After a journey of three-quarters of an hour we approached the village of Bahardar Georgis. Before entering the hamlet we had to conform to a singular usage. Two men had stationed themselves beside the track, one on each side of it, and they held a _shama_ across it. We asked Johannes what this meant, and he told us that it was to protect the villagers from the power of the “evil eye.” This is lost if the stranger who may possess it passes under the _shama_. We had to move the greasy robe aside and go beneath it, hoping rather than believing that it was not verminous. The Habashes are extremely superstitious in this respect. It is customary to screen a person of rank with a shama when he drinks, to safeguard him from the same peril, and such persons are frequently kept from view likewise while they eat their meals. Mr. Hormuzd Rassam, being a high dignitary, was carefully shielded in this way to his no slight disgust. He wrote: “As the generality of the garments spread out for our seclusion had not been washed for months, and probably not since they were first worn, the reader’s imagination may be left to conceive the odour which surrounded us on these occasions. But even if they had been washed no later than the previous day, the disagreeable smell of rancid butter with which the natives besmear their heads would suffice to render any such curtain almost intolerable.”[83] We had to use care in the selection of our camping-ground near Bahardar Georgis. Much of the ground is covered by the papyrus plant, and this shows dampness and, by consequence, risk of fever. We finally selected a spot on some high ground, where there was a dry, red soil. This happened to be close to a little settlement of the curious people called _Waitos_, who are only found in this district. They inhabited two or three huts near the village. Mr. Rassam has given a concise and interesting account of them: “The Waitos are Mussulmans of the Maliky sect, and although Mohammedanism recognizes no castes among its adherents, nevertheless these people, who subsist upon the flesh of the hippopotamus” (which is considered unclean by all other Abyssinians), “are looked down upon by their co-religionists, who consider it a degradation to associate with them. A few among them cultivate a little grain, but the flesh of the hippopotamus forms their staple food. . . . I was unable to obtain any satisfactory account of the origin of this peculiar people. It is just possible, however, that there may be some relationship between them and the _Watos_, a tribe of Gallas inhabiting the banks of the Hawash, south of Shoa, who are also said to live on the flesh of the hippopotamus.”[84] Stecker, who was scrupulously accurate in almost every particular which he mentioned, said that the _Waitos_ were, “strictly speaking, a Pagan sect (_eigentlich Heiden-secte_)”[85] but in this he was mistaken. Oddly enough, these people, though they are, in a sense,