a more fearful wild fowl than your lion living
Midsummer Night’s Dream
Very shortly after this we came to a Somali karia, or encampment. Its inhabitants were a nomadic crowd, and very friendly, rather too much so, and I had to order Clarence to set a guard over all our things.
Their own tents were poor, made of camel mats that had seen better days. The Somali women were immensely taken with our fair hair, and still more with our hair-pins. Contrary to the accepted custom of lady travellers, we did not suffer the discomfort of wearing our hair in a plait down our backs. We “did” our hair—mysterious rite—as usual. By the time I had finished my call at the camp my golden hair was hanging down my back. I had given every single hair-pin to the Somali ladies, who received them with as much delight as we should a diamond tiara.
Married women in Somaliland wear their hair encased in a bag arrangement. Girls plait theirs. The little ones’ heads are shaven, and so, apparently, were the scalps of the very old men. Clarence’s hair was about two inches long when we started, and he had a way of cleaning it reminiscent of a bird taking a sand bath. He rubbed his head with wet ashes, which speedily dried in the sun, and allowed him to shake the dust out—a nettoyage à sec process, and very effective. As a rule he wore no head-covering in the hottest sun.
Even the heads of the Somali babies are exposed in all their baldness. I suppose God tempers the rays to the shorn lambs.
The huts are made of a frame of bent poles, over which camel mats and odds and ends in the way of blankets are thrown. The nomadic tribes in their treks follow the grass, and occupy the same zarebas year after year. These they make of thick thorn brushwood, immensely high, two circles, one inside the other. Between the two fences the cattle are penned sometimes, but at night the middle encampment receives most of them, and fires are lighted. All the work of erecting the huts and tending the animals is done by women, and very often the oldest women and the smallest of the children have this office thrust upon them.
You can imagine that a Somali baria is rather of the nature of Barnum’s, minus the auctioneering and the shouting and bustle—countless people, ground all ploughed with the sturm und drang of the restless feet, and smell—-!
It is a wonderful thing that human beings can thrive in the condition of dirt and squalor in which these wandering Somalis live. They do, and some of them are very fine-looking men indeed.
The majority of the tribes are nomadic. There are some settled, some traders pure and simple, and some outcaste people, of whom the Midgans seem the most romantic—probably because he still uses bow and arrow, lives a hand to mouth existence, calls no karia home, and makes his bed in the open.