We heard the prayers for today’s feast celebrating one of St. George’s miracles.  They started at 5:00 a.m. or so.  After visiting the eleven church of Lalibela, including St. Makarios, we traveled by car in the afternoon.  Lalibela is extraordinary for its spectacular location on a series of ridges.  The whole village seems perched on the most impossible precipices with huge valleys stretching out down below and giant mountains on the ridges above that remind me of Table Mountain in South Africa where our journey began.  I wish I knew how old some of these little houses are.  They seem like they have been there since the dawn of time.

So yesterday our journey after lunch began by descending along the ridge back to the valleys before and then moving back through the hills to Yemrehanna Kristos.  I have to say that this cave with a church, palace and unburied bodies in it was a great disappointment to Micah.  All afternoon he kept talking about a cave with diamonds in it, with crystals.  Finally, we realized that he thought we were talking about Yemrehanna Crystals not Kristos.

We traveled through remote villages, saw cows and goats and very rocky fields and people at work behind the plow.  Finally, we arrived at the base of a tree-covered ravine.  We followed a creek up through the trees to a great cave with a textured ceiling with what looked like hexagonal or octagonal rock structures hanging down.  We walked around this church which is 80? Years older than the ones at Lalibela and past the grave of Lalibela’s brother.  We went to the back of the cave and found hundreds of moldering skeletons with feet and heads sticking out everywhere.  On the way back we saw skulls poking out of the hay beneath our feet.  The geometric designs in the church were striking.  We prayed there and received our blessing from the priest and imagined what his life must be like as the guardian of this sacred cave.  All the time on that day we heard the clock ticking.  Our departure from Ethiopia looms large for us as we sing together behind the church.  Driving through the canyons in the red light of the fading afternoon, I said a long continuing prayer of thanksgiving.  It was almost a kind of automatic response to the blessings we received in this place.

No one in the group looked forward to the long-planned sheep ceremony that night.  Although everyone had chimed in telling Yemi that this was unnecessary, she doggedly insisted on it.  The pilgrims dusty from a long car ride and tired from visiting 12 churches walked slowly on the crooked dirt roads of town over big leftover sheep bones and little pieces of rubbish until we arrived at Merigeta Hafte’s house.  We sat inside for a short time drinking the only sodas left in Lalibela after the Timkat Festival and then went outside to sit on a long skin covered bench.  Rick and I wandered behind the house and watched the sun set so many ridges away.

Megeta is a local priest and his home, in part because of this, felt like home to us.  Micah and Melia made friends here in town.  As we walked through the churches, they sat and drew pictures in their notebooks.  Micah made friends with a young boy named Asrat who let Micah copy the drawing of St. George that he was selling.  Later at dinner we saw him again.  Asrat is Mergeta’s nephew.  Being there at the home, sitting out in front among these ancient structures at dusk, eating roast lamb and injera, we celebrated the end of an extraordinary adventure together.

Now we are back at the airport 25 kilometers away from Lalibela on the nearest stretch of flat land to the town.  We fly through Gondar, Bahir Dar, Addis Ababa on our way to London for a very different kind of holiday as we make our transition back to our ordinary lives.  How can we ever forget the women we saw with swollen necks, or the blind children, the weak, elderly and lame or this beautiful land.  We made some wonderful friends on this pilgrimage.