I at once changed my plans. To prove that the journey presented no real danger, I offered to visit alone what was considered the most perilous part of the country and explore Harar, the capital of the terra incognita. But to prevent my being detained meanwhile, I stationed my companions on the African coast with orders to seize and stop the inland caravans—a measure which would have had the effect of releasing me. This is a serious
danger in Abyssinian travel: witness the case of Pedro Cavilham in 1499, and the unfortunate Consul Cameron in our own day. Those “nameless Ethiopians,” the older savages, sacrificed strangers to their gods. The modern only keep them in irons, flog them, and starve them.
At the time I went few but professed geographers knew even the name of Harar, or suspected that within three hundred miles of Aden there is a counterpart of ill-famed Timbuctu. Travellers of all nations had attempted it in vain; men of science, missionaries, and geographers had all failed. It was said that some Hamitu prophet had read decline and fall in the first footsteps of the Frank, and that the bigoted barbarians had threatened death to the infidel caught within their walls. Yet it was worth seeing, especially in those days, when few were the unvisited cities of the world. It has a stirring history, a peculiar race and language, it coins its own money, and it exports the finest coffee known. Finally it is the southernmost town in Tropical Africa.
On April 28th, 1854, in an open boat, I left Aden alone, without my companions, re-becoming El Hajj Abdullah, the Arab. My attendants were Mohammed and Guled, two Somali policemen bound to keep my secret for the safety of their own throats. I afterwards engaged one Abdy Abokr, a kind of hedge-priest, whose nickname was the “End of Time,” meaning the ne plus ultra of villainy. He was a caution—a bad tongue, a mischievous brain, covetous and
wasteful, treacherous as a hyena, revengeful as a camel, timorous as a jackal.
Three days of summer sail on the “blind billows” and the “singing waves” of the romantic Arab geographers landed us at Zayla, alias Andal, the classical Sinus Avaliticus, to the south-west of Aden. During the seventh century it was the capital of a kingdom which measured forty-three by forty days’ march; now the Bedouin rides up to its walls. The site is the normal Arabo-African scene, a strip of sulphur-yellow sand with a deep blue dome above and a foreground of indigo-coloured sea; behind it lies the country, a reeking desert of loose white sand and brown clay, thinly scattered with thorny shrub and tree. The buildings are a dozen large houses of mud and coralline rubble painfully whitewashed. There are six mosques—green little battlemented things with the Wahhali dwarf tower by way of minaret, and two hundred huts of dingy palm-leaf.
The population of fifteen thousand souls has not a good name—Zayla boasting or vanity and Kurayeh pride is a proverb. They are managed by forty Turkish soldiers under a Somali Governor, the Hajj Shermarkuy, meaning “one who sees no harm.” The tall old man was a brave in his youth; he could manage four spears, and his sword-cut was known. He always befriended English travellers.
The only thing in favour of Zayla is its cheapness. A family of six persons can live well on £30 per
annum. Being poor, the people are idle, and the hateful “Inshalla bukra”—“To-morrow if Allah pleases”—and the Arab “tenha paciencia,” “amanha,” and “espere um pouco” is the rule.
I was delayed twenty-seven days whilst a route was debated upon, mules were sent for, camels were bought, and an abban, or protector-guide, was secured. Hereabouts no stranger could travel without such a patron, who was paid to defend his client’s life and property. Practically he took his money and ran away.