120 THROUGH SOMALILAND AND ABYSSINIA CHAP. 
when gorged and lazy, the lions are caught in the early morning 
returning over the plains, and are ridden to a standstill by the 
Somalis, and killed with poisoned arrows and spears. 
After passing Garodki Mayagéd, an ancient clearing in the 
thorn-forest, we came to the usual caravan halting-place, a 
zeriba of thorns, occupied occasionally by the nomads or by 
caravans as they pass along the road. At the side of the track 
were shallow depressions in the soil where rain-water had rested, 
and round these dry pools were rows of small pits six inches deep, 
dug by Somalis in order to stand up the water hdns to be filled. 
The jungle now began to get more open and the glades 
wider, the durr grass growing in beautiful feathery clumps. 
Huge red ant-hills appeared at every hundred yards or so, often 
twelve feet thick at the base, and with a pinnacle twenty-five 
feet high, looking like a giant hand and beckoning forefinger. 
On the evening of the third day we got on to high ground 
almost imperceptibly, and camped at the southern side of an 
old fire clearing near Gudaweina. Looking back we could see, 
in the clear air of the elevated Haud, beyond the tops of the 
nearer thorn-trees, the various gradations of tint—yellow, brown, 
green, or blue—on the several bits of jungle or grass glades 
which we had come through ; and beyond all a high rim of 
deep indigo blue, looking like a sea-horizon, running without a 
single landmark, showing the great expanse of the Haud forest 
stretching in every direction in everlasting dips and rises of 
ground. All the hills about Hargeisa had long ago sunk out 
of sight. 
On the fourth day we marched on to Kheidub-Ayéyu. For 
a mile we went slowly in the dawning light through thorny 
jungle, and then came out into a glade of durr grass, the camels 
swinging along faster as the path became more visible. We 
passed a chief’s grave, encircled by a stockade of trunks of 
thorn-trees twelve feet high. We afterwards emerged on to 
open rising ground, where we saw beisa and Waller’s gazelles 
feeding, and in the centre of the path a wart-hog had been 
rooting up the ground. 
The open pasture here was dotted with the old zeribas of the 
Samanter Abdalla, Habr Awal, who come from the north for a 
season every year. They were here six weeks before us, but the 
rain falling, they had returned to Aror, where we had seen them 
a few days previously when crossing the open dan. These were 
also the most northern pastures of the Ogadén tribes, none of 
