You
are about to land in a planet within a planet: Dankalia, the
land of the Afar People. From the shores of the Red Sea inland
to the feet of the Eritrean and Ethiopian highlands, this
is the heart of the Rift Valley. Geologically one of the most
active spots on the planet, it is a vast expanse of deserts,
lava and below-sea-level salt plains and lakes, active and
extinct volcanoes along a south/north chain. The hottest region
on the Earth with an extremely salty lake (Lake Afrerΰ, also
named Lake Giulietti after the Italian explorer killed by
the Afars in 1881) at 120 meters under the sea level kept
alive by many thermal springs feeding it. The coastal part
entirely in Eritrea and the inner, bigger part in Ethiopia
(Tigray) it is the land of the Australopithecus afarensis
(Lucy from Hadar, Ethiopia) our tree million years old ancestor
and Buia's Homo (from Alat, Eritrea, one million
years old) the last one having all the characteristics of
Homo Sapiens.
The pictures span a period between 1965 and 1974 - indeed
morphologically little if anything should have changed in
Dankalia to this day, they are as actual now as they were
yesterday. Unpublished, you never saw them before - perhaps
you never imagined that such a place could exist on our planet.
They are old prints hence quality suffers.
DANKALIA articles of related interest.
La Lingua degli Afar
Vocabolario Italiano - Dankalo e Dankalo
- Italiano.
