While camped at Kheidub-Ayéyu we observed a long strip of jungle-fire creeping along the ridge of thorn forest in our front. Clouds of smoke were floating far ahead of the fire, and it must have been driven by a strong south-west gale, judging by the pace. The Habr Gerhajis and two sub-tribes of the Habr Awal had at different times taken advantage of this solitary occupation by trying to loot the karias, but were always driven off. Although living in only two, there were a large number of fighting men in proportion to the women and children in this clan; and they were some of the best mounted of the Rer Ali, always a warlike tribe. The chief of the clan was called Mahomed Liba.
We marched through patches of burnt jungle, with the trees still smouldering, and pits left in the ground full of white ashes, where the roots had been burnt out.
Near Yoaleh we came to stony ground, the first since leaving Aror. On 25th July we left the Haud and descended into the valley of the Tug Milmil, a sandy nala wooded with gób[28] trees about eighty feet high, fringing the river-bed and growing on islands in the centre of the expanse of sand, some seventy yards wide at this point. We found ponies, sheep, and camels of the Rer Harún and Rer Ali, Ogádén, watering at Milmil wells. One continuous stream of camels marched up and down the river-bed, and we must have seen some twenty thousand in all.
There had been a quarrel just before our arrival between the Rer Harún here and Mahomed Liba’s clan which we had met at Kheidub-Ayéyu, in which two men had been killed and two hundred camels had changed owners.
On the day of our arrival at Milmil, at the end of the Haud crossing of one hundred and five miles, I had still seven full háns in my portion of the caravan, nine having been expended, say forty gallons of water for fifteen men for five days. About fifteen gallons of this had been spilt from various causes, so that fifteen men, one Arab fast camel, and two goats drank only twenty-seven gallons, or a little over five gallons a day, including cooking water. I attribute this moderation partly to the coolness of the weather in the elevated Haud. We had crossed in five days, thus doing twenty-one miles a day; this fact will indicate the good state of the caravan track over the red stoneless soil. Indeed, as I have stated before, a bicycle might have been ridden at speed over nine-tenths of the distance.
The Haud ends at Milmil in a succession of bluffs a hundred feet high, and as one descends between them to the Milmil nala, one emerges on to the general level of Ogádén, and farther on at the wells the country opens up, disclosing several hills; two of these, called Firk-Firk, resemble the remarkable twin hills at Hargeisa which are called “Náso Hablod,” or the “Maiden’s Breasts.”
Soon after we had pitched camp at the part of Milmil which is called Gagáb an important travelling sheikh arrived. The Somáli so-called sheikh is a religious mullah who has gained a great and wide-spread reputation for piety, and being intelligent, even among mullahs, can often read and write Arabic, although he is generally as black or brown in skin as any other Somáli.
The horsemen of the Rer Ali came down in scores, attired in all their finery of red-tasselled saddlery and red and blue khaili tobes, to go through the usual dibáltig before the great man, whose name is Au Mahomed Sufi. They formed a large crowd on the sand of the river-bed below our tent, which was pitched under some large trees overhanging the Milmil nala. The sheikh’s own bivouac was on the same bank of the river, about five hundred yards to the north of us. I joined the crowd of onlookers with my brother, and Au Mahomed Sufi, the recipient of the honours of the day, came forward and shook hands with us, and gave us a place by his side.
This man was travelling through Ogádén, and was, I afterwards learnt, part of an organised plot for rousing the Somáli tribes to combine against the Abyssinians. After the dibáltig he lifted his spear and addressed the assembled people, beginning by himself singing what appeared to be a composition of his own.
In the evening, taking my hunters, I followed the tracks of a lion which had stolen a sheep from the Rer Ali flocks in broad daylight. Getting into broken country at the base of one of the bluffs, we put up two lions. We could not see them, although we heard them roar significantly, as though they had seen us. We found their lair, and part of the carcase of the sheep, close by, and within a yard of it was a dead vulture, which the lions had just killed, no doubt, by springing out of the ambush from which they had kept watch over the meat. Several vultures were perched on the branches of the trees around, looking wistfully down, but not daring to come to the feast. The lions eventually got on to stony ground and we lost them.