My journey began with the hard alluvial plain, forty-five to fifty-eight miles broad, between the sea and the mountains. It belonged to the Eesa, a tribe of Somali Bedouins, and how these “sun-dwellers” could exist there was a mystery. On the second day we reached a kraal consisting of gurgi, or diminutive hide huts. There was no thorn fence as is required in the lion-haunted lands to the west. The scene was characteristic of that pastoral life
which supplies poetry with Arcadian images and history with its blackest tragedies. Whistling shepherds, tall thin men, spear in hand, bore the younglings of the herd in their bosoms or drove to pasture the long-necked camels preceded by a patriarch with a wooden bell. Patches of Persian sheep with snowy bodies and jetty faces flecked the tawny plain, and flocks of goats were committed to women dressed in skins and boys who were unclad till the days of puberty. Some led the ram, around whose neck a cord of white heather was tied for luck. Others frisked with the dogs, animals by no means contemptible in the eyes of these Bedouin Moslems. All begged for bori—the precious tobacco—their only narcotic. They run away if they see smoke, and they suspect a kettle to be a mortal weapon. So the Bachwanas called our cannon, “pots.” Many of these wild people had never tasted grain and had never heard of coffee or sugar. During the rains they lived on milk; in the dries they ate meat, avoiding, however, the blood. Like other races to the north and south, they would not touch fish or birds, which they compared to snakes and vultures. “Speak not to me with that mouth that has tasted fish!” is a dire insult.
The Eesa were a typical Somali tribe; it might have numbered one hundred thousand spears, and it had a bad name. “Treacherous as an Eesa,” is a proverb at Zayla, where it is said these savages would offer you a bowl of milk with the left hand
and would stab you with the right. Their lives were spent in battle and murder.
The next march, a total of fifty-two miles, nearly lost us. Just before reaching the mountains which subtend the coast, we crossed the warm trail of a razzia, or cavalcade: some two hundred of the Habr Awal, our inveterate enemies, had been scouring the country. Robinson Crusoe was less scared by the footprint than were my companions. Our weak party numbered only nine men, of whom all except Mohammed and Guled were useless, and the first charge would have been certain death.
Escaping this danger, we painfully endured the rocks and thorns of the mountains and wilds. The third march placed us at Halimalah, a sacred tree about half-way between this coast and our destination—Harar. It is a huge sycamore suggesting the hiero-sykaminon of Egypt. The Gallas are still tree-worshippers, and the Somali respect this venerable vegetable as do the English their Druidical mistletoe.
We were well received at the kers (the kraals or villages). They were fenced with large and terrible thorns, an effectual defence against barelegged men. The animals had a place apart—semi-circular beehives made of grass mats mounted on sticks. The furniture consisted of weapons, hides, wooden pillows and mats for beds, pots of woven fibre, and horse gear. We carried our own dates and rice, we bought meat and the people supplied us with milk gratis—to sell
it was a disgrace. Fresh milk was drunk only by the civilised; pastoral people preferred it when artificially curdled and soured.
We soon rose high above sea-level, as the cold nights and the burning suns told us. The eighth march placed us on the Ban Marar, a plain twenty-seven miles broad—at that season a waterless stubble, a yellow nap, dotted with thorny trees and bushes, and at all times infamous for robbery and murder. It was a glorious place for game: in places it was absolutely covered with antelopes, and every random shot must have told in the immense herds.
Here I had the distinction of being stalked by a lion. As night drew in we were urging our jaded mules over the western prairie towards a dusky line of hills. My men proceeded whilst I rode in rear with a double-barrelled gun at full cock across my knees. Suddenly my animal trembled and bolted forward with a sidelong glance of fear. I looked back and saw, within some twenty yards, the king of beasts creeping up silently as a cat. To fire both barrels in the direction of my stalker was the work of a second. I had no intention of hitting, as aim could not be taken in the gloaming, and to wound would have been fatal. The flame and the echoed roar from the hills made my friend slink away. Its intention was, doubtless, to crawl within springing distance and then by a bound on my neck to have finished my journey through Somaliland and through life. My companions shouted in horror “Libah! libah!”—“The