292 TWO DIANAS IN SOMALILAND 
arrangement, and not very far from our camp was 
an immense cemetery where many thousands of 
people are buried. Clarence took us also to the ruins 
of a one-time city, now covered with grass and aloe 
growth. How ancient the place is I cannot say with 
accuracy, but it looked very ancient indeed. Not far 
away at the Upper Sheik is a large Somali village, a 
Mullah settlement, and the Sheik there, a very en- 
lightened person indeed, told us that the remains of 
the city are not really very antediluvian, and are the 
site of the homes of the early settlers from the Yemen. 
As we neither of us knew anything about such influx 
we kept silent, to conceal our ignorance. Quite a lot 
of the tracery on the stones which satisfied un- 
archaeological people like ourselves is nothing but 
decorative work carved by the shepherds trying to 
kill time ! 
Being comparatively near Berber a and “ civilisa- 
tion,” the pass being a kind of high road to Brighton, 
this Mullah saw a good deal of Europeans, and spoke 
a little English. We presented him with a Koran, a 
tusba , and a couple of tobes — the last of the Mohicans 
— and so our reception was exceedingly cordial. The 
Mullah was an elderly man, but it is exceedingly 
hard to guess ages “ out there,” and his face was 
deeply lined, his eyes were very jaded. When the 
conversation, engineered by Clarence as usual, began 
to flag I cast about in my mind for a suitable remark, 
which I placed carefully. He would just wait for me 
to make another, and seemed to have no inventive 
faculty of his own. At last I said I hoped all his 
