TURKANA HABITATIONS 227 



did not last ; our guide succeeded in calming tlie people, and 

 the same evening the inhabitants of the village returned. 



To give time for the news of our arrival to spread, and to 

 afford the rest needed to our men, who were suffering much 

 from sore feet, the Count decided to remain here a day, though 

 nothing could have been much drearier or more forbidding than 

 the site of our camp. 



We were now in the frontier district of Katiaman, which 

 resembled nothing so much as a deserted Karst ^ district. Here 

 as there the ground was thickly strewn with pointed, sharp- 

 edged debris, but here this debris consists of coarse, porous, 

 volcanic rock of a brownish-grey colour. Katiaman was the 

 most sterile inhabited district we came across. Soon after 

 the rainy season the grass was all gone, and the only water 

 was a little evil-smelling muddy fluid, at the bottom of a 

 few depressions of the soil, from which even our men turned 

 with nausea. The cattle, sheep, and goats were like walking 

 skeletons, but the camels and donkeys were in better condition. 

 The village was small, and the habitations — there was nothing 

 either here or elsewhere in Turkana which could be called 

 huts — consisted merely of circles of dried branches stuck in 

 the ground. We saw very few natives, and those few did not 

 venture into the camp, but this could scarcely have been from 

 dread of us, for they soon allowed their herds to graze near us 

 again. Imagining that we were in an exceptionally poverty- 

 stricken part of Turkana, we did not bother about getting 

 cattle, but contented ourselves with buying two donkeys and 

 six goats, declining the oxen offered as far too lean. 



From our camp, situated at an altitude of some 3,077 feet, 

 we had an extended view of Turkana, which appeared to be 

 divided pretty equally into a flat plain and a series of mountain 



^ Karst, or Carso, is a mining district east of Trieste with a curious subterranean 

 water system. — Trans. 



Q 2 



