VIII 
JOURNEY TO WEBBE SHABELEH RIVER 
205 
call, I blew the alarm whistle and fell in all the men two deep, 
when, loading with blank, we fired two volleys in the air. 
Then, folding some red blankets and laying them over store- 
boxes, I made the Sheikh and his sons and elders sit down. 
Abdul KAder, while sipping his coffee, his eyes wandering con- 
tinually over the strange objects in my tent, and his fingers 
picking absently at my blankets, promised to do all he could 
for me, remarking significantly that he heard English people did 
not burn karias and murder women ! 
The hundreds of assembled tribesmen listened in silence to 
the sentences murmured in a high cracked voice by the old man, 
who had lost his front teeth. Some of his small children, or 
perhaps grandchildren, naked and dusty, clung round the poles 
of my tent, sucking their thumbs, and gazing calmly at the first 
white man they had set eyes on ! A dozen horsemen of the Her 
Am&den then went through the dihdltig, covering us with dust, 
and the minstrel, sitting in the saddle facing my tent, gave me, 
appropriately put into verse, complaints against the neighbours 
of the Amdden, which, as a representative of the English, I was 
expected to settle, this place being about three hundred and 
thirty miles inland. 
While in camp here I set up a large astronomical telescope 
and turned it upon Jhrna Deria’s karia, a few miles away on the 
side of a hill. The people came in crowds to look through this 
at all hours of the day, with a running fire of comments, such 
as, “ By Allah! that is Jama’s white cow. How big! like an 
elephant,” and so forth. The mullahs flocked round my tent 
begging for white paper to write sentences from the Koran, 
which are subsequently enclosed in a leather bag and sold, to be 
worn round the neck as a charm to stave off ill-luck. I gave 
the mullahs several tusbas or scented prayer-chaplets made of 
black wooden beads and worn as necklaces. There is a supersti- 
tion that a Somali who wears a tusba and does not count the 
beads in prayer at the regular times will be choked by the tusba 
in revenge. 
Late at night, in the pitch darkness before the moon had 
risen, a little girl of seven came over from one of the karias to 
my camp, begging for food, as she was starving. She had 
braved the terrible danger of hyaenas, which swarm between the 
karias at night, to cross to my camp ; so giving her some beisa- 
meat and cooked rice, I sent her back under escort to her own 
habitations. I suspect this poor child had no relations. “ I 
