Getting into the thick of the tribe later on, we camped among their karias, beside a tall red ant-hill; and while camp was being pitched, wishing to draw off the crowds of people from worrying my men at their work, I withdrew to a distance of a couple of hundred yards and, under the shade of an Adad thorn-tree, exhibited coloured prints from the Graphic Christmas numbers, and a book representing the different varieties of British soldier. The men, women, and children pressed round me in a dense mass, remarking, “You are not like the Amhára;[39] we are not afraid of you; you don’t mean any harm.” They were particularly delighted with some old Zoological Society’s Proceedings which contained coloured illustrations of a Waller’s gazelle and of a Somáli wild ass; and they said, “Now we have seen that the English can do everything!”
I had a serious difficulty here. One of the Bulhár men, having quarrelled with Adan Yusuf, my caravan leader, decided to leave me; and as is the custom, seven more coast men, drawn from the same tribe, although bearing no malice, joined their fellow-tribesman as a matter of principle. I called for volunteers from the Sheikh Ash tribe; and about twenty at once offering themselves, my own followers, seeing I was independent, returned to obedience. I dismissed the two ringleaders with ten days’ rations and their back pay, and wished them a safe return to Berbera. It is a good thing when making up a caravan not to draw too many men from one tribe.
I gave several Korans and prayer-chaplets to the mullahs here, and they were received with real pleasure. The mullahs are the traveller’s best friends in Ogádén; they are intelligent, have great social influence, and are particularly useful in giving introductions, passing a traveller on from tribe to tribe. The more intelligent among them can write in Arabic. From these mullahs I heard that at Durhi, in the Malingúr tribe, on one of the roads to Imé on the Webbe, I was certain to come upon Grevy’s zebra, which had not yet, I believe, been shot by Europeans; so I determined to go there.
On the 13th I broke up my camp at Yoghon among the Sheikh Ash karias, and marched along the bed of a torrent, deep cut in the red earth, to a pool called Garba-aleh.
Before striking camp at earliest dawn, just as Suleiman the cook, whom I always told the sentry to awaken before the bulk of my followers, was beginning to prepare my coffee, a leopard jumped into the middle of the camp to seize my best milch goat, which was reclining under the lee of a pile of camel-mats; but Makunan’s mule, by braying at the brute, aroused the whole camp. The Somális rushed unarmed at the leopard, while I dived quietly under my bed and drew out my coat, which had cartridges in the pockets, and a rifle; but of course by the time all this was ready the leopard had gone!
Approaching the water at Garba-aleh I saw three hyænas making off through the thorn forest; and I sent a Martini-Henry picket through one of them, by which I hoped to secure his eventual death, and so save some Malingúr sheep.
I met an old man called Mader Ádan, the first Malingúr I had seen, and he greeted me cheerily, and told me to expect lions and rhinoceroses in plenty at Eil-ki-Gabro, a march or two ahead. He said his own karia had been driven from the district by the former. This was joyful news.
The Garba-aleh pool, about twenty yards in diameter, in the bed of a deeply-cut sand-river, looked promising for lying in ambush, so I constructed a shelter on the principle of that which had been so successful at Kuredelli, the back of the bower being an overhanging wall of earth fifteen feet high. As it had been a hot day even for the Kalíl season, and likely to bring game early to water, I occupied my ambush at about five o’clock, and we sat quiet.
