IV GOVERNMENT EXPLORATIONS 91 
they had seen from the hill, brought them in as hostages for 
exchange with some looted camels. Finding the prisoners on 
our return we released them, and after turning all the Arasama 
elders neck and crop out of camp, we gave out that we intended 
to be friends with all tribes and would not be mixed up in their 
quarrels, 
Followed by a large number of avaricious elders, we marched 
north-east to Badwein, where we found more wells, and a large 
tank of water, four hundred yards in circumference, with per- 
pendicular sides forty feet deep, supposed to have been excavated 
in the limestone rocks by ancient Gallas; but the water was 
utterly unfit for human consumption. Ruins, which rise half 
smothered from among a tangle of aloes and thorn-jungle close 
by, cover an area of forty thousand square yards, and in some 
of the houses the walls are still ten feet high. E rode into 
a large house or temple, to find it two hundred feet long and 
one hundred feet wide, divided by a number of partition walls. 
They are built of limestone, much decomposed by rains, and are 
supposed to be the work of the Gallas, but no one knows who 
built them. Some of the Somalis say they date back to the 
time of a race before the Gallas. The people at Badwein had 
just come from Gosaweina, driven from there through fear of 
the Mahamud Gerad, and we were assured we should certainly 
be attacked by that tribe if we held to our determination of 
going to Gosaweina. We were further told that the plains were 
very open and the horsemen “as numerous as the sand,” and 
that some years ago a force of natives armed with one hundred 
matchlocks had been completely wiped out there by a night 
attack. 
Marching eastward, we soon entered the open grass plains, 
where we saw the smouldering zeribas of the Arasama and 
Barkad Gerdd sub-tribes, which had fled before the Mahamud 
Gerad. The next day we held across the open plains to 
Gosaweina, and had scarcely started when a party of horsemen 
was seen halted on some low hills to the north! We, however, 
kept straight on, and the horsemen, constantly increasing in 
numbers, followed, moving parallel to us on the higher ground. 
Without halting the camels, we whistled the men up, and 
they formed line, and moved out to protect the caravan. The 
horsemen came towards us at a gallop, but pulled up on our 
running with a few men towards them. On getting up to them 
my men were greatly relieved in their minds to find that instead 
