The Eesa, here mixed with the Gudabirsi, have little power: we found them poor and proportionally importunate. The men, wild-looking as open mouths, staring eyes, and tangled hair could make them, gazed with extreme eagerness upon my scarlet blanket: for very shame they did not beg it, but the inviting texture was pulled and fingered by the greasy multitude. We closed the hut whenever a valuable was produced, but eager eyes peeped through every cranny, till the End of Time ejaculated "Praised be Allah!" [43] and quoted the Arab saying, "Show not the Somal thy door, and if he find it, block it up!" The women and children were clad in chocolate- coloured hides, fringed at the tops: to gratify them I shot a few hawks, and was rewarded with loud exclamations,--"Allah preserve thy hand!"--"May thy skill never fail thee before the foe!" A crone seeing me smoke, inquired if the fire did not burn: I handed my pipe, which nearly choked her, and she ran away from a steaming kettle, thinking it a weapon. As my companions observed, there was not a "Miskal of sense in a Maund of heads:" yet the people looked upon my sun-burnt skin with a favour they denied to the "lime-white face." I was anxious to proceed in the afternoon, but Raghe had arrived at the frontier of his tribe: he had blood to settle amongst the Gudabirsi, and without a protector he could not enter their lands. At night we slept armed on account of the lions that infest the hills, and our huts were surrounded with a thorn fence--a precaution here first adopted, and never afterwards neglected. Early on the morning of the 4th of December heavy clouds rolled down from the mountains, and a Scotch mist deepened into a shower: our new Abban had not arrived, and the hut-mats, saturated with rain, had become too heavy for the camels to carry. In the forenoon the Eesa kraal, loading their Asses [44], set out towards the plain. This migration presented no new features, except that several sick and decrepid were barbarously left behind, for lions and hyaenas to devour. [45] To deceive "warhawks" who might be on the lookout, the migrators set fire to logs of wood and masses of sheep's earth, which, even in rain, will smoke and smoulder for weeks. About midday arrived the two Gudabirsi who intended escorting us to the village of our Abbans. The elder, Rirash, was a black-skinned, wild- looking fellow, with a shock head of hair and a deep scowl which belied his good temper and warm heart: the other was a dun-faced youth betrothed to Raghe's daughter. They both belonged to the Mahadasan clan, and commenced operations by an obstinate attempt to lead us far out of our way eastwards. The pretext was the defenceless state of their flocks and herds, the real reason an itching for cloth and tobacco. We resisted manfully this time, nerved by the memory of wasted days, and, despite their declarations of Absi [46], we determined upon making westward for the hills.