TWO DIANAS IN SOMALILAND 
123 
reliable shot possible. A child would have brought it 
off. Cecily dropped the inquirer dead in his tracks. 
We were very glad of the meat, and the horns were 
not amiss. The men would not be able to look for- 
ward to a resulting feast, as the “ hallal ” was left out. 
However, they had any amount of sun-dried meat to 
go on with. One pony had to carry the buck, which, 
after being cleaned, probably weighed less than the 
Somali who had occupied the saddle previously. Then 
we made tracks for the rendezvous. Looking behind 
us we saw a large jackal making off with the left-behind 
bits of aoul. Another and another came up, and then 
a set-to fight began as to who should eat the spoils. 
Whilst the battle raged with fang and claw a tiny 
jackal stealing up made off at best pace with most of 
the bone of contention. 
At the arranged place of meeting we found no hos- 
pitably waiting tents, no cook trying to cook, no camels, 
no anything, but an arid waste of sand, sparsely dotted 
with adad bushes and a couple of very stunted guda 
trees. From the adad comes the gum arabic of Somali 
trading, a useless commodity to us. But we could see 
it for ourselves in amber lumps, in the crannies of the 
thorn. 
Half an hour passed. The ponies nibbled the occa- 
sional brown spears that masqueraded as grass, and 
we sat down and said things. One of the hunters got 
up a guda tree to help investigations, and we played : 
“ Sister Ann, Sister Ann, do you see anybody coming ? ” 
until we were tired of it, and the man not being par- 
ticularly agile missed his footing and fell with a plop 
