Article by film and theatre director Richard Eyre at the Telegraph.
Addis Ababa is a city - huge, musky, dusty and chaotic - that still lives up (or down) to Evelyn Waugh's description: " . . . everything was haphazard and incongruous: one learned always to expect the unusual and yet was always surprised." (...)
Unusually for such a large country - the size of France and Spain combined - the landscape changes quite rapidly and at each change you search for a description but your comparison is never quite sufficient: Alpine valleys give way to Provençal scrubland that channels into chasms as deep and splendid as the Grand Canyon, which open onto plateaus noble as the plains of Greece.
It is a landscape that fuels legends and has inspired fiction for centuries: "The Letter of Prester John" in the 12th century told of a huge Christian kingdom in the East, comprising the "three Indias'', free of crime and sin, where "honey flows in our land and milk everywhere abounds''; Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia used the country for a parable about how to live better; the tales in James Bruce's Travels to discover the Source of the Nile, though later verified, were dismissed as too exotic to be credible and, two centuries later, served as source material for George Macdonald Fraser's latest Flashman adventures.
You can find the full article here.
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