358 THROUGH SOMALILAND AND ABYSSINIA 
plains, we arrive at the higher mountains, rising to nearly 6900 feet. 
Gélis is the collective name, though Somalis have a name for each flat- 
topped bluff, as Daar-dss (Red clay), Gan-Libah (Lion hand), Ban-yéro 
(Little plain), and Dig-wein (Big ears). In fact, in Somaliland every 
watering-place, hill, or mound, and many « prominent tree, has some 
descriptive name known to all the local tribes. 
The Gélis Range forms a gigantic step rising abruptly on the northern 
or coast face, and presenting to the sea, thirty-five miles distant, great 
scarped precipices and bold descents, long walls of perpendicular rock, 
red, yellow, or gray in colour, fringing the summit for many miles. 
The whole interior of Somaliland presents the appearance of having, 
in some great movement of the earth’s crust, been elevated from the 
level of Guban, an abrupt break or fault occurring at Gélis Range, which 
seems to have been upheaved for about six thousand feet; while at 
Hargeisa the country is crumpled up into a chaos of hills, Guban rising 
gradually into Ogo in several successive steps instead of in one great 
fault. On the Hargeisa side the country between the levels of Guban 
and Ogo is called Ogo-Guban. At the base of the fringing precipices, 
which are two or three hundred feet high, vast tumbled masses of rock 
which have slipped from the crest lie heaped together half-buried among 
the foliage of tall cedar-trees and a profusion of forest growth, forming 
caves and moss- grown recesses with great variety of wildflowers, and 
clumps of maiden-hair fern growing in the damp crevices of the rocks. 
The soil is a rich black vegetable mould. 
There can be no greater contrast than that between this fine mountain 
country and the brown sterile shores of the Gulf of Aden. Often as one 
looks down from the top of Gdlis the whole of Guban is hidden from 
view by an immense expanse of white cloud lying below, resembling a 
storm-tossed sea, the tops of Deimoleh- Wein and other detached hills 
rising like islands above it. The air is so clear in the elevated interior 
that from a hill in the Eilo Range, above Zeila, I have recognised each 
separate bluff of Gélis at a distance of one hundred and twenty miles. 
In these hills the roar of a lion or the alarm note of a koodoo can be 
heard echoing up the gorges for great distances. 
On the northern slope, at about a thousand feet below the level of the 
crest of Golis, is a ledge of broken ground, a mile or two wide, running 
parallel to the range for twenty or thirty miles. It is called Mirso, or 
‘¢The Haven,” and is a favourite pasture of the Habr Awal and Habr 
Gerhajis tribes, and also good ground for koodoo. It is covered with 
jungle, but the soil is shallow and stony. A gigantic blue-green cactus, 
or euphorbia, called hassidan, grows here to a height of about forty 
feet, and gives a very dense shade. The sap is a white milky liquid, 
which pours from every cut in the tree, and if caught in cups and 
dried, solidifies into a kind of rubber. The top of the range is covered 
with dense jungle of mountain cedar. In the gorges some of these 
trees, called dayeb, grow tall and straight, often four feet in diameter 
at the foot, and over a hundred feet high; but more frequently the 
dayeb forest is of comparatively stunted growth, being about forty feet 
high, with the trunks and branches much bent and twisted. The best 
trees which I saw were under Daar-dss Bluff, near Kulméye in Mirso, 
and on Wagar Mountain, farther east. 
From the crest of Gdlis the country slopes towards the south-east, 
