I was glad to see that the servants set to work to wash their clothes with soap in the lake. The cleansing was needed. Soon the tents in our camp were draped with garments enough to occupy the wash-lines of a whole suburb. The lake had a pleasant temperature for bathing, and the men stayed in the water till their clothes were dry. On this morning we had a visit of ceremony from another priest, whose umbrella was of many colours. His attendants were a boy dressed in plum-coloured chintz with a yellow scroll-pattern on it, another boy, who was naked, and carried a bell which he tinkled incessantly, and three Abyssinian students. These learn to read and write the Gheez language, and I think the Bible is the only book which they study. They are lads from the villages who are “candidates for orders,” and the theological classes are held in the church-porches. I secured two satisfactory snap-shots of the priest. He received an oblation of five dollars with an absolutely impassive face, and then left us in doubt whether he was secretly gratified by the amount of the offering or inwardly disgusted by it. Dupuis and Crawley resumed their survey work in the afternoon, and I strolled away from camp with my gun and brought down a lesser bustard, of the size of a turkey. I also shot a brace of quail, but lost them in the long grass. Altogether it was a quiet day. The climate was now very pleasant, neither too hot at noon nor too cold at night. In the early morning there was a dead calm. After this a little breeze came down from the north-west, and the wind remained in that quarter till the afternoon. At four o’clock it shifted right round to the south-east, and blew pretty stiffly about seven. We always saw lightning in the evening. It seemed to play over the lake. On the morning of the 9th Dupuis and I got our Berthon collapsible boat ready. This had caused us much trouble on the upward march, as it is awkwardly shaped for donkey-transport. We took our guns and angling tackle, and paddled about three miles westward. Then we landed on a sandy beach, left two of our boys in charge of the boat, and went in search of game, taking one man with us. We had not walked far when we sighted a covey of guinea-fowl. We got ahead of them, and were trying to drive them towards the water when about forty rose in all directions, and we could not reload fast enough. Several were lost in the thick grass, chiefly owing to the boy’s stupidity; he could not make up his mind which bird to pounce upon first. As we were returning to the beach by the way we had come, Dupuis put up a brace of partridges and shot them. They must have “sat tight” all through the fusillade, and only rose when my companion nearly walked them down. We carried about ten head back to the boat.