The youth who brought up the horses could not induce them to come near to the dead gazelle; so Jáma, mounting his beautiful young mare, which he said was “blood-shy” and required teaching, by voice and heel coaxed her up to the meat till she brought her dilated nostrils close to it. He made her jump over the buck several times before he was satisfied. The Amáden, who had perhaps never seen game shot before, examined the hole in the buck with great interest, Jáma remarking that the Abyssinians couldn’t do that near so well, and that the English were good people. He said that I was to be his Englishman, and while in the country shoot him lots of zebra, as all the Amáden liked the meat very much.
During our evening march we were overtaken by a violent storm, the burst of the monsoon, which occurs very locally and at different dates in different places. We could not advance or retire, the camels having to stand loaded for over an hour up to their fetlocks in running water, with an impassable torrent a little distance off on either side, where all had been lately dry land; my cook Suleiman was caught by one of these streams while following the caravan; and he was turned over and over, and would have been drowned had we not gone to his assistance. After the storm had passed we had hard work to reach the top of the highest ground in the neighbourhood, a mile from where we had been caught, the camels slipping at every step on the sloping surfaces of soft red clay. It was the worst storm I have ever experienced, accompanied by constant thunder and vivid lightning. Lions roared in some nasty bush round our camp at night; luckily, however, they did not attack our horses; for the fuel on the spot being soaked, and it being too dark to send out to search for any, we could only make a small fire with a scanty supply which my cook Suleiman, always thoughtful, had wrapped up in a waterproof sheet and put on a camel just as the storm came on, for the preparation of my evening meal.
Next day, the 3rd May, we made a long march and reached Gullá. A lion roared at night, but he was on the farther side of a precipitous watercourse which he could not pass without going a great distance round; so he did not disturb my camp otherwise than by the grand music of his voice, which on the clear nights after heavy rain can be heard for miles, a performance which it was pleasant to lie awake and listen to.
On 4th May, crossing a beautiful stream called Samani at Bal Balaad, we marched to the Sheikh’s karia. Jáma Deria, who had been with us so far, now left us. As I rode up to Abdul Káder’s karia I was met by a dignified old man, who turned out to be the Sheikh himself, and I respectfully dismounted from the camel and shook hands; and the Sheikh, by way of emphasising the welcome, fumbled at the brim of my hat with outstretched hands to bless me, as is the custom, by touching my forehead and mumbling a few words of the Koran over me. Asking his permission through the interpreter, I ordered the men to pitch camp at once among the karias of the Amáden. I was received with enthusiasm by the Sheikh’s people, who are his own clan of the Amáden; his karias were also full of mullahs from every tribe. He gave me some sheep, and a camel worth twenty-five dollars, to be killed for my men, and a fat calf for myself; and lines of women came carrying large háns decked with white beads and full of camel’s milk; and soon a long row of these vessels was set up at my tent door. In return I gave white shirting and red shawls, which are afterwards picked to pieces to make tassels for the saddlery. To the Sheikh’s principal wife I gave a red and blue tartan-patterned tobe worth four dollars, and a looking-glass; and to the other women I gave beads. As the Sheikh, supported by a thick stick and two stalwart sons, hobbled to my tent to pay me a formal call, I blew the alarm whistle and fell in all the men two deep, and loading with blank we fired two volleys in the air. Then, folding some red blankets and laying them over store boxes, I made the Sheikh and his sons and elders sit down. Abdul Káder, while sipping his coffee, his eyes wandering continually over the strange objects in my tent, and his fingers picking absently at my blankets, promised to do all he could for me, remarking significantly that he heard English people did not burn karias and murder women!
