274 THROUGH SOMALILAND AND ABYSSINIA CHAP. 
creepers, and looking like the Terai of the lower slopes of the 
Himalaya at Darjeeling, we descended to another abrupt change 
at Buoroma, below six thousand feet. Here we entered an open 
pastoral country, with wooded heights above crowned with the 
flat-topped and funnel-shaped wédi thorn-trees, so common 
in the Suwulla hills of the Marar Prairie in Somaliland. This 
was practically “high veldt.” We passed a great lake here 
called Tyer-Tyer, one shore being an open meadow, the other a 
heavily-wooded hill. At Laga-Hardim, the western border of 
the Harar highlands, we began to descend over the Ito Range 
to the Hawash depression, and found ourselves in a country 
resembling the thorny gorges of Somaliland. The paths became 
terribly bad for the few camels we had hired to help at the 
Hawash crossing. Here a camel, falling a hundred feet almost 
sheer, and rolling two hundred feet farther through the thorn- 
bushes, was the cause of my having to climb down in the dark 
before the moon rose, helped by my comrades of the Aden troop 
with their puggarees. As a second climb at sunrise showed that 
the animal’s hind-leg was broken, it had to be shot. 
It was not till next day, after twenty-one hours on my feet, 
without any food except a biscuit or two, that I got in with the 
last loads to the camp at the gorge of the Hawash stream, out 
in the desert country, with the thermometer marking 107° in 
the shade, the road having come down to two thousand five 
hundred feet. It was the only real bit of hardship during an 
otherwise easy trip. 
We crossed the Hawash depression, some sixty miles across, 
in appearance a veritable bit of low desert Somaliland, to 
Tadechamalea, ‘and later at Godoburka climbed the abrupt 
western wall of barren hills, passing through the rich villages of 
the cultivated Balchi district, where we found oxen treading 
corn, and ploughing going on. Thence to Addis-Abbaba the 
daily marches were over the limitless veldt of Shoa—rolling 
yellow downs of short grass, to change to green later on as we 
came back, the general elevation being some eight thousand feet. 
These open plains, scored by shallow depressions where the 
streams, torrents in the rainy season, trickled over a rocky bed, 
and where the horizon line was everywhere broken by the tops 
of low peaks, were a fine example of African plateau scenery. 
At last, one morning, the 28th April, as we dipped to a 
slightly lower level, we could see across the plain, where the 
converging hills made a pale blue background, Menelik’s palace 
