The Roof of Africa and the Bleeding-Heart Monkeys

In the north of Ethiopia there are mountains so high and so strange that people call them the Roof of Africa.

They are not smooth mountains. They are jagged — enormous towers and pinnacles of rock standing in rows, with sheer cliffs dropping away for a thousand metres into cloud. The Simien Mountains, they are called.

Up on the grassy tops, where the air is thin and cold, live monkeys that exist nowhere else in the whole world.

They are called geladas. They have thick golden-brown fur like a cape, and long clever fingers, and each one has a bright red patch of skin on its chest, shaped rather like a heart. People call them the bleeding-heart monkeys.

Geladas do something no other monkey does: they sit down in the grass and eat it, plucking blades with their fingers all day long, chatting to each other constantly in mutters and coos and little squeaks. Scientists say their chatter sounds remarkably like people talking.

There are walia ibex up there too, with great curved horns, and red foxes, and lammergeier eagles that drop bones onto rocks to crack them open.

And every evening, as the sun goes down and the cold comes in, the whole gelada troop walks to the edge of the cliff and climbs down over the side — because they sleep on the rock face, where nothing can reach them.

Goodnight, monkeys on the cliff. Hold on tight.