The hundreds of assembled tribesmen listened in silence to the sentences murmured in a high cracked voice by the old man, who had lost all his front teeth. Some of his small children, or perhaps grandchildren, naked and dusty, clung round the poles of my tent, sucking their thumbs, and gazing calmly at the first white man they had ever set eyes on! A dozen horsemen of the Rer Amáden then went through the dibáltig, covering us with dust, and the minstrel, sitting in the saddle facing my tent, gave me, appropriately put into verse, complaints against the neighbours of the Amáden, which, as a representative of the English, I was expected to settle, this place being about three hundred and thirty miles inland.[42]
While in camp here I set up a large astronomical telescope and turned it upon Jáma Deria’s karia, a few miles away on the side of a hill. The people came in crowds to look through this at all hours of the day, with a running fire of comments, such as, “By Allah! that is Jáma’s white cow. How big! like an elephant,” and so forth. The mullahs flocked round my tent begging for white paper to write sentences from the Koran, which are subsequently enclosed in a leather bag and sold, to be worn round the neck as a charm to stave off ill-luck. I gave the mullahs several tusbas or scented prayer-chaplets made of black wooden beads and worn as necklaces. There is a superstition that a Somáli who wears a tusba and does not count the beads in prayer at the regular times will be choked by the tusba in revenge.[43]
Late at night, in the pitch darkness before the moon had risen, a small child, a little girl of seven, came over from one of the karias to my camp, begging for food, as she was starving. She had braved the terrible danger of hyænas, which swarm between the karias at night, to cross to my camp; so giving her some oryx meat and cooked rice, I sent her back under escort to her own habitations. I suspect this poor child had no relations. “I cannot help the child; it is not of my clan,” is too often the answer given by great healthy Somális on being accused of heartlessness. This is not due to natural ferocity of character, but to thoughtlessness, what is everybody’s business being nobody’s business; and the little sufferers starve and die.
Abdul Káder and Jáma Deria were both particularly glad to help me on to Imé, because for some months past the Amáden had been at war with the Adone or negroes at Imé; and Jáma Deria thought this would be a good opportunity of reopening negotiations. The country between the Sheikh’s karia and Imé was uninhabited for seventy-five miles, and the people told us that while passing over this tract we would be exposed to the risk of meeting Arussi Gálla wandering bands. It appeared that Jáma Deria and Abdul Káder, though jealous of one another, had settled their differences for the time being in order to assist me, and we arranged that Jáma and his son, and Abdul Káder’s son and another Amáden, should guide me to Imé on the 5th of May.
There being very little of my leave remaining, I decided that there would not be time to take the slowly-travelling caravan so far, and that it would be better to leave it, under command of a good camelman, encamped at Abdul Káder’s karias at Dambaswerer, while with my interpreter, two hunters, and four of the Amáden, I should ride to Imé and back. The distance would be about one hundred and fifty miles, according to the natives, and with the help of my mule and two Arab camels and five Amáden ponies, without any camp equipage, we hoped to accomplish a short stay at Imé and to be back again at Dambaswerer within six days. A glance at the map will show the confidence we felt in the friendship of the natives of Ogádén, to be able to cut ourselves adrift from the caravan in unexplored country so far in the interior. Imé is four hundred miles from the coast, and Dambaswerer is seventy-five miles short of Imé. In 1884, at the time of Mr. F. L. James’s journey to the Shabéleh district to the south-east, such a ride would have been very hazardous; but since then things have been changing for the better every day.
Our cavalcade thus consisted of seven mounted Somális and myself, four of us having rifles, the other four only shields and spears. In the saddle-bags on the two Arab camels Abokr and I carried a few blankets and necessaries, and a bag of coffee, and for meat we depended on the game we expected to fall in with. We rode during the whole of 5th May, with a short interval to rest and cast loose the camels at noon; and at 5 P.M. we halted by the side of a pool of rain-water, hobbled the animals, lit a fire, and threw ourselves down in a circle round it to sleep, one man keeping watch over the animals. At 3 A.M. we were again on the move, and began to descend a long slope cut up by deep ravines, which falls to the Webbe Shabéleh river. We lost ourselves among impassable, precipitous watercourses several times; the guides, however, always managed, after much difficulty, to regain the path, which had been grown over with grass, and, because of the Amáden raids, had been unused for a year. We reached the Webbe Shabéleh at Imé at 1.30 P.M., having done the seventy-five miles in thirty-two hours at a moderate pace without a change of animals.