“Pagan! Mr. Harris, when our pagan ancestors back in Yorkshire and Saxony were using their enemies’ skulls as a plate to serve food, these Christians here were singing the psalms. They believe they have the Ark of the Covenant locked up in a church in Axum. Not a saint’s finger or a pope’s toe, but the Ark! Ethiopian believers put on the shirts of men who had just died of the plague. They saw in the plague a sure and God-sent means of winning eternal life, of finding salvation. That,” she said, tapping the table, “is how much they thirsted for the next life.”
