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The first day we had our camels loaded with jowari, and at Bir Mighar we took up fuel. From Hagheri Ask to Kanfar is about six miles, and we spent two hours over it. Trees became more numerous, good large ones, chiefly arrack and acacia, and a few small fan-palms.
Our crew, consisting of seventy-one men and boys, prepared, as evening fell, a mess of Jowari grain and grease, the recipe of which I spare you, and it was despatched in a style that would have done credit to Kafirs as regards gobbling, bolting, smearing lips, licking fingers, and using ankles as napkins.
At times water must be sprinkled over the meal, until a finely powdered paste is ready for the oven: thus several hours' labour is required to prepare a few pounds of bread. About 6 A.M. there appears a substantial breakfast of roast beef and mutton, with scones of Jowari grain, the whole drenched in broth.
The Bedou does very little in the way of cultivation, but when grass is scarce, and consequently milk, he turns his attention to the sowing of jowari in little round fields dotted about the valleys, with a wall round to keep the goats off.
There was a great flutter when we arrived on the scene, for there were a large number of women and girls bathing. They did not seem to mind their own relations seeing them, but on our approach they rushed into their blue dresses and fled. This sulphureous stream makes the crops grow prodigiously, and we walked through fields of jowari and Indian corn as high as our heads.
Mansur has all this time been living, like the slaves of the country, on jowari porridge, which is made by grinding the seed into flour and boiling it in water until it forms a good thick paste, when master and man sit round the earthen pot it is boiled in, pick out lumps, and suck it off their fingers.
In front of nearly every house you see large slabs of granite, the stones on which the jowari is ground by women, who, kneeling before them, rub the grain down to flour with a smaller stone, which they hold with both hands at once. Thus rubbing and grinding away, swaying monotonously to and fro, they cheer the time by singing and droning in cadence to the motion of their bodies.
Here all the people were very busily engaged in their harvest, cutting their jowari, and thrashing it out with long sticks. The whole country lies in long waves, crested with cropping little hills, thickly clad with small trees and brushwood. In the hollows of these waves the cultivation is very luxuriant.
The Jowari grows luxuriantly, with stalks 8 and 9 feet high, and this first effort had well rewarded the enterpriser. Lieutenant Speke lent the slave Farhan, to show the art of digging; for this he received the present of a goat. I may here remark that everywhere in the Somali country the people are prepared to cultivate grain, and only want some one to take the initiative.
P.S. Donkeys are very scarce; only found in a few places in the Unyamuezi country. Vegetable. Rice, jowari, bagri, maize, manioc, sweet potatoes, yams, pumpkins, melons, cucumbers, tobacco, cotton, pulse in great varieties, chilis, benghans, plantains, tomatoes, sesamum. The Quantity of Kit taken for this Journey consisted of
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