The eleven churches at Lalibela were not built up from the ground but cut down into it. In the Ethiopian highlands, masons of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries started at the surface of the red rock and went down. Each church was freed from a single block, its windows, columns and ceiling cut as the work descended. The only part of any of them that meets open ground is the roof. Bete Medhane Alem, the largest, stands in a pit deep enough to dwarf you at its edge, ringed by thirty-four pillars. Inside, a forest of rock columns carries a ceiling that was carved rather than assembled. The windows are cut as crosses and circles, and the light moves across bare floors and hanging lamps as the sun goes round.
Chest-deep trenches and tunnels link the churches, so a pilgrim goes from one sanctuary to the next without ever climbing back to open ground. Some passages run pitch dark for several metres, and the stone steps under you are worn round by eight hundred years of feet. The one that stands apart is Bete Giyorgis. From the rim of its pit the roof reads as a single clean cross cut into the plateau, and the trench down to the door has ten metres of rock over your head. None of it is a ruin. Priests in white and gold chant in Ge'ez, the old liturgical language, deacons shake sistrums and drums, and pilgrims lean on prayer sticks for hours; you watch from the edge of the courtyard. At Genna, the Ethiopian Christmas in January, tens of thousands walk in from the countryside and fill the trenches. Tradition says the king raised all eleven in twenty-four years, too few for human hands, so angels are said to have carved each night. The only things at Lalibela ever built upward are four metal shelters put over the churches in 2008 to keep the rain off. They were meant to last ten years, and the priests would like them gone.