A Somali shepherd wished to tack on to us here, deserting his charge, and as he seemed so very keen about it, and Clarence said he could do with another man, we assented. It is the dream with some of these jungle people to taste the sweets of civilisation, make money, and then return to his tribe, acquiring many camels and wealth of goats and sheep, and it is very strange that in no time he becomes a jungly person again, casting off the trammels of civilisation with ease after having lived perhaps for two or three years in the service of a white man. A very good thing it is so too. For the savage who lives in the wild is far more to be admired, and is altogether a more estimable creature than the savage who drives you about Aden, or hauls your boxes about at Berbera. Like many other wanderers, he learns the white man’s follies and faults and none of his better attributes.
And so it comes about, once in a while, you enter a karia, with every evidence of native domesticity about it, and are greeted by the village head-man without the usual “Nabad,” or “Salaam aleikum,” and in great amaze, you hear an English salutation.
We camped for the night at a place of deep stone wells. If game seemed scarce, water was plentiful. Next day we came on a Somali encampment where lions were provided against and so must occasionally come to call. All manner of scare-lions were set about the zareba, torn herios arranged flag-like on broken spears, and an ingenious scheme for making a scratching noise in a wind amused us very much. It was a rough piece of iron, strung on a bit of leather rope, and its duty was to scrape against a flint set in a contrivance of wood. Poor protections against so fierce a foe as a lion! This tribe seemed none too friendly, and we put a couple of miles between us ere we camped.
We sighted a dibatag buck, shy as a hawk. This was a part of the country destitute of game apparently. Only the useful dik-dik abode with us to fill the pot.
To Joh next day. There was nothing to tell us it was Joh, any more than Bob or Tom. The only reason it had for being specified as a place at all was that it had a very superior well with running water. Even that did not please half the caravan, for we saw them, in preference, choose a dirty mud-hole and drink from it. We did a big day’s excursion into the jungle, trying to come on spoor of any animal where spoor was not. As a resort for game this part of Somaliland seems unpopular. I cannot think why. Were I a lion, far rather would I haunt the shores of the lake at Sinna-dogho than grill on the sands of the Ogaden.
CHAPTER XV—ANOTHER GAP IN OUR RANKS
Give thy thoughts no tongue
Hamlet