208 THROUGH SOMALILAND AND ABYSSINIA CHAP. 
from the Somalis, were even then fighting their way through 
the Galla tribes in front. 
The difficulty and expense of fitting out a Somdli expedition 
may be realised when it is explained that in the four or five 
hundred miles between Berbera and Imé, on the routes I took, 
there was no permanent village. The karias are merely Somali 
temporary kraals, and the huts are packed on camels when the 
natives move for change of pasture three or four times in the 
year; in all my journeys, except during the week’s visit to 
Harar, I was never able to obtain anything but occasionally 
milk and mutton or other meat. Rations of rice, dates, and 
clarified butter were carried for the men for every day we spent 
in the interior ; also water-casks capable of supplying us for six 
days when crossing the Haud. All these supplies had to be 
carried on camel-back, making a very large caravan for four 
and a half months, which was the time that elapsed before we 
returned to Berbera, and during which we covered about one 
thousand two hundred iniles of route. By much cutting down 
of weight I had managed to do with thirty-three baggage 
camels, each carrying two hundred and seventy-five pounds, 
the cost price of each camel being £2. I took no furniture, 
sleeping on the ground or on camel-mats laid over store-boxes, 
in a double-fly tent weighing eighty pounds. 
As we rode over the flats near the river, I sent Jama Deria 
and his son forward to the villages, hidden among the palm 
clusters two thousand yards away, to warn Gabba Oboho, the 
Adone chief of Imé, of our arrival. He took, wrapped up in 
the end of his tobe, an Arabic letter from Sheikh Abdul Kader. 
With the other five Somalis I sat down under a shady gudd 
tree in the open plain and awaited developments, at the same 
time hobbling the animals and turning them out to graze. 
This was an exciting crisis in the course of my expedition. 
Between my advanced party and the camp we had left behind 
at Dambaswerer lay seventy-five miles of uninhabited wilderness. 
We were eight men in all, with four rifles. A mile away was a 
cluster of more than a dozen large villages teeming with sus- 
picious and ignorant negroes, who were of a different race, and 
had lately been the enemies of the Amaden Somalis who formed 
my escort. The only white men thay had ever seen were Baudi 
and Candeo, and possibly Robecchi, and the party of Italians 
which had lately gone into Gallaland under circumstances by no 
means peaceful. 
