XXXI SEARCH FOR IBEX 361 



but throughout the year they go bare-legged and unshod, 

 even when snow hes on the ground. 



The guide reported that the headman of the village 

 was away, but he had "collected" these things in the 

 meantime, and that the Shum would arrive the first thing 

 in the morning to hear my commands, I was up as soon 

 as it was light next day, and found w^e were camped on 

 one side of an amphitheatre of hills. Opposite were 

 the Buiheat mountains, with a great wall of broken 

 cliffs, as it were a girdle drawn tightly round them and 

 kept in place by knife-edged ridges running clown to the 

 valley below, in which lay the scattered village of Lourre 

 amid its cultivated ground. Away to the north, where 

 the cliffs ended, was one of those vast fields of fantastic 

 rock-scenery to be seen nowhere but in Abyssinia ; 

 one might imagine oneself to be gazing on the play- 

 ground of a race of giants, who had vied with each 

 other in setting up as many huge buildings of every 

 sort, as close together as possible, and had then run off 

 and left the lot unfinished. Minarets and domes, castles 

 and cathedrals, sphinxes, obelisks, and pyramids, all 

 seemed to be there in endless profusion — small wonder 

 the old writers more than half believed Simien was an 

 enchanted land ! Behind us lay a steep grassy valley 

 sloping downward to join a larger one at the foot of 

 Ras Detjem, a great sugar-loaf hill in the far distance. 

 Breakfast done, and no headman having appeared, I sent 

 the guide off to the village to look for him, while I 

 searched the foot of the cliffs opposite with the telescope, 

 in the hope of seeing a herd of the wala I had come so 

 far to shoot. After a good hour had gone by, the guide 



