VI A VISIT TO RAS MAKUNAN OF HARAR, 1893 163 
One day I went out into the plains with three or four men, 
and found immense herds of hartebeests and Scemmerring’s 
gazelles ; but the day being windy, they were very shy. The 
gazelles were always galloping about and starting the masses 
of beisa and hartebeests. They would draw up in front of the 
larger game, appearing to know that I did not want to fire at 
them, sometimes giving me very easy chances. At last, seeing 
no chance of the larger game, and being in want of meat, I 
shot two Scemmerring’s gazelles right and left, one a very good 
buck with a thick winter coat; and on the way to camp I saw 
a bull hartebeest standing, as he thought, out of range, some 
four hundred yards away, so I lay prone and brought him down 
with a careful shot from the Martini-Henry. 
Returning to camp, I found messengers from one Farur 
Gerdd Hirsi, a relation of the Bertiri Sultan, who was at his 
karia two miles away, and had “pains all over his body,” so he 
had sent his sons to call me. I gave him twenty drops of 
chlorodyne and half a dozen quinine pills, one to be taken daily. 
I was received with great enthusiasm by a crowd of some two 
hundred of his womenfolk and male relations, all calling out 
“‘ Nabad” (Welcome). The Gerdd said he would have had him- 
self carried to my camp, but not while the hated Abyssinians 
remained there. The elders flocked around to lay complaints 
before me of the treatment they had received from the Abyssinian 
invaders. They said that Banagusé was lazy, and did not 
administer the country a bit; that he and his mob were good 
neither at fighting nor governing, and that the only thing they 
could do was bullying the karias for the extraction of cattle, 
which his soldiers eat raw. The Gerdd told me that ten cows 
were taken last month from his karia alone. Another man, 
Ibrahim Guri (Rer Ali), lost seventy-six camels, two hundred 
sheep, and five huts in one day; and he and his wife were 
arrested and taken away by the Abyssinians towards Harar. 
These are samples of the arbitrary behaviour of frontier officials. 
At night I returned to my camp from the Gerad’s karia, 
across torrent-beds and wait-a-bit thorns, and learnt the lesson 
that it is much better to cross one deep ravine low down than 
the twenty or more tributary ravines from which it is formed. 
We got to camp at last, relieved in our minds, because the 
presence of a man-eating lion in this neighbourhood had made 
us feel rather uncomfortable when stumbling about amongst the 
ravines in the darkness of the night. 
