own spears, and often sit on them to spare
their shoulders: they are now dismounting
because their saddles hurt them, then mounting
again because their legs are tired. "An
English boy of fourteen," says our pilgrim,
"would have shown more bottom than the
sturdiest."

The two hundred miles or thereabouts of
travel from Zayla to Harar, we mean to clear
almost at a bound. We mention only the wild
ostriches, the falling upon the fresh track of
two hundred Habrawal horsemen, against
whom what is a cavalcade of nine men, seven
of them arrant cowards, and two serving-
women? " Verily, O Pilgrim! " cries the
End of Time, " whoso seeth the track, seeth
the foe," and he hums, in despair,

     Man is but a handful of dust,
     And life is a violent storm.

We must not dwell on the escape among
thorns, the nights spent among the flies and
vermin, of deserted kraals, declared to be
the only safe places of rest; or say much of
the setting out of tribes who quit a kraal—
in one instance leaving the sick and infirm
behind, to perish miserably and lie at the
mercy of the lions and hyenas. They who
were guilty of this last-mentioned barbarity
were Eesa Bedouins, of whose race it had
been said, at Zayla, that its men are the
types of treachery—wretches who, with the
left hand, offer a bowl of milk, and with the
right hand stab. They are blacker, uglier, and
balder than their neighbours; but they have
piercing well-trained eyes, often have good
profiles; and some of their girls, we are told,
have fine forms with piquant features. They
are both more hospitable and more
murderous than the other Somali, so that there
was some reason for the symbol of the milk
in one hand and the dagger in the other.
They scorn theft unaccompanied with homicide,
and they are not, like their neighbours,
noted liars. These people importuned our
pilgrim, as he passed through, to settle
among them, offering him sundry wives; and
they flattered him by saying, that after a few
days' residence he would become quite one of
themselves. The true wealth of these men
lies in their flocks and herds. " Sheep and
goats," they say, "are of silver, and the cow
of gold."

Then presently there was the march up
from the maritime plain by the ghauts to the
first fringe of Ethiopian highlands. So the
path of the pilgrim led him to the Gudabirsi,
his companions hunting for news by the way.
"News liveth,'' said the End of Time; and it
is strange to be told how it lives in those
wild places. Captain Burton found the
wild Gudabirsi talking with much interest
about the Russian war; and heard at
Harar of a violent storm which had, only
a few weeks before it was there discussed
damaged the shipping in the harbour of
Bombay.

About the tombs of the Gudabirsi, passed
sometimes upon the march, a word ought to
be said. They are heaps of stone surrounded
by a fence of thorns or loose blocks. Little
stone houses on each grave, such houses as
children at play would make out of pile
stones, indicate by their number the rank of
the deceased—how many establishments he
kept. The dead man's milk-pails are hung
on a stick at his grave-head; on a neighbouring
tree has been thrown the mat that bore
him to his burial; and hard by are the ashes
of his funeral feast.

On went the travellers, till from a height
there was in view a golden streak on the
horizon; and that was the journey's end—
the Harar prairie.

When within sight of the success for which
he had been labouring, the adventurer fell
sick; and had he been content to turn his
face to the wall, might have died, although
he was in truth tenderly nursed by the wild
people, and had his stomach burnt affectionately
in six places by the End of Time. "The
end of physic is fire," said that sententious
worthy. Cautery, chiefly in the form of a rude
moxa, is in great favour among the Somali,
who believe that disease and fire cannot exist
together. The danger was overcome, and
the journey continued by a traveller who, as
an Englishman, knew that he must not
succumb. But the Englishman had learned
enough about the sun and the dry wind of
Africa to regard, as not the least of breakfast
luxuries, the pat of butter, not provided to
be eaten, but to be smeared over head and
body.

To enter upon the Harar prairie was, in
the opinion of the outlying tribes, to pass the
gates of death. Yet, as Harar was
approached, the travellers came into a cultivated
land, found reapers at work with tiny
sickles upon yellow crops of holcus; men
thrashing and winnowing; women husking
the pineapple-formed heads of the holcus in
their mortars made out of a hollowed trunk,
washing the threshing-floors with cow-dung
and water, as defence from insects; heaping
the heads of grain up into cunning patterns,
and surrounding them and the straw-heaps
with thorn fences, to protect them from the
plunderings of the wild hog. There was
something hopeful in thus coming on a
harvest-home after a journey through the
desert. So Harar was reached at last; the
camels and the luggage—all but a few
necessaries that would travel in a pair of saddle-
bags upon a single mule—being left, with
the cowards and the women, in the hands of
an adjacent prince, lord indeed of that harvest,
who had treated them well; and, taken
them into his royal dwelling—or, as Mr.
Burton says, his smoky closet, or, as the
nursery song would say, his counting-house—
and fed them royally with bread and honey.
Much had depended on the favour of this
man, the Gerad Adan. He fortunately