40 SERVICE AND SPORT IN THE SUDAN 



part to El Eddaiya, south of Nahud, which was to 

 be our new station. Its situation would prevent a 

 recurrence of raiding. I did not follow myself till 

 just after Christmas. The weather in El Obeid was 

 now extremely cold, and riding in the night hours, 

 as pedestrianism was almost out of the question, a 

 penance. The burr of the heskinit grass was particu- 

 larly offensive. One day I followed a gazelle for about 

 a hundred yards through it, and then was covered by 

 a regular coating of them, so much so that I had to 

 call up my camel and change my trousers where I 

 stood. Every traveller in Kordofan carries a small 

 tripod on which to hang his belongings at a halt out 

 of reach of this pest. 



I left Whittingham (on his way back to Bara) at 

 Nahud and arrived at El Eddaiya, called the local 

 sheikhs together and arranged with them for the 

 building of 150 huts, &c. My men dug a " mat- 

 murra," or grain pit, about nine feet in diameter and 

 seven deep, into which I poured the grain I sat buying 

 for hours from the natives around. Storing grain in 

 a pit is a bad method, as the grain at the bottom is 

 the first put in and the last used. Two local facts are 

 worthy of notice. The Kababish, a camel-owning tribe, 

 bring in at times skins full of grain, which they barter 

 for water ! The favourite coin is a " habeshi," twenty- 

 four of which can be bought for ten piastres in Nahud, 

 but twenty of which buy that coin elsewhere on the 

 frontier. 



It was not long before some of the huts were 

 finished. To avoid suspicion of favouritism, the 



