[37] The Gu or spring rains; due about the middle of April.
[38] Also called Dih Wiyileh.
[39] Amhára, i.e. Abyssinians.
[40] It now transpires that the Italian traveller Sacconi had visited this neighbourhood, and that it was here he was killed in 1883.
[41] The Rer Amáden have inflicted loss on the Abyssinians from time to time. I saw the remains of the bivouac of an Abyssinian army which was said to have been defeated by them two or three years before my visit. The Malingúr, living in the Fáfan Valley, which is the Abyssinian eastward path of invasion, have had to give in, but not so the Amáden.
[42] By the Protocol of ’94 the Amáden tribe falls within the Italian sphere of influence.
[43] The mullahs get on with Europeans because, being the only people in Somáliland who can read and write, they have great respect for people who show nimbleness with a pencil and note-book, and who can write even on horseback; they admire pictures and photographs.
I was amused by their insisting that nearly every book I had was a “Frinji Bible”; and not till I had shown them the illustrations in one of the supposed Bibles, which was Gordon-Cumming’s Five Years’ Adventures in South Africa, did they realise that there are books on every subject. They all beg for hashi (paper), Korans, and tusbas, and I gave a score of mullahs two or three quires of white foolscap to divide between them.
[44] I.e. “the black rock,” called after a feature in the river-bed near the wells.
[45] She had actually come back half a mile on her tracks to follow us, with what motive I know not, unless it was to see us safe off the ground. A lion will often, on seeing men in the jungle, follow them in order to mark them down and find out the site of their karia, with a view to future seizures of cattle or human beings.