MORE GRIEVANCES 
73 
a lot more was simmering in the large round cooking- pots, 
out of which each man fished for his share, like the priests 
before the tabernacle in Exodus. Indeed, my caravan often 
reminded me of the story of the Children of Israel wander- 
ing round Mount Sinai, especially when they grumbled and 
murmured on my making them wander in the waste Boorgha 
country, devoid of villages, instead of staying in Abriordi 
Garodi, rich in flocks and herds, and a land flowing with 
milk and sheep’s fat. 
Many of the expressions, sentences, and speeches of the 
natives remind me also of those in the Bible. The man 
with a bad leg came to me with a grievance. He said : 
^ Another tribe loot me one year since ; he taketh from 
me one camel, and sought also to take my life. I corneth 
here and findeth my camel — my long-lost camel. Verily it 
is mine camel, for I knoweth my mark that I maketh on 
his ham.’ 
He drawled on like this for several minutes, the drift of 
it being that he had now taken back his lost property from 
the village by force, and he requested my aid to help him 
to keep it until we again reached Berbera. As all the rest 
said it was a hond-jide case,- 1 at length consented. I told 
him I had enough trouble of my own without entering into 
other people’s, but that if he swore that the camel really 
belonged to him, I would allow him to let it join my herd 
on condition that it carried its share of my loads, and that, in 
case of being attacked for the possession of it, I should shoot 
it at once and throw the carcase to the hyenas. Not a man 
should have an ounce of its fat. I suspected all the time 
it was a put-up job, yet the natives in the villages all seemed 
very friendly. Just before we started, one of my men ran 
an oryx horn, which is often very sharp at the tip, about 
2 inches into his leg. I bandaged him up, and he had to be 
carried on a camel. 
. We took a guide and started. We had not been march- 
ing more than one hour when our so-called guide evidently 
got out of his latitude, and, after wandering about for another 
