ON THE FRONTIER OF DSYRR AND NGAMATAK 



251 



every respect of the Kerio plain we had just left, a number of 

 isolated heights, resembling, those of the Doenye Erok, here as 

 there shutting out the horizon. This was the Turkana district 

 of Dsyrr intersected by the Eagemat, the easternmost of the 

 three sources of which we reached early the next morning. Its 

 banks were fringed with fine, well-grown, shady trees, chiefly 

 acacias, but fan-palms, which are the only vegetation of the 

 middle course of the Eagemat, were entirely wanting. 



A good many natives visited us, but they only brought 

 six goats and one donkey for sale. Tobacco was even more 

 anxiously asked for here than elsewhere in Turkana, and 

 when Qualla suddenly produced a little bundle of Kikuyu 

 tobacco, which he said he had just accidentally found amongst 

 his things, there was a perfect inundation of would-be 

 purchasers. In less than no time a number of camels appeared, 

 of which we were allowed to take our pick. Qualla chose 

 the fattest and paid for it with some tobacco, for which he had 

 given one string of beads in Kikilyuland. The Turkana went 

 off delighted with his acquisition, and Kharscho, no less happy, 

 lost no time in killing the camel and securing a steak from it. 

 For once, after all our unsatisfactory bartering, everyone was 

 satisfied. 



The next dsij we cut across the plain in five hours' march, 

 and camped, as so often before in this arid country, by the 

 dried-up bed of a stream at the foot of the western range of 

 hills. We found a little water in several deep holes in the 

 channel. We were now on the frontier of the Turkana districts 

 of Dsyrr and Ngamatak, the natives of which, as we could at 

 once tell by their behaviour, had already been worked by cara- 

 vans.^ They soon found out, however, that they had a different 



' Jumbe Kimemeta, who was here'twice in 1884, was the first ivory trader to 

 penetrate to the western frontier of Ngamatak along the Trrawell, and later it 

 was reached by the caravan which was at Taveta when we were. 



