Not one day since I landed in Somaliland has passed without my running up against one or more of the victims of the Mullah, now reported to be getting old, and so stout as to be almost inactive. On trek I could not sit down to breakfast without hearing the wail of some poor woman or child outside the encampment. "Sahib! Sahib! for the love of God! A bite of food for a poor meskin!" Daily in the Court Room wrecks of women and children came before me for relief. Almost invariably I found, on the strictest inquiries being made into their cases, that their villages had been destroyed, their property looted, their men-folk killed, by the murdering gang of thieves who carried out incessantly the merciless policy of this awful man. In desperation they had roamed across country, ever making away from the territory where the terror reigned. How the Mullah had put to the sword the men, women, and children of one whole section of a tribe because, whilst being shown over a fort in the course of construction by their headman, a wooden beam had fallen and broken his arm, was related to me a few days before she died by a poor woman, one of the few survivors. I had read much of the man before I came to Somaliland, and rather admired what I imagined to be his sporting character. But since I have learned enough about him at first hand, and have been so shocked at the misery, caused by this fiend, that is ever being brought to my notice, the very mention of his name causes my blood to boil. It was in the West, and in the month of October, 1919, that I found myself deeply involved in nothing more exciting than the hearing of divorce cases, marriage disputes, petty loots, and homicides. In fact occupied with the thousand and one affairs, the settlement of which goes to make up the greater part of the routine work in the daily life of a District Commissioner in the Zeila District of British Somaliland. Into the midst of all this came a mail, and in the mail a letter addressed to me from the Officer Commanding Troops (also, at that moment, administering the Government) asking if I would take over the organisation of the supply and transport for certain contemplated operations against the "Mad Mullah." My reply, though couched in more official language, can be summed up briefly as, "_Rather!_" In the course of this narrative, and after having thus explained my rôle in the expedition, I do not propose to do any more than set forth such events and happenings as came to my personal notice, or with which I naturally became conversant as being in close touch with the officers, or units, of whom I write. This is not a disquisition or treatise on how to run Supply and Transport in Somaliland, though a by-no-means unexciting subject.