SHOOTING PARTIES 
7 
at me with his eagle eye as if I was the biggest smuggler 
and Customs swindler out of prison. 
Just then the pretty hills thirty miles inland were lost 
in black clouds, and distant thunder rolled. The rainy 
season in Somaliland had begun. My ^ boy ’ remarked : 
‘ Plenty of rain upstairs ’ — pointing to the hills. ‘ Don’t 
you hear him speaking V — the latter remark referring to 
the thunder. 
There were no camels on sale, so I was obliged to await 
the incoming of a caravan on the morrow, the owner having 
been badly mauled by a lion in the jungle. This made the 
fourth white man mauled in the last six months. That 
morning I took tiffin in the tent of one of the parties which 
had just come in from the hills. It proved a very jolly 
meal, the ladies relating amusing anecdotes of leeches in 
their drinking water, centipedes in their tents, and tadpoles 
in their baths, when encamped up in the hills. One of the 
gentlemen presented me with what he called a most efficient 
trap to catch small animals. I was soon enabled to prove 
its efficiency, for I at once succeeded in catching my thumb. 
The gentlemen of the party also had some yarns to spin. 
One related how a follower had complained to him of a 
terrible swelling in the throat, and a close examination of 
his mouth disclosed an ‘ enormous leech stuck fast to the 
roof of his larynx. One man held the poor fellow’s mouth 
open whilst the narrator with a pair of pincers out of the 
tool-chest extracted the noxious animal, together with a 
large piece off the roof of his mouth. He obtained imme- 
diate relief ! 
Seeing a Somali with one arm, I asked him how he had 
lost the other, when he related how he had been charged 
by an elephant, which impaled his arm with its tusk. The 
sahib, after minute examination, again had recourse to his 
tool-chest, and having produced his meat-saw, and cleaned 
away the flesh with his hunting knife, he sawed the bone 
in two. The only words the wretched man uttered were, 
‘ Be quick, sahib ; be quick !’ 
