356 THROUGH SOMALILAND AND ABYSSINIA 
Plain ; but from May to October the town is nearly empty, a detachment 
of police being kept there as a guard. The Bulhar Plain is a vast 
expanse of bush, surrounded by blue mountains, and viewed from the 
sea, with the loug line of white beach in the foreground, is very striking. 
Two very notable landmarks well known to sailors are Elmas Mountain, 
thirteen miles west of Bulhar, and Laba Gumbur Mado (the “ two 
black hills ”), twenty-five miles east of Berbera. Elmas rises to about 
1500 feet, and is a cluster of bold peaks. 
The Maritime Mountains are composed principally of limestone, 
and in parts are nearly as barren-looking as the volcano at Aden. 
Here and there they are cut through by river-beds like the wadi of 
Arabia, water percolating slowly, hidden at various depths below a 
glaring expanse of dry powdery sand. Sometimes water is so near the 
surface that the sand is moist, and it can be got by scraping out a hole 
with the hands, though generally it is obtained by digging the Ids , or 
shallow pit, through the surface sand. 
However inviting these smooth stretches of sand may appear, a 
camp should never be pitched in the main channel. On a dozen 
different occasions, after heavy rain in the hills, I have seen a yellow 
flood, two to four feet deep and fifty yards wide, rush foaming down 
the dry channel of the Issutugan with great speed, rolling down in 
front of it a mass of branches, debris, and large boulders, and under- 
mining the high perpendicular banks, pieces of which would drop into 
the river with a loud splash. At such a time the whole of the river- 
bed in front of the freshet has been absolutely dry, untouched by water 
perhaps for months. These freshets dwindle to a trickling stream in 
about six hours, and may cease to flow in two days. The water does 
not always reach the sea, as the dry loose sand of the Maritime Plain 
drinks it up. After one of these floods has run itself away a thin layer 
of mud remains deposited, which dries, cracks, and curls up into small 
flakes, to be swept away in a few days by the wind, leaving the surface 
of the sand again exposed. 
At Bulhar, when there has been particularly heavy rain in the hills, 
the Issutugan comes' sweeping down over twenty miles of river-bed and 
plain, and reaching the coast makes a clear cut through the high bank 
behind the sea -beach. When the river dries the sea -bank is again in 
the course of time silted up by the surf to its original height. At 
ordinary times the water of the Issutugan, which is a typical tug or 
Somali sand-river, loses itself in the sand at So-Midgan, twenty-three 
miles inland from Bulhar, and sinking deep down below the Maritime 
Plain, collects behind the sea-bank, where it can be reached by digging. 
Vast numbers of shallow pits, which render riding rather dangerous 
at night, are seen at intervals along the coast between Bulhar and Zeila. 
They contain water which is brackish, but drinkable. After being used 
for some time the well deepens, striking through the layer of fresh water 
into the underlying sea- water, and a new pit has to be dug. Where the 
Issutugan cuts through the Maritime Hills, which it does for forty miles 
of its course, there is generally a tiny rivulet of water running along the 
centre of its bed, now and then sinking out of sight, to reappear again 
a mile or two below, the sand saturated with water held in suspension, 
forming awkward although not dangerous quicksands. 
The aspect of the Maritime Mountains is very forbidding. Bare 
