Notes From Afield | A Cloud Across the Grass
Three strangers. A question. No answers. An afternoon in the Melkam Daga Highlands, Ethiopia... or someplace like it.
Author’s Note
Melkam Daga is not on any map I’ve seen, though I’m certain it exists. The land imagined here borrows freely from Ethiopia’s Wag Hemra highlands—places I have never set foot, but often wandered in thought. This story carries quiet respect for the Amhara and Agew peoples, whose presence runs deeper than the roads and older than the names.
“I speak of Africa and golden joys.”
- Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2
Melkam Daga Highlands, Wag Hemra Zone, Amhara Region, Ethiopia
Late dry season | Mid-afternoon
A goat bell clinked somewhere down the slope. Dust drifted across the ridgeline. On these unsurrendered African hills, on this particular afternoon, it was clear to me that meaning does arrive quietly—not always in thunder or flame, but in presence. The sun was high. The grass was still. Nothing called attention to itself.
Melkam Daga sits perched in the northern highlands of the Wag Hemra Zone, in Ethiopia’s Amhara Region—not far from the carved churches of Lalibela, the ruins of Axum, and the ragged edge of Tigray. It lies at a crossroads of spiritual history, ancient caravan routes, and contemporary hardship. The land bears witness. It offers nothing freely, but it remembers everything.
The three of them sat beneath the acacia, close but not crowded. A circle of stones held the ashes of a small fire.
Alemu, the youngest, ran his thumb over a smooth green stone he’d carried in his pocket since Lalibela.
“መሰከረ ምን ነው?”… meseker men new?... What does it mean to witness?
No one answered at first.
Bekele, older, his face sunlined and wide as a gourd bowl, stared at the hill across the valley.
“ማንም አይሰማህም እስከምትዝም.” … manim ayisemahim iskemet’zim. … No one hears you until you are quiet.
Selam, the third, moved with unhurried purpose. Her wrists bore faint white ash lines. She poured water from a metal jug into three chipped enamel cups and handed one to each of the men. She kept the third for herself, turning it once in her hands before she drank. She did not speak.
Somewhere far down the slope, the same bell rang again, and then a donkey brayed once and was quiet.
He held the stone tighter and thought of the priest at Lalibela who had pressed it into his palm and said nothing. Alemu had waited for a teaching, a sentence, a blessing. But none came. Only a hand, and the cool green stone, and the feeling that something had passed between them anyway.
“Maybe that was the teaching,” he thought. “Maybe the silence was full of words.”
Bekele had heard sermons carried on wind, and once, as a boy, seen fire leap from a dry fig tree. None of that had stayed with him. What stayed was the quiet after his father died—the way the house sounded like a cave, the way no one spoke, and yet everyone understood.
“It is not the fire that changes you,” he thought. “It is what comes after.”
Selam watched the dust settle on the enamel cup in her lap. The rim was chipped. Her fingers traced it. She remembered her mother pouring water like this—same cups, same slope, same light. Nothing had been said then either, but she had learned to listen with her hands.
She took a slow sip. The wind moved across the grass. No one spoke, but they all looked out as a lone cloud cast its shadow across the slope, slow and soundless, like a thought passing between them.
The End
Coda
Mouna-vyākhyā prakatita para-brahma-tattvam… He reveals the Supreme Truth through silence.
- Dakshinamurti Stotram, verse 1, attributed to Adi Shankaracharya (8th century CE)
Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The example of His light is like a niche within which is a lamp - the lamp is within glass, the glass as if it were a brilliant star - lit from [the oil of] a blessed olive tree, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil would almost glow even if untouched by fire. Light upon light. Allah guides to His light whom He wills...
- Surah An-Nur (24:35)
And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; by the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.
- 1 Kings 19:11-12 (KJV)
