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A few ostriches appeared, but they were too shy even for bullet. At 8 P.M. we crossed one of the numerous drains which intersect this desert "Biya Hablod," or the Girls' Water, a fiumara running from south-west to east and north-east.
Beyond the Porta Gordicchio is the wood market, and one for horses and forage is outside the Porta Fiumara, where the barrack for belated Montenegrins stands, for they are not admitted within the walls.
The substance, fine yellow mud, glued by the secretions of the ant, is hard to break: it is pierced, sieve-like, by a network of tiny shafts. I saw these hills for the first time in the Wady Darkaynlay: in the interior they are larger and longer than near the maritime regions. We travelled up the Fiumara in a southerly direction till 8 A.M., when the guides led us away from the bed.
At 11 A.M. we reached the Greater Abbaso, a Fiumara about 100 yards wide, fringed with lovely verdure and full of the antelope called Gurnuk: its watershed was, as usual in this region, from west and south-west to east and north-east. About noon we halted, having travelled eight miles from the Holy Tree.
Three o'clock P.M. brought us to a broad Fiumara choked with the thickest and most tangled vegetation: we were shown some curious old Galla wells, deep holes about twenty feet in diameter, excavated in the rock; some were dry, others overgrown with huge creepers, and one only supplied us with tolerable water.
In the rock was a hole about two feet wide, whence a crystal sheet welled over the Fiumara bank, forming a paradise for frog and tadpole.
Revived by the music, we pushed on more cheerily. At last the Donkey preceded us, and about 3 A.M. we found, in a Fiumara, some holes which supplied us with bitter water, truly delicious after fifteen hours of thirst.
Having skirted the sea for two hours, I rode off with the End of Time to inspect the Dihh Silil , a fiumara which runs from the western hills north-eastwards to the sea. Its course is marked by a long line of graceful tamarisks, whose vivid green looked doubly bright set off by tawny stubble and amethyst-blue sky. These freshets are the Edens of Adel.
At 9 A.M. we crossed the Lesser Abbaso, a Fiumara with high banks of stiff clay and filled with large rolled stones: issuing from it, we traversed a thorny path over ascending ground between higher hills, and covered with large boulders and step-like layers of grit.
On the evening of August 11th the captives were led to the high bank of the Wady Sudr, where it received another and smaller fiumara yet unnamed, and bidden to prepare for death. Boldly facing his enemies, Palmer cursed them in Biblical language, and in the name of the Lord. But while the words were in his mouth, a bullet struck him and he fell.
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