190 
THROUGH SOMALILAND AND ABYSSINIA chap. 
once offering tliemselves, my own followers, seeing I was in- 
dependent, returned to obedience. I dismissed the two ring- 
leaders with ten days’ rations and their back pay, and wished 
them a safe return to Berbera. 
I gave several Korans and prayer-cliaplets to the mullahs 
here, and they were received with real pleasure. The mullahs 
are the traveller’s best friends in Ogaden ; they are intelligent, 
have great social influence, and are particularly useful in giving 
introductions, passing a traveller on from tribe to tribe. The 
more intelligent among them can write in Arabic. From these 
mullahs I heard that at Durlii, in the Malingur tribe, on one of 
the roads to Ime on the Webbe, I was certain to come upon 
Grevy’s zebra, so determined to go there. On the 13th I 
broke up my camp at Yoglion among the Sheikh Ash karias, 
and marched along the bed of a torrent, deep cut in the red 
earth, to a pool called Garba-aleli. 
Before striking camp at earliest dawn, just as Suleiman the 
cook, whom I always told the sentry to awaken before the bulk 
of my followers, was beginning to prepare my coffee, a leopard 
jumped into the middle of the camp to seize my best milch 
goat, which was reclining under the lee of a pile of camel-mats ; 
but Makunan’s mule, by braying at the brute, aroused the 
camp. The Somalis rushed unarmed at the leopard, while I 
dived quietly under my bed and drew out my coat, which had 
cartridges in the pockets, and a rifle ; but of course by the time 
all was ready the leopard had gone ! 
Approaching the water at Garba-aleh I saw three hyaenas 
making off through the thorn-forest ; and I sent a Martini- 
Henry bullet through one of them, by which I hoped to secure 
his eventual death, and so save some Malingur sheep. I met 
an old man called Mader Adan, the first Malingur I had seen, 
and he greeted me cheerily, and told me to expect lions and 
rhinoceroses in plenty at Eil-ki-Gabro, a march or two ahead. 
He said his own karia had been driven from the district by the 
former. The Garba-aleh pool, about twenty yards in diameter, 
in the bed of a deeply cut sand-river, looked promising for 
lying in ambush, so I constructed a shelter on the principle of 
that which had been so successful at Kuredelli, the back of the 
bower being an overhanging wall of earth fifteen feet high. As 
it had been a hot day even for the Kalil season, and likely to 
bring game early to water, I occupied my ambush at about five 
o’clock, and we sat quiet. 
