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Sheikh Ali Debalohp had a quilted cotton coverlet, and Mohammed Ali Hamid the same and a cartridge-belt; Sheikh Hassan Bafori a blanket, a smart silk keffieh and a sword-belt; and the mamour an opera-glass and a silk blanket, besides minor things; all seemed very well satisfied. They certainly were all very nice to us.
Debalohp suggested to my husband that he knew of some ruins in a neighbouring valley to which he could take him, but it was not without considerable hesitation that he decided to go.
Their camping arrangements were never luxurious. The Mrs. Debalohp used to hoist a mat on a spear, to keep off the wind. Mr. Debalohp used to lie on another mat in the open, surrounded by his weapons. The huts we saw were made of sail-cloth, and were very neat inside. There is a passage all round where pots and baskets are kept, and within that a square room made of matting with a mat floor.
The encounter was amusing to look back on afterwards, but by no means so at the time; the yelling and brandishing of spears and shields and the parleying of Hassan Bafori and Mohammed Ali Hamid, who went forward, and the earnest wishes for the presence of Sheikh Ali Debalohp, who had gone round by his home to join us later.
We were terribly afraid we should be made to go by a lower way between the mountains and the sea, in which case our journey would not be of nearly such great value in map-making, but at last my husband persuaded the sheikhs, saying he would sign, with all the rest of us, a paper to protect the heads of Sheikhs Ali Debalohp, Hassan Bafori, and Mohamed Ali Hamed, which we did.
Naturally he felt rather startled at being confronted with this unexpected discovery, and in the short space of time then available it was impossible to grasp it all. So he rode back joyfully to tell the news to his party at Hadai. He told Debalohp that he had decided that we should move our camp thither, and stay as long as it was possible. Difficulties again confronted us.
Also here we saw many graves of the Debalohp family neat heaps of white stones, with a double row of white stones forming a pattern around them, and a headstone towards Mecca, on one of which was a rude Arabic inscription. These tombs reminded us very forcibly of the Bogos tombs in Northern Abyssinia, and evidently point to a kinship of custom.
Our two Kourbab sheikhs did not want to go. Sheikh Mohammed Ali Hamid was anxious to get on to his own country, and Sheikh Hassan Bafori quite set his face against our going at all, and Debalohp himself had to be firmly spoken to. An extra present to him was what finally helped us, and at length we all made a start on the following day to my husband's new El Dorado.
Sheikh Ali Debalohp, the chief of the Kilab tribe, was to take us to his district, Wadi Hadai and Wadi Gabeit, some way inland at the back of the Erba mountains, which group we insisted on going entirely round. He was a tall, fine specimen of a Bishari sheikh, with his neck terribly scarred by a burn, to heal which he had been treated in hospital at Sawakin.
He of the Kilab tribe, Ali Debalohp, was the most important of them, and he took one of his wives with him; all had their servants and shield-bearers, and most of them were wild, unprepossessing looking men, with shaggy locks and lard-daubed curls, and all of them were, I believe, thorough ruffians, who, as we were told afterwards, would willingly have sold us to the Dervishes had they thought they would have gained by the transaction.
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