Notes on a Land of Mirages

After preliminary visits to Eritrean Liberation Front offices in Damascus and Khartoum, TIME Correspondent Dean Brelis set off on a 600-mile journey through Eritrean-held territory, the most extensive visit yet made by a Western journalist. Some of his recollections:

From Khartoum, Photographer David Burnett and I booked ourselves aboard a red and yellow bus that makes the daylong journey to Kassala, a Sudanese town that lies near the Eritrean border. For twelve hours, the bus hurtled through the open desert, crashing across giant potholes; the thermometer was constant--between 115DEG and 120DEG F.

Once inside Eritrea, we traveled cross-country, mostly by Land Rover, often at night. It was necessary for two people to drive--one at the wheel, the other calling out the terrain ahead or shouting out the depths of a river in the manner of Mark Twain.

Nowhere have I seen so many mirages as I saw in Eritrea. To reach out one's hand for what is clearly a shimmering pool of water nestled among rocks, to see reflections in the water, and then to touch sand and feel insects biting: this happened several times, as if one could never learn the lesson. It got to the point where to save precious water, I dry-washed my hands with dirt, only later to find my fingers and palms itching from infinitesimal slivers of thorns hidden in the dirt.

There were flocks of doves and pheasants everywhere. Sometimes Ethiopian warplanes would appear overhead, but we would hide and they wouldn't see us. Once I wondered aloud if there was danger ahead. "Only from snakes," replied Seyoum Geresus, my Eritrean guide, "but it is not their way to attack first." Then we saw a militiaman in a long white gown, with a

World War II carbine on his shoulder. "The Ethiopian planes dropped napalm, and everything burned," he said later, as he showed us a crater that ran through the village. "But now life has returned. Our village survives."

In Tessenei, a town that the Eritreans have recently captured, we had good luck--there was a hotel, kept by an Italian, Archimede Parmigiani, 68, who has lived 42 years in Eritrea. There were no other guests. The kitchen had shell holes in the roof, the dusty flasks of Chianti were empty. His family has gone back to Bologna, but Parmigiani stays on. He asks: "What would I do in Bologna after so many years here?"

At a prisoner-of-war camp, I saw my guide give three packs of cigarettes to a prisoner. Why? "He was my guard when they had me in jail," Seyoum said. "When he saw me just now, he tried to hide, he thought I would kill him." I said to Seyoum, "You have come full circle now that they're your prisoners." "Almost," he said. "First we have to set them free. Then it will be full circle."

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