Thursday, May 31. Start at 3:45 A.M., halt at 8:45 A.M., start again at 3:30 P.M., halt at 7:30 P.M. Make 36 kilometers. Highest temperature 37°, lowest 5°. Fine, clear, and calm. Southeast wind in the afternoon, which changed to northeast and dropped toward evening. Calm evening and night, with full moon and few white clouds.
An uneventful day.
Shortly after an early start on Friday, June 1, the guide got sleepy and “lost his head.” We were soon traveling due west instead of southeast. I did not interfere until we stopped for morning prayers at five, but then I asked him quietly if he had intended to march to the westward. He was surprised but admitted frankly his error. Fortunately, we had not been going wrong for long.
At 6:30 we passed a hill called Tamaira, on which stood a dry tree marking the boundary between Wadai and the Sudan. From the boundary-post we dropped into Wadai Hawar, a large valley full of big trees, which is said to extend westward to Wadai and eastward toward the Sudan. In Wadai, it is called Wadi Hawash.
The soil in the wadi is very fertile, and the men from Wadai and Darfur come to it in the autumn for grazing. We camped here for the midday halt and found tracks of giraffe. In the afternoon we walked through high dry grass as though in a great field of ripe corn.
THE CHIEF OF THE ZAGHAWA TRIBE OF DARFUR
Receiving the explorer and his party on entering the frontiers
The men of the caravan were getting worn out, all the more as clothing was tattered, shoes at the last gasp; and to add to our inflictions we had much trouble with haskanit, a small, very hard, hooked thorn which grows on a low bush and attaches itself to whosoever brushes against it, when it is extremely difficult to extract.
I heard Bukara describing to Hamid a giraffe and an elephant. The giraffe, he said, has the head of a camel, the hoofs of a cow, and the hind quarters of a horse. His word picture of the elephant was grotesque and much exaggerated, to impress the man from the north.