Even before the corpse materialised, my resolve to reach Ethiopia's most insular monastery was cracking. I'd queued patiently behind pilgrims and priests at the base of the 20m-high cliff that makes visiting Debre Damo so formidable. Polished smooth by fourteen centuries of scrambling monks, the vertiginous rock face looked more daunting the closer I got. Finally, when my hands grasped the frayed leather rope that is the monks' lifeline to the outside world, the corpse appeared from nowhere wrapped in a silken shroud, and another agonising wait ensued as it was slowly hauled up the cliff for burial. This seemed a bad omen.

Like many of Tigray's rock-cut churches, Debre Damo is extraordinary. Some 55 miles east of Ethiopia's holiest city, Axum, the monastery blends unnoticed into an ancient expanse of eroded mountains. It's a landscape of slow evolution; golden fields of barley and teff-wheat were being painstakingly harvested by hand-scythes.

Dirar, an entrepreneurial local who'd tagged along from our hotel in Axum, stopped our chartered minibus (which was in danger of having its chassis ripped away by the jarring track) and pointed to one particularly steep-sided, truncated peak. "That's Debre Damo," he said, as we focused on an ant-like stream of pilgrims ascending the cliff. "You still want to go there?"

Ironically, my partner Alison, a competent rock-climber, had to witness my inexpert ascent from below: like many of Ethiopia's holy sites, Debre Damo is a male-only preserve. The ascent seemed to take an eternity. Breathless with the altitude, my biceps burning, I was grateful to be eventually pulled onto a ledge by a group of waiting monks. From there, I was led up a path of rock-hewn steps by Gebreselassie, a newly-ordained monk wearing tangerine and lemon-yellow robes.

I felt euphoric on reaching the flat plateau, partly, I suspected, from having survived the climb. Though the ascent has shades of Conan-Doyle's Lost World, Debre Damo itself is actually quite demure. The monastery is a collection of stone-built houses and several small churches spread over a parched escarpment. About 120 monks lived there, said Gebreselassie, along with their protgS AND livestock. But little suggests this is the country's oldest place of worship: a community with roots in the 6th century, when Christianity was being embraced in Ethiopia.

"Yes, it's old," Gebreselassie assured me. "It dates back 1490 years." But why go to the trouble of building up here, I asked? "So we can be closer to God," was his esoteric response. There isn't total agreement over when the monastery was built, though it's widely regarded as the creation of the great 6th century Axumite king, Gebre-Maskal. More practically, he must have had security in mind, as Ethiopia's fledgling Christian state faced conflict from the more established religions of the region: Judaism and, latterly, Islam.

The monks cherish their own legends, however, and view St. Aregawe, one of Ethiopia's pantheon of patron saints, as their founder. As proof, in one church they showed me several ancient yet cartoon-like murals painted on wooden panels. One particularly psychedelic illustration pictured St. Aregawe ascending Debre Damo mountain on the back of a giant snake watched by a grinning cherub. I was also shown several old religious books written on withered parchments in the ancient language of Ge'ez.

Not wishing to outstay my welcome (I'd detected the monks preferred their own company), I pushed on to the opposite escarpment edge. Debre Damo is totally encircled by precipitous cliff-faces, and looking beyond the fringing cactus trees occupied by daredevil Vervet monkeys, I stared across a russet plain deep into Eritrea. A sense of immortal isolation is what makes the monastery so special.

My journey down was also delayed: an aggressive monk in turquoise robes had commandeered the rope and wouldn't let anybody descend until all the monastery's supplies had been hauled up. Candles, bundles of sequined umbrellas (for ritual use) and sacks of sorghum (the chief ingredient of tella, the monk's home brew) appeared from below.

Peering over the ledge, as another sack bumped its way up the cliff, I asked Gebreselassie, who was just 27, how long he would remain here? "I hope to stay here all my life," came his assured response. But was this simply devotion, or was he, like myself, petrified of abseiling back down?

Published in Travel Africa Edition Nineteen: Spring 2002.Text is subject to Worldwide Copyright (c)