268 THROUGH TURK AN A ANI) SUK 



by this time. But as yet we had no suspicion that this late 

 harvest was the first the poor natives had had for a very long 

 time, and that they had been wrestling with all the horrors of 

 famine. Maricha, we were now told, meant a wretched village 

 of starving people, but in Weiwei, the next settlement, we 

 should find dhurra plantations stretching away as far as the 

 eye could reach. 



With this hope we led our hungry men through the dripping 

 bush, along a lateral valley of the range, noting, as we went, 

 signs of a denser population, the huts of the natives clustering 

 in little groups at the edge of the steep mountain slopes, whilst 

 the plains were entirely occupied by dhurra plantations. But 

 the corn in this much loftier district than Ngaboto was not 

 nearly ripe, and the men tramped on with less and less spirit 

 through the still perfectly green fields. 



We camped near the Weiwei brook at a height of 3,282 

 feet, with rugged mountain slopes shutting in the view on the 

 south and west, whilst on the south-west we got a peep of the 

 ravine through which the little stream makes its way to the 

 plain, and beyond that plain of the highlands stretching further 

 away westward. 



In accordance with the custom of trading caravans, we 

 notified our arrival by three shots fired in the air, Avhich were 

 caught up and repeated in wonderful echoes in the mountains 

 hard by. But very few natives came to visit us, and those 

 few wretched-looking, half-starved creatures. One of them 

 had still three jiiicy stalks of dhurra in his hand, and offered 

 them to us for sale, as if they had been some choice bunch of 

 exotic flowers. In spite of our offering wire stuffs and beads 

 for the three stalks, the man took them awav with him ao-ain, 

 for here too tobacco was the only current coin. 



Our position was now, as the reader will have guessed from 

 the preceding pages, pretty well desperate. Our men had 



