Page:First Footsteps in East Africa, 1894 - Volume 1.djvu/164

doubly green by comparison with the parched stubbles below. The Eesa, here mixed with the Gudabirsi, have little power: we found them poor and proportionally importunate. The men, wild-looking as open mouths, staring eyes, and tangled hair could make them, gazed with extreme eagerness upon my scarlet blanket: for very shame they did not beg it, but the inviting texture was pulled and fingered by the greasy multitude. We closed the hut whenever a valuable was produced, but eager eyes peeped through every cranny, till the End of Time ejaculated "Praised be Allah!" [43] and quoted the Arab saying, "Show not the Somal thy door, and if he find it, block it up!" The women and children were clad in chocolate- coloured hides, fringed at the tops: to gratify them I shot a few hawks, and was rewarded with loud exclamations,--"Allah preserve thy hand!"--"May thy skill never fail thee before the foe!" A crone seeing me smoke, inquired if the fire did not burn: I handed my pipe, which nearly choked her, and she ran away from a steaming kettle, thinking it a weapon. As my companions observed, there was not a "Miskal of sense in a Maund of heads:" yet the people looked upon my sun-burnt skin with a favour they denied to the "lime-white face." I was anxious to proceed in the afternoon, but Raghe had arrived at the frontier of his tribe: he had blood to settle amongst the Gudabirsi, and without a protector he could not enter their lands. At night we slept armed on account of the lions that infest the hills, and our huts were surrounded with a thorn fence--a precaution here first adopted, and never afterwards neglected. Early on the morning of the 4th of December heavy clouds rolled down from the mountains,