TWO DIANAS IN SOMALILAND 123 



reliable shot possible. A child would have brought it 

 off. Cecily dropped the inquirer dead in his tracks. 



We were very glad of the meat, and the horns were 

 not amiss. The men would not be able to look for- 

 ward to a resulting feast, as the " hallal " was left out. 

 However, they had any amount of sun-dried meat to 

 go on with. One pony had to carry the buck, which, 

 after being cleaned, probably weighed less than the 

 Somali who had occupied the saddle previously. Then 

 we made tracks for the rendezvous. Looking behind 

 us we saw a large jackal making off with the left-behind 

 bits of aoul. Another and another came up, and then 

 a set-to fight began as to who should eat the spoils. 

 Whilst the battle raged with fang and claw a tiny 

 jackal stealing up made off at best pace with most of 

 the bone of contention. 



At the arranged place of meeting we found no hos- 

 pitably waiting tents, no cook trying to cook, no camels, 

 no anything, but an arid waste of sand, sparsely dotted 

 with adad bushes and a couple of very stunted guda 

 trees. From the adad comes the gum arabic of Somali 

 trading, a useless commodity to us. But we could see 

 it for ourselves in amber lumps, in the crannies of the 

 thorn. 



Half an hour passed. The ponies nibbled the occa- 

 sional brown spears that masqueraded as grass, and 

 we sat down, and said things. One of the hunters got 

 up a guda tree to help investigations, and we played : 

 " Sister Ann, Sister Ann, do you see anybody coming ? " 

 until we were tired of it, and the man not being par- 

 ticularly agile missed his footing and fell with a plop 



