We sent a camel for the lioness, and laying the two carcases side by side, we pitched camp close by. Some starving people, who had wandered from Harar, were glad to make a meal off the carrion. The third lion escaped, as the Jibril Abokr horsemen, feeling that while we were in this country they were responsible for our safety, and shocked at the state I was in, refused to take my brother after him. On the day after the accident we were delayed in the morning by the bandaging and doctoring which I had to go through. The only thing we had with us was cocoa-nut oil, which we had brought for the lamps of the theodolite, and I don’t think its application did the wounds much good. In the plain round the tents, a quarter of a mile away, were brown and gray masses entirely composed of hartebeests and oryx, and nearer were a few solitary bulls, which loomed up on the swelling ground and disappeared in the hollows, like ships on the horizon, and their shoulders being much higher than the quarters, and the legs hidden in the grass, they appeared to be sitting up. We counted seventeen ostriches as they suddenly appeared out of the haze, and passed in single file, at a great pace, half a mile off.
In the evening, the sky being overcast and the air cooler, we marched five miles towards Bottor wells, on the direct road to Gebili. Next day we got off the open ban into the thorn jungle, and descended into a grassy hollow at the head of the Bottor Valley. Here there were numbers of high birch-trees covered with kites’ nests—a noticeable feature of this valley and easily seen from a distance, the upper branches being bare and the nests looking like globe signals.
The Ujawáji people, on hearing of my accident, sent several messengers to inquire how I was getting on, and horsemen came from most of the Jibril Abokr clans which were pasturing in the neighbourhood, to dibáltig to us before our start for the coast. We held a council of the elders, when the complaints against Abyssinia were taken down by us for transmission to Government.
All these elders professed great personal friendship for ourselves. They said they had been asked for tribute by the Abyssinian leader Banagúsé and had refused it, and were now expecting that a force would be sent against them. The tribe had therefore retreated across the Marar Plain from their pastures, near the curious conical Subbul hills, which could be seen twenty miles away rising out of the plain; and they had been obliged to graze their animals on the poorer pasture at Ujawáji. The elders said that the Abyssinians had pushed out and built a fort at Jig-Jiga, about forty miles south of us, within the farther edge of the Marar Prairie.
On 21st June we passed through Gebili, and reached a spot in thick jungle with aloe undergrowth, called Armadader. On pitching camp here in the evening we found fresh elephant tracks, and E⸺ followed them, returning after dark, having killed a bull with one shot from my four-bore.
We continued our survey through the very mountainous Jibril Abokr country towards the coast, running the gauntlet of the Rer Haréd clan, which was at that time very turbulent and defiant towards the British. We had several night alarms, being surrounded by Rer Haréd spies during our march, but we were not attacked.
By the end of June my wounds were beginning to become very troublesome, my right arm swelling to the size of a small sand-bag, from the shoulder to the wrist, and giving me great pain. Travelling became almost unendurable, the sterile, broken hills being fearfully hot, the temperature rising to over 110° in the shade at certain places. We had now descended to the low coast country, where the south-west wind of the Haga season was at its height, blowing day and night with great fury. It was impossible to put up a tent at night, and the sand got into eyes and ears, and stung our faces and necks in a most disagreeable manner as we marched along. The only way to obtain any sleep was to pile the baggage into a heap and lie under the lee of it.
Since leaving Ujawáji E⸺ had sole charge of the survey, as I was unable to take observations. When we were still ninety miles from Bulhár, fearing that any longer delay in getting medical help might bring on blood-poisoning, I left E⸺ in charge of the expedition, and mounting a camel, accompanied by a few of my servants, I made for Bulhár by forced marches, reaching the village on 1st July, twelve days after the accident. Here I was glad to find an hospital assistant, a native of India, who looked after the wounds and put me in a fair way to recovery, so that the necessity of going to Aden was obviated. I was never under the care of a qualified doctor, and was able to go on with the mapping at Berbera, and to start on an expedition to the Gadabursi country on 10th September, the wounds having just healed. This record of our Jibril Abokr trip shows what an advantage it is to have another European with one in the interior, for I feel sure the lioness would have finished me if my brother had not come promptly to the rescue, and but for his unremitting care after the accident I think I should never have reached the coast.
On our next expedition for the survey of the Gadabursi country, our route, skirting to the north of Hargeisa, passed through Gebili. We crossed the path taken by a powerful force of the Rer Haréd, Jibril Abokr, who were out raiding the Bahgoba sub-tribe, and I came upon some of the robbers in rather a curious manner.
Our caravan was marching from Gebili to a small hill called Bohol-Káwulu, while with four hunters I took a short cut across a deep valley, the direct distance being four and a half miles. We had passed the Gebili sand-river and were working our way up some low foothills, intersected by deep narrow ravines having perpendicular sides, and choked with thorn jungle, when I observed about fifty vultures circling over a tributary gully. Thinking a lion might have killed a koodoo, we made our way towards the place, and found ourselves at the foot of a platform of ground having nearly perpendicular sides, about forty feet high. It was above this little plateau that the vultures were circling, and climbing noiselessly up I peeped over, expecting to see some dead game.