Page:First Footsteps in East Africa, 1894 - Volume 1.djvu/190

 for the night. The Bedouins, chattering with cold, stood closer to the comfortable blaze than ever did pater familias in England: they smoked their faces, toasted their hands, broiled their backs with intense enjoyment, and waved their legs to and fro through the flame to singe away the pile, which at this season grows long. The End of Time, who was surly, compared them to demons, and quoted the Arab's saying:--"Allah never bless smooth man, or hairy woman!" On the 8th of December, at 8 A.M., we travelled slowly up the Halimalah Valley, whose clayey surface glistened with mica and quartz pebbles from the hills. All the trees are thorny except the Sycamore and the Asclepias. The Gub, or Jujube, grows luxuriantly in thickets: its dried wood is used by women to fumigate their hair [19]: the Kedi, a tree like the porcupine,--all spikes,--supplies the Bedouins with hatchet-handles. I was shown the Abol with its edible gum, and a kind of Acacia, here called Galol. Its bark dyes cloth a dull red, and the thorn issues from a bulb which, when young and soft, is eaten by the Somal, when old it becomes woody, and hard as a nut. At 9 A.M. we crossed the Lesser Abbaso, a Fiumara with high banks of stiff clay and filled with large rolled stones: issuing from it, we traversed a thorny path over ascending ground between higher hills, and covered with large boulders and step-like layers of grit. Here appeared several Gudabirsi tombs, heaps of stones or pebbles, surrounded by a fence of thorns, or an enceinte of loose blocks: in the latter, slabs are used to make such houses as children would build in play, to denote the number of establishments left by the deceased. The new grave is known by the conical milk-pails surmounting the stick