We saw some interesting domestic features in this mountain village. The children are given toy shields and spears, with which to practise in early life; and we found here several long flutes with four notes each, the music of which is weird and not unlike that of the bagpipes, and well suited to the wild surroundings.
Here, too, they play the ubiquitous African game, munkala or tarsla. Two rows of six holes are dug in the ground, and in these they play with counters of camel-dung a mysterious game which I never can learn. Here they call it mangola, and it is played all down the East Coast, from Mashonaland to Egypt, and also, I hear, on the West Coast; it seems a general form of recreation throughout the Dark Continent, and has been carried by Africans to all parts of the world to which they have wandered. Here they were playing with holes in the sand, but one often sees them dug in marble blocks, or on rocks, or in pavements.
There are two games—the game of the wise and that of the foolish; the former, like chess, requires a good deal of thought.
Flute-players in the Wadi Koukout, Soudan
Sheikh Hassan Bafori's mother resided in this village, so old that she looked like the last stage of 'She,' but no one said she was as old as old Ali Hamid's mother.
I think the weaving arrangements were quite the most rude I have ever seen.
The yarn had been wound over two sticks about 20 feet apart, and that stick near which the weaving was begun was tied by two ropes, each a foot long, to pegs in the ground. The other was simply strained against two pegs. At this end a couple of threads had been run to keep the warp in place. There was no attempt to separate the alternate threads so as to raise each in turn. There was a stick raised 4 or 5 inches on two forked sticks to separate the upper and under parts of this endless web of 40 feet. The weaver sat on her goat's-hair web, and never could get the shuttle across all the way. It consisted of a thin uneven stick, over a foot long. She had to separate twelve to fifteen threads with her hand, and stick in a pointed peg about 10 inches long, while she put the shuttle through that far; then she beat it firm with this instrument and went on as before, patiently.
The shepherd boys looked very graceful, playing on the long flutes with four notes. One of these flutes belongs to each hut. We were interested, too, in seeing men making sticks out of ibex horns. They cover the horn with grease, and put it in hot water or over the fire to melt and soften it, and then scrape and scrape till it is thin enough and able to be straightened. The ibex-horn hairpins are made with six or seven bands of filigree round them. The women's camel-saddles have great frameworks of bent sticks, nearly as large as some of the huts, to give shelter, and are very smart indeed on a journey.
On leaving Koukout, Sheikh Hassan took us to his well at Tokwar again, a deep and presumably ancient well, near which he has his huts; and from there to a spot called Akelabillèh, about four miles from Tokwar, and not far from our original starting-point of Hadi. Here we found slight traces of gold-working. About half a dozen crushing-stones lay around, and a good deal of quartz refuse. Probably this was a small offshoot of the more extensive mines in the interior which had not repaid continued working.