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Updated: May 3, 2025
Neither sex possessed personal attractions, and the head-dresses of the women seen from behind resembled a pawnbroker's sign, except that they were blue instead of gilt. The people lived chiefly on holcus, and a narcotic called "jat," made by pounding the tender twigs of a tree of the same name.
Long before dawn the goodwife rises, wakens her handmaidens, lights the fire, and prepares for the Afur or morning meal. The quern is here unknown . A flat, smooth, oval slab, weighing about fifteen pounds, and a stone roller six inches in diameter, worked with both hands, and the weight of the body kneeling ungracefully upon it on "all fours," are used to triturate the holcus grain.
Finally, the Dayrah Jahi is when the magnetic needle points due north. "Foyst" and "buss," are the names applied by old travellers to the half-decked vessels of these seas. Holcus Sorghum, the common grain of Africa and Arabia: the Somali call it Hirad; the people of Yemen, Taam. The Somal being a people of less nervous temperament than the Arabs and Indians, do not fear the moonlight.
The Somal shuddered at the sight of a wayfarer, who rushed into our encampment in cuerpo, having barely run away with his life. Not that our caravan carried much to lose, a few hides and pots of clarified butter, to be exchanged for the Holcus grain of the Girhi cultivators, still the smallest contributions are thankfully received by these plunderers.
In the lower valley, a mass of waving holcus, we met a multitude of Galla peasants coming from the city market with new potlids and the empty gourds which had contained their butter, ghee, and milk: all wondered aloud at the Turk, concerning whom they had heard many horrors.
The road from Eastern Tura led through vast fields of millet, Indian corn, holcus sorghum, maweri, or panicum, or bajri, as called by the Arabs; gardens of sweet potatoes, large tracts of cucumbers, water-melons, mush-melons, and pea-nuts which grew in the deep furrows between the ridges of the holcus.
There we found the Bedouins, who, scarcely believing that we had escaped alive, grinned in the joy of their hearts, and we were at once provided from the chief's kitchen with a dish of Shabta, holcus cakes soaked in sour milk, and thickly powdered with red pepper, the salt of this inland region.
Neither goats, sheep, nor cattle thrive here, so the people are confined to fowls and fish. Cassava is very extensively cultivated, indeed, so generally is this plant grown, that it is impossible to know which is town and which is country: every hut has a plantation around it, in which is grown cassava, Holcus sorghum, maize, beans, nuts.
The women husked the pineapple-formed heads in mortars composed of a hollowed trunk , smeared the threshing floor with cow-dung and water to defend it from insects, piled the holcus heads into neat yellow heaps, spanned and crossed by streaks of various colours, brick-red and brownish-purple , and stacked the Karbi or straw, which was surrounded like the grain with thorn, as a defence against the wild hog.
It is served up in gourd bottles upon a basket of holcus heads, and strained through a pledget of cotton, fixed across the narrow mouth, into cups of the same primitive material: the drinkers sit around their liquor, and their hilarity argues its intoxicating properties.
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