Page:First Footsteps in East Africa, 1894 - Volume 1.djvu/50

6 to travellers, visited distant lands—Egypt and Calcutta—and finally settled as a Faringhi policeman. He cannot read or write, but he has all the knowledge to be acquired by fifteen or twenty years' hard "knocking about": he can make a long speech, and, although he never prays, a longer prayer; he is an excellent mimic, and delights his auditors by imitations and descriptions of Indian ceremony, Egyptian dancing, Arab vehemence, Persian abuse, European vivacity, and Turkish insolence. With prodigious inventiveness, and a habit of perpetual intrigue, acquired in his travels, he might be called a "knowing" man, but for the truly Somali weakness of showing in his countenance all that passes through his mind. This people can hide nothing: the blank eye, the contracting brow, the opening nostril and the tremulous lip, betray, despite themselves, their innermost thoughts.

The second servant whom I bring before you is Gulad, another policeman at Aden. He is a youth of good family, belonging to the Ismail Arrah, the royal clan of the great Habr Girhajis tribe. His father was a man of property, and his brethren near Berberah, are wealthy Badawin: yet he ran away from his native country when seven or eight years old, and became a servant in the house of a butter merchant at Mocha. Thence he went to Aden, where he began with private service, and ended his career in the police. He is one of those long, live skeletons, common amongst the Somal: his shoulders are parallel with his ears, his ribs are straight as a mummy's, his face has not an ounce of flesh upon it, and his features suggest the idea of some lank bird: we call him Long Gulad, to which he replies with the Yaman saying "Length is Honour, even in Wood." He is brave enough, because he rushes into danger without reflection; his great defects are weakness of body and nervousness of temperament, leading in times of peril to the trembling of hands, the dropping of