We cover the sixty miles to Hargeisa in two clear days, and ride into the usual African up-country town. Here is the D.C.'s Court, the police lines, the prison and the D.C.'s house. Beyond them the native town; a town of sticks, straw and native mats, with a few sun-dried brick houses, and one of stone. Between all this is a natural park; a park on the banks of a waterless river-bed; a park filled with the thorn trees, the aloes in flower, and the plant with the thousands of fingers. Strangely enough, here is a European lady as well, who sits beneath a huge mimosa tree and puts them all into a picture. She says they are beautiful.
It is one hundred and twenty miles as the crow flies to Zeila, and nearly two hundred by the road we have come. There is a mail waiting; it has arrived by Berbera, and links us up with the outer world, which after all, and in these days, is not so far away. Here, for the first time in four months, I speak to an Englishman, and, when it is time to pack up for the return journey to Zeila, I leave Hargeisa with regret.
[CHAPTER XX]
THE BREAKING OF THE MAD MULLAH
The Mullah's deeds—Supply and transport—Arrival of No. 2 Unit, R.A.F., at Berbera—Details and arrangements—Mullah miracles—Aeroplane scouting—Friendlies—R.A.F. reports—Post-bag bombing—To Medishe—The Mullah's birds—A Mullah victim—Tali and the last of the Mullah.
In 1919 British Somaliland was roughly divided—politically—into two separate territories, the East and the West. The former dominated by one saturnine personality, the Mad Mullah, who rarely (of late years never) intruded into the more peaceful, if more subtle, situation of the West.
Not one day since I landed in Somaliland has passed without my running up against one or more of the victims of the Mullah, now reported to be getting old, and so stout as to be almost inactive. On trek I could not sit down to breakfast without hearing the wail of some poor woman or child outside the encampment. "Sahib! Sahib! for the love of God! A bite of food for a poor meskin!" Daily in the Court Room wrecks of women and children came before me for relief. Almost invariably I found, on the strictest inquiries being made into their cases, that their villages had been destroyed, their property looted, their men-folk killed, by the murdering gang of thieves who carried out incessantly the merciless policy of this awful man. In desperation they had roamed across country, ever making away from the territory where the terror reigned. How the Mullah had put to the sword the men, women, and children of one whole section of a tribe because, whilst being shown over a fort in the course of construction by their headman, a wooden beam had fallen and broken his arm, was related to me a few days before she died by a poor woman, one of the few survivors.
I had read much of the man before I came to Somaliland, and rather admired what I imagined to be his sporting character. But since I have learned enough about him at first hand, and have been so shocked at the misery, caused by this fiend, that is ever being brought to my notice, the very mention of his name causes my blood to boil.