Having skirted the sea for two hours, I rode off with the End of Time to inspect the Dihh Silil [28], a fiumara which runs from the western hills north-eastwards to the sea. Its course is marked by a long line of graceful tamarisks, whose vivid green looked doubly bright set off by tawny stubble and amethyst-blue sky. These freshets are the Edens of Adel. The banks are charmingly wooded with acacias of many varieties, some thorned like the fabled Zakkum, others parachute-shaped, and planted in impenetrable thickets: huge white creepers, snake-shaped, enclasp giant trees, or connect with their cordage the higher boughs, or depend like cables from the lower branches to the ground. Luxuriant parasites abound: here they form domes of flashing green, there they surround with verdure decayed trunks, and not unfrequently cluster into sylvan bowers, under which--grateful sight!--appears succulent grass. From the thinner thorns the bell-shaped nests of the Loxia depend, waving in the breeze, and the wood resounds with the cries of bright-winged choristers. The torrent-beds are of the clearest and finest white sand, glittering with gold-coloured mica, and varied with nodules of clear and milky quartz, red porphyry, and granites of many hues. Sometimes the centre is occupied by an islet of torn trees and stones rolled in heaps, supporting a clump of thick jujube or tall acacia, whilst the lower parts of the beds are overgrown with long lines of lively green colocynth. [29] Here are usually the wells, surrounded by heaps of thorns, from which the leaves have been browsed off, and dwarf sticks that support the water-hide. When the flocks and herds are absent, troops of gazelles may be seen daintily pacing the yielding surface; snake trails streak the sand, and at night the fiercer kind of animals, lions, leopards, and elephants, take their turn. In Somali-land the well is no place of social meeting; no man lingers to chat near it, no woman visits it, and the traveller fears to pitch hut where torrents descend, and where enemies, human and bestial, meet. We sat under a tree watching the tribe defile across the water-course: then remounting, after a ride of two miles, we reached a ground called Kuranyali [30], upon which the wigwams of the Nomads were already rising. The parched and treeless stubble lies about eight miles from and 145° S.E. of Gudingaras; both places are supplied by Angagarri, a well near the sea, which is so distant that cattle, to return before nightfall, must start early in the morning.