Although they were on higher ground, they appeared uneasy at the sight of strangers. Bruce saluted the chief, asking him if he would sell a goat out of their large flock; but the man seemed to think it prudent to decline entering into conversation, and the whole tribe passed in silence onward. In the evening Bruce resumed his journey, and at night pitched his tent at Hamhammou, on the side of a small green hill, some hundred feet from the bed of the torrent. The weather had been perfectly good since he left Masuah; but this afternoon the mountains were quite hid, and heavy clouds were sweeping along the sides of the lower range of hills; the lightning was frequent, in broad flakes, and deeply tinged with blue, and long, rumbling peals of thunder were heard at a distance. As Bruce's description of this storm is one of the parts of his narrative which have been marked as exaggerated, we give it in his own words: "The river," he says, "scarcely ran at our passing it, when, all on a sudden, we heard a noise on the mountains above louder than the loudest thunder. Our guides, upon this, flew to the baggage, and removed it to the top of the green hill; which was no sooner done, than we saw the river coming down in a stream about the height of a man, and the breadth of the whole bed it used to occupy. The water was thickly tinged with red earth, and ran in the form of a deep river, and swelled a little above its banks, but did not reach our station on the hill." Salt says: "Bruce passed a night on the same spot (Hamhammou), and it was his fortune, as well as ours, to encounter here a terrible storm, which, as usual, he describes with some exaggeration." In Sicily and in Greece we have known people to be carried away by the violent "fiumaras," which are even there produced by the sudden rains; and Bruce's description of a storm _within the tropics_ does not appear at all exaggerated. But it seems that Mr. Salt's storm was not quite equal to the one described by poor Bruce, and he therefore makes up the difference by raising a little tempest of his own against a fellow-traveller: still, in a very few pages after, he says, "We heard that the dead bodies of three men had been found washed down by the torrent on this side of Tarenta." "Dead men," it has been said, "tell no tales!" yet in this instance they certainly do very strongly corroborate Bruce's account of the storm he witnessed: but Lord Valentia and his secretary seem to have fancied that they were to find everything in Abyssinia, elements and all, precisely as Bruce left them forty years before. Leaving Hamhammou, Bruce first saw "the dung of elephants, which was full of thick pieces of undigested branches." He also observed the paths where these enormous animals had passed; trees were torn up by the roots, some were even broken in the middle, and branches, half eaten, were lying on the ground.