Let us try to realize where we are standing. If we travel 17 southward from Wagga or from Sheikh, we go downhill, but we find that the dried-up beds of the streams are sloping away from the sea. We have crossed the main water-parting of the country. The mountain ridges which we have scaled are merely the steep broken edges of a great highland block which falls gently southwards to a broad plateau, without hills or streams, a monotony of stones, red earth, dust and dense thorn scrub. In the dry season we may travel for a week or ten days together and find not a drop of water. On the caravan routes are a few wells, such as we 18 see here, but many of these dry up, and we have to dig for a few mouthfuls of warm, dirty water in the liquid mud at the bottom. This is the _Haud_; it belongs partly to Britain, partly to Italy and partly to Abyssinia, though in such a country boundaries have little or no meaning; they are merely imaginary lines drawn from a few known points through the unexplored area. On the mountain slopes and on the plains at the foot are the courses of many rivers and streams. These are marked on the map, but few are permanent. In the rains they are rushing torrents, overflowing the channels which are too narrow to contain them and spreading out into wide unhealthy marshes; in the dry season they are mere channels or _tugs_, with a few stagnant pools in the deepest parts. The rains are of the tropical kind, beginning in April and going on, with one break, through the summer. The winter months are almost rainless, and the smallest annual fall is on the coast. The peculiarities of the plateau and the seasonal rainfall have been largely responsible for the shaping of the Somali. He is essentially a nomad; all his property is moveable and consists of flocks and herds and camels. It is true that there are remains of stone buildings, and deep wells in the rock, especially further inland; but these are not the work of the present-day Somali; his house is as easily moved as his cattle. In the dry weather we 19 see the herds collected round the permanent wells and on the banks of the few streams where some water and pasture are still to be found. Notice the primitive native method of getting 20 at the water. A man is handing it up in a jar or skin, while another pours it into a trough for the cattle. The summer rains bring vegetation to the dry steppe, and forthwith the people with their animals migrate to the cooler air and fresh pasture of the plateau. Berbera and the coast towns empty themselves in this way in the hot weather, so that there is a great change in the size of the population at different seasons of the year. There is no real agriculture until we reach the borders of Abyssinia and the river valleys in the far south and west.