Page:First Footsteps in East Africa, 1894 - Volume 1.djvu/180

 cattle as well as men, were sadly thirsty: many of us had been chewing pebbles during the morning, yet, afraid of demands for tobacco, the Bedouins would have pursued the march without water had I not forced them to halt. We found three holes in the sand; one was dry, a second foul, and the third contained a scanty supply of the pure element from twenty to twenty-five feet below the surface. A youth stood in the water and filled a wicker- pail, which he tossed to a companion perched against the side half way up: the latter in his turn hove it to a third, who catching it at the brink, threw the contents, by this time half wasted, into the skin cattle trough. We halted about half an hour to refresh man and beast, and then resumed our way up the Wady, quitting it where a short cut avoids the frequent windings of the bed. This operation saved but little time; the ground was stony, the rough ascents fatigued the camels, and our legs and feet were lacerated by the spear-like thorns. Here, the ground was overgrown with aloes [7], sometimes six feet high with pink and "pale Pomona green" leaves, bending in the line of beauty towards the ground, graceful in form as the capitals of Corinthian columns, and crowned with gay-coloured bells, but barbarously supplied with woody thorns and strong serrated edges. There the Hig, an aloetic plant with a point so hard and sharp that horses cannot cross ground where it grows, stood in bunches like the largest and stiffest of rushes. [8] Senna sprang