The next day, they ran directly back to the same grove and repeated the performance. The goats refused to come home with him until hours later, but they did not die. It must be the trees that had maddened his goats. What else could it be?Īs he watched, one goat after another chewed off the glossy green leaves and red berries of a tree he had never seen before. In winded wonder, the boy stood gaping at them. Under the thick rain forest canopy, which allowed the sun to sift through in sudden bright splotches, the goats were runningĪbout, butting one another, dancing on their hind legs, and bleating excitedly. Running around the corner of a narrow trail, Kaldi suddenly came upon the goats.

He finally heard bleating in the distance. Puzzled, the boy climbed higher, listening for them. One afternoon, however, the goats did not come. In the late afternoon, when he blew a special, piercing note, his goats scampered from their browsing The job required little of him, so he was free to make up songs and to play his pipe. A goatherd named Kaldi, a poet by nature, loved following the wandering paths made by his goats as theyĬombed the mountainsides for food. Of the various Ethiopian and Arab legends, the most appealing involves dancing goats. We do not know exactly when or by whom coffee was discovered. Not yet discovered-was the beverage we now call coffee. 'Encompassed on all sides by the enemies of their religion,' the historian Gibbon noted, 'the Ethiopians slept near a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten.' Likewise forgotten-or (a monarchy that continued, with a hiatus between 5, untilĪlways relatively poor, the Abyssinians were nonetheless a proud, independent people, most of them adopting a cloistered, orthodox form of Christianity when no other African indigenous people held that faith. Mountains to join King Solomon in Jerusalem, and, according to legend, she founded the Axum dynasty that established its rule in the first century A.D. The Queen of Sheba later descended from the Ethiopian Across the nearby Red Sea, further to the north, Moses led his people to freedom. The earthquake-prone Great Rift Valley, has a biblical quality-and little wonder. Situated at the conjunction of the African and Arab worlds known as the Horn of Africa, the mountainous country, split down the middle by Possibly the cradle of mankind, the ancient land of Abyssinia, now called Ethiopia, is the birthplace of coffee. Lewis Lewin, Phantastica: Narcotic and Stimulating Drugs (1931)

and by this abuse are inspired to profound wisdom on It may also be observed in coffee house politicians whoĭrink cup after cup. Manifest by a remarkable loquaciousness sometimes accompanied by acceleratedĪssociation of ideas. an excessive state of brain-excitation which becomes The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our WorldĬoffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.

Uncommon grounds by mark pendergrast