But I, who know it, see beneath the beauty. Those aloes with the red-hot pikers are armed with spikes and sharp-hooked thorns to tear your flesh in ribands. Their very colour, if one looks closely, is suggestive of snakes and death, not brightness and life. The grass will soon die, and the yellow ground is but a crust of harsh sand that has no substance. The agriculturists who would wrest a living from out it have a hard row to hoe to procure even the bare wherewithal to live. Beautiful it is, yet withal a thin, harsh, cruel land. We cover the sixty miles to Hargeisa in two clear days, and ride into the usual African up-country town. Here is the D.C.'s Court, the police lines, the prison and the D.C.'s house. Beyond them the native town; a town of sticks, straw and native mats, with a few sun-dried brick houses, and one of stone. Between all this is a natural park; a park on the banks of a waterless river-bed; a park filled with the thorn trees, the aloes in flower, and the plant with the thousands of fingers. Strangely enough, here is a European lady as well, who sits beneath a huge mimosa tree and puts them all into a picture. She says they are beautiful. It is one hundred and twenty miles as the crow flies to Zeila, and nearly two hundred by the road we have come. There is a mail waiting; it has arrived by Berbera, and links us up with the outer world, which after all, and in these days, is not so far away. Here, for the first time in four months, I speak to an Englishman, and, when it is time to pack up for the return journey to Zeila, I leave Hargeisa with regret. CHAPTER XX THE BREAKING OF THE MAD MULLAH The Mullah's deeds--Supply and transport--Arrival of No. 2 Unit, R.A.F., at Berbera--Details and arrangements--Mullah miracles--Aeroplane scouting--Friendlies--R.A.F. reports--Post-bag bombing--To Medishe--The Mullah's birds--A Mullah victim--Tali and the last of the Mullah. In 1919 British Somaliland was roughly divided--politically--into two separate territories, the East and the West. The former dominated by one saturnine personality, the Mad Mullah, who rarely (of late years never) intruded into the more peaceful, if more subtle, situation of the West.