Chris and Andualem on the Ethiopia Airlines bus.

All our early morning wakitude came in handy for the domestic travel. Our flights had early departure times, and Solomon always wanted us there two hours ahead to begin check-in rituals that started with a guard who wouldn't let us beyond the parking lot without our tickets and passports. On December 21, the sky was mauve when we reached the airport. The palm in front of the domestic terminal window was black. By the time we moved through security, the palm was green against a pink sky. I sat quizzing Jonathan on his Amharic. "Cus be." "Be careful." A man in dapper orange and green called the flight: "Ethiopian Airlines flight 8128 to Bahr Dar, Gondar and Lalibela is now ready for boarding."

For pilgrimage, one could hardly do better than Lalibela. Cousineau writes of visiting Egypt and feeling something "ancient and holy" unfolding all around him. He sensed, he says, what the seventeenth-century Japanese pilgrim-poet Basho "called a glimpse of the underglimmer, an experience of the deeply real that lurks everywhere." That glimmer is powerful under the red rocks and pale, clear air of Lalibela, a place that was born in a time when Crusaders and Islamic holy warriors were locked in struggle over Jerusalem -- and the Crusaders were about to lose.

Chris and Rebekah at Bole Airport in Addis Ababa.

Christianity had been the state religion of Ethiopia since the fourth century, and in 1190 Ethiopia had a devout new emperor, King Lalibela ("the bees love him"). At that time, the Ethiopian Orthodox church was under the authority of the bishop of the Egyptian Coptic church, and some of King Lalibela's communications with the bishop -- along with oral tradition -- tell of the king's vision and subsequent determination to create the New Jerusalem on the high Lasta Plateau in Ethiopia. Workers by day and, according to legend, angels at night, started at the top and chiseled down, sculpting twelve churches from solid rock, carefully removing anything (as Michelangelo might say) that wasn't church. Looking at the massive red rock churches, it's hard to believe angels weren't somehow involved.

This sensation of space breathing, this underglimmer, fills Lalibela.

Over the centuries, the reddish brown stones and steps of Lalibela have been worn smooth by the feet of thousands of pilgrims. I thought of those steps last week as I read the words of another modern pilgrim who set out from Great Britain to visit some of the world's ancient sacred places. Jennifer Lash opens her book On Pilgrimage with these words: "Poor cancer, the word is dark and terrible, full of fear to the medical profession as much as anyone else." After raising seven children, Lash underwent an operation for cancer, and heard a voice within calling, "Make A Pilgrimage. Go to ancient places. Go wherever there are contemporary seekers. Go in whatever way it works out. Just go!"

Her travels took her to places in France where pilgrims throng -- Lourdes, Lixieux and Taize -- and also to places where she traveled alone or alongside a smattering of other seekers. In the little village of Saint Michael d'Aiguilhe, she stopped outside a chapel where the stone was "warm ochre" and "marked with green and white lichen." Inside the chapel, everything curved. "Rich fragments of glowing light move[d] round the stones--. Candles were lit and intense prayers were going on." In this place, Lash felt "the breath of the space itself. You want simply to be still and in some measure absorb it." Outside the chapel, she spoke with a research scientist, a fellow pilgrim, who told her: "To visit places that have inspired man from the earliest times is to receive a little of the energy that has accumulated there -- and possible to add to it."

What intrigued me most in my visit in 1997 and again this time was the way that in this pre-literate time, King Lalibela's churches and all of the art inside them, were texts be read. The architecture, itself, repeats the story in varicolored ways. Every window, every pillar, every swirl and angle of all the different crosses--everything inside and outside stands as a symbol to tell, and tell again, some piece of the story.

This tunnel, for instance, where we groped our way hesitantly in disorienting darkness, was designed to remind pilgrims (and other worshipers) of hell, that place where all light, all sensory experience of anything, is utterly gone.

Thanks to modern-day pilgrims, economic development appeared to be blooming in Lalibela: a Swedish water project, school improvements (making the local schoolboys hungry for more education, more opportunities, more, more), a dozen new souvenir shops, and an EAL terminal to replace the acacia tree Jan and I sat under last time I visited. Flying back to Addis Ababa, I gazed down at land that, millions of years ago, had been crunched, scrunched and folded into crumpled mountains and gouged into chasms. Now those mountains and chasms were soft purple with blotches of gray-blue shadows. Part of me longed to be back in that circular dining space of the Jerusalem Guest House, where the menu might have been limitedótomato soup, lentil soup, tsome (fasting) wat, egg sandwich, omelet with hot pepper, oatmeal, unsalted bread, honey, jamóbut somehow the food tasted unusually sweet. I felt sad to be leaving. If I never left Lalibela, however, I was never going to reach Maji.