Illuminated by flickers of candlelight, an elderly pilgrim squats in the mud, reciting passages from a well-thumbed, leather-bound copy of the Old Testament.

Around him, figures swaddled in ghostly-white linens are stacked tightly together, covering every crack, crevice and precipice of Lalibela’s ancient rock-hewn churches. Having walked for days, the exhausted bodies lay stiller than corpses in a mortuary; but when sunlight spears the horizon in six hours’ time, heralding Ethiopia’s Christian Orthodox Christmas Day, this place will be very much alive.