IV 
GOVERNMENT EXPLORATIONS 
105 
feeling that while we were in the country they were responsible 
for our safety, and shocked at the state I was in, refused to take 
my brother after him. On the day after the accident we were 
delayed in the morning by the bandaging and doctoring wdiich I 
had to go through. The only thing we had with us was cocoa- 
nut oil, which we had brought for the lamps of the theodolite, 
and I do not think its application did the wounds much good. 
In the plain round the tents, a quarter of a mile away, were 
brown and gray masses entirely composed of hartebeests and beisa, 
and nearer were a few solitary bulls, which loomed up on the swell- 
ing ground and disappeared in the hollows; their shoulders being 
much higher than the quarters, and the legs hidden in the grass, 
they appeared to be sitting up. We counted seventeen ostriches 
as they suddenly appeared out of the haze, and passed in single 
file, at a great pace, half a mile off. 
In the evening, the sky being overcast and the air cooler, we 
marched five miles towards Bottor wells, on the direct road to 
Gebili. Next day we got off the open ban into the thorn-jungle, 
and descended into a grassy hollow at the head of the Bottor 
Valley. Here there were numbers of high birch-trees covered 
with kites’ nests — a noticeable feature of this valley and easily 
seen from a distance, the upper branches being bare and the 
nests looking like globe signals. 
The Ujawdji people, on hearing of my accident, sent several 
messengers to inquire how I was getting on, and horsemen came 
from most of the Jibril Abokr clans pasturing in the neighbour- 
hood, to dibdltig to us before our start for the coast. We held 
a council of elders, when the complaints against Abyssinia were 
taken down for transmission to Government. 
All these elders professed great personal friendship for our- 
selves. They said they had been asked for tribute by the 
Abyssinian leader Banagiise and had refused it, and were now 
expecting that a force would be sent against them. The tribe 
had therefore retreated across the Marar Plain from their 
pastures, near the curious conical Subbul hills, which could be 
seen twenty miles away rising out of the plain ; and they had 
been obliged to graze their animals on the poorer pasture at 
Ujawaji. The elders said that the Abyssinians had pushed out 
and built a fort at Jig-Jiga, about forty miles south of us, 
within the farther edge of the Marar Prairie. 
On 21st June we passed through Gebili, and reached a spot 
in thick jungle with aloe undergrowth, called Armadader. On 
