Hell’s Angel,’ he said.
And thereafter he would tell me, when we were alone together, about his weekends with the Chapter, and about motorcycles and how to customise them to make them just so, and why, when a big petrol tank meant that you could ride for longer and make fewer stops, it was a good thing to replace it with a smaller one, from the point of view of just looking hardcore.
All of which made sense to me then and seemed only right and natural.
I was twenty-three years old, or thereabouts. I saw the world of work, then, as what people had to go through, to pay for what they wanted to do in their ‘real’ time, the time that mattered. And all the business reports on the television talking about the FT-100 Share Index and whatnot, and the copies of the Financial Times in the newsagents, and in the bookshops the shelves upon shelves of books with titles like Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple, The Ten Habits of Successful Business Leaders and The Corporate Warrior: Your Road Map to Success, I thought, then, that they were what people had to read because of their jobs, and what they had to put themselves through to earn their living. But that beyond these, I thought there were other things that meant more to them: I don’t know—golf, say, even, or motorcycles, or tennis or something. Now, I don’t know so much. Now, I’m not so sure. There are people, I have seen, who every day when lunchtime comes, stay at their desks. There are people who, every day when home-time comes, don’t go home, but instead stay on at work for hours. There are people who, though they have holiday allocation, don’t take it all, or even much more than a fraction of it; and who, when they do leave the office, take with them the concerns of their company, take them on as their own and carry their work around in their heads with them, and when they talk, they talk about work, or else they constantly check mobile electronic devices for messages to do with work. There are people who earn the most extraordinary sums of money working in offices, but who do not know what their own children like to eat. There are television programmes about work, too, game-shows in which the contestants vie to be the best shopkeeper or salesman or distributor or wholesaler, and for whom the prize, should they win, is a job in an office in a provincial retail park.
I shared a taxi, years later, with a businesswoman I had been working with, a senior executive with a multinational company who had lived, for a year or two at a time, in more countries than she could remember, who regularly attended breakfast meetings before work and evening functions with business colleagues and contacts after work, and who said goodnight to her children, most nights, by telephone as the nanny tucked them in; and as we drove, by way of conversation, I asked about her husband and what he did.
‘He’s an entrepreneur,’ she said.
And indeed he seemed to be a successful one, for between them they had an expensive house in a sought-after part of London and a second home elsewhere, and several expensive cars. They both had their clothes made for them by tailors, and had all of the things and did all of the things that successful people have and do.
‘And what are his hobbies?’ I asked.
It took her a moment or two to make sense of what I had said. It seemed to be not the sort of question that she was used to being asked by the kinds of people she habitually mixed with.
‘Business is his hobby,’ she replied, at length.
‘But outside business? I mean, does he have a sport he likes, or an interest or something?’
She thought again.
‘I asked him once. I said, what would you do if you couldn’t work? If you’d earned so much money you didn’t need to. And he said, “I’d start a new company”.’
For some people, work is the thing, the main thing in life. Work is what they choose to do and where they want to be. Work is life.
But then I did not believe this to be so.
To the east of Abyssinia there lies a desolate volcanic plain, strewn with ash and tumbled black rocks, almost entirely empty of life and swept constantly by a burning salt wind. What vegetation there is grows close to the banks of the slow-flowing, mud-red Awash River, which winds its way down from the mountains, down through deep gorges and into the barren desert, where live the people known as the Danakil, who were, at one time, a murderous tribe split into two great bands, the Adoimara, or White Men, and the Asaimara, or Red Men. Among these Danakil, both Adoimara and Asaimara, a man’s status was judged, entirely, by the number of men, women and children he had killed. This he might do by any means he pleased, no matter how treacherous. When they were not killing outsiders, or engaging in feuds with surrounding tribes, the two bands of the Danakil expended their time and their energies on killing each other.
The river flows on and on through the Danakil lands for mile after mile until there rises, in the distance, a line of purple hills known as the Magenta Mountains. There is a steep and narrow pass in these mountains, and the river flows through it, pouring down into an extraordinary oasis, shut in all round by sheer precipices of black rock. Some thirty miles square, it is a place of thick forest, deep swamp and huge lakes.
This is the land of Aussa, and it was, in the 1930s, the home of a great Danakil army who owed their absolute loyalty to the Sultan of that place, whose palace lay deep within the forest.
The Sultan, in those days, was a small, intense-eyed man called Muhammad Yuya. His father, the Sultan before him, had on his deathbed called for two slaves to be brought before him, one male and one female; and he had had them both slaughtered there, in the hope of seeing, in their death-agonies, some clue or portent that might help him escape his predicament. He could not. But no doubt it passed the time.
The river flows around Aussa on three sides, looking for a way out into the desert land beyond, where at some further point, before reaching the coast at Djibouti, it disappears. No one outside Aussa ever knew where it went.
There had been attempts to discover the river’s destination, over the years; and over the years there had been a number of expeditions to Aussa, but none had ever returned alive.
An expedition, in 1875, led by the Swiss explorer and mercenary Werner Munzinger, accompanied by his wife and children, were all murdered before