The position of the Samawé ruins would favour a supposition that some power holding Harar, and having its northern boundary along the hills which wall in the southern side of the Harrawa valley, had built the fort to command the Gáwa Pass, which is one of the great routes from the Gadabursi country up on to the Marar Prairie. On the other hand, the fort may have been built by a power holding the coast, to close the pass on the Harar side.
Within half a mile of the Samawé tomb, on the sloping ground to the south, we found a curious stone enclosure, half buried in jungle. It was in the form of a rectangle measuring fifty-seven yards by fifty-eight yards, marked by long rows of dressed stones, each about nine inches by a foot, lying loosely on the ground. Some of these were blocks of limestone, and some apparently basalt.
Near Hug, in the mountainous Jibril Abokr country, my brother found many signs of old “Gálla” habitations and graves, and some well-made pathways down the hillsides. His followers told him that the hills having in the olden time been used as places of refuge by the Gállas, these roads were made to enable the cattle to be quickly driven up in case of alarm—the custom being for a part of the clan to camp on the top of a hill, in order to hold it, while the rest looked after the flocks and herds grazing below. He was told that the Gállas on the Abyssinian border, and the Abyssinians themselves, still do this.
All over the territory of the Ishák tribes, and in the Dolbahanta country, we found many old Gálla graves and cairns. At Kirrit there is a well in which a very ancient cross has been carved in the face of the rock. Crowning nearly every prominent hill in the countries named is a cairn or pile of stones, each stone being, roughly speaking, about the size of a man’s head. They are made up of many hundreds of such stones, and are generally about twelve or fifteen feet high and eight yards in diameter. Each one is circular, having in the centre a depression, suggesting that there may have been a tomb beneath, which has fallen in. I never cared to dig one up, not wishing to offend the susceptibilities of the natives. Some of them are of immense size, and are called Taalla Gálla or Gálla cairns.
There is a curious legend accounting for the origin of these cairns, which was told me by one of the Esa Musa tribe, while I was camped on the Golis Range, and by others of the Habr Awal at different times.
The drift of his story was that when the Gállas were in the country there once lived a great and powerful queen, called Arroweilo. She was very wicked, and was the origin of all evil in women at the present day. For some reason she conceived a ferocious prejudice against all male children, and a mother, to escape from her tyrannies, fled into a far country with her baby boy. As years went on this son grew, and when he had become a man he returned into Arroweilo’s country armed with a sword. He attacked Arroweilo in a lonely pass, and hacking her to pieces, tied her remains on a camel, and sent it off with a parting cut. The camel trotted in mad career all over the country, and wherever a piece of Arroweilo fell, the pious native, as he passed, said a prayer and threw a stone “to keep her down.” The chief use of these cairns now is to form cover for robbers when watching for caravans; and my brother and I found they made very recognisable points when seen through the telescope of a theodolite.
At Badwein (i.e. “Big Tank”) in the Dolbahanta country, one hundred and fifty miles, as the crow flies, from Berbera, we found a tank forty feet deep and a hundred and twenty yards in diameter, evidently excavated by human labour. Near it was a temple or large house with walls still standing at a height of ten feet, and the space enclosed was so large that a party of horsemen could ride into it.
The Dolbahanta told us that before the Gállas a race of men occupied the country who could read and write. Unfortunately none of their literary work was visible, as we examined many remains for inscriptions, but found none. One man, for a small fee, took us four miles out of our way to read an inscription, but the result was not promising, for we only found on a tombstone some scratches, perhaps twenty years old, evidently made by an idle sheep boy. All these discoveries of ancient remains go to prove that the elevated parts of Somáliland (not semi-desert Guban) have once been capable of permanent settlement under a more secure form of society than at present exists.
The deserted village of Dagahbúr in Ogádén is an example which shows how settlement and cultivation have been successfully begun, and abandoned because of the insecurity resulting from intertribal feuds. At Dagahbúr there were formerly many square miles of jowári cultivation, which have been abandoned within the last few years, and now there is only left an immense area of stubble and the ruins of the village. Dagahbúr used to be a thriving settlement of one thousand five hundred inhabitants, with trade caravans plying regularly across the Haud to Hargeisa and Berbera; and now not a hut is left.
The fact is, that although the natural conditions are suitable to the settlement of large tracts of country, and though many of the people are willing enough to engage in cultivation, yet the tribes and sub-tribes are so incessantly at feud, that the religious mullahs or widads, who enjoy a certain immunity from raids, alone dare settle down and cultivate; and now that many of the old wells and tanks have fallen into disuse and ruin, the water-supply could only be restored by a great expenditure of capital, for which there would perhaps be no adequate return for some generations.