Proceeding into the welcome shade we come to the roadside town of Alamaya, past a turn-off on the left to the modern Alamaya University of Agriculture, and, on the right, an everyday market, whose vendors display their wares on the ground or on stalls shaded by awnings. One of the many articles on sale is quti, or coffee leaves, which the local people boil to produce a hot, stimulating infusion. This delectable drink is much favoured by the coffee growers of Harar and its surroundings, who sell their well known coffee for cash - while they themselves drink this infusion of quti, often with milk, and with salt instead of sugar.

Leaving the town and market of Alamaya behind, the road leads on through trees of luxuriant growth, their boughs heavy with dense foliage and bright blossoms. Here and there are tropical palms and dark, lofty junipers.

Nearing the city of Harar we see rows of slender, tapering cypress trees, and, in the gardens of the modern houses, all sorts of acacias; some with brilliantly coloured flowers, magnolias with their wax-like blooms, beautiful pink hibiscus, roses of many colours, lilies, and climbing plants with pale-blue, fragile flowerlets. The traveller is by now in the wide, tree-lined streets of New Harar, only a few minutes drive from the famous Walled City, but ever in sight of the lofty mountains of Harar, with Mount Hakim to the right, and to the left, a much more distant range.

The principal road to the Old City leads past the main hotel - the Ras - the Military Academy, and various other buildings, including a small modern shopping centre selling all sorts of wares. The Academy is noted for its stained glass windows depicting Ethiopian warriors of former days. These windows were designed by Ethiopian artist Afewerk Tekle, better known for his internationally renowned stained glass in Addis Ababa's Africa Hall, the Headquarters of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa. Another of his works, an equestrian statue of Ras Makonnen, governor of Harar at the turn of the century, stands nearby, only a few minutes walk from the Ras Hotel.

Having rested from this by no means arduous journey, the traveller will be ready to enter the Old City, which for most of its long history was closed to foreigners from other lands.

The first important foreign visitor to enter the then forbidden city was Sir Richard Francis Burton, the famous British Orientalist and translator of The Arabian Nights. In January 1855 he spent ten brief but memorable days in Harar, which he described in his classic travelogue First Footsteps in East Africa. Later, well-known foreign travellers to the city included the noted French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who lived in Harar for no less than a decade in the 1880s and 1890s, and the British novelist Evelyn Waugh, who visited the settlement on two separate occasions in the 1930s.