'Southern Arabia, by Theodore Bent, F.R.G.S., F.S.A., Author of 'The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland' 'The Sacred City of the Ethiopians' 'The Cyclades, Or Life Among the Insular Greeks' etc. and Mrs Theodore Bent' [‎310] (367/552)

310
THE EASTEEN SOUDAN
learnt from the Bedouin of Mount Erba, who soften the
horns in hot water, grease them, pull them out and flatten
them with weights and polish them, using them as camel
sticks. The governor gave us several of these sticks, and
also presented an ibex-horn head-scratcher to me, remarking
as he did so, with a polite gesture, that it was a nice thing
to have by me when my head itched. He was a little
and very dark man, with a pleasant, honest face, and
three transverse scars across his cheeks, each about two
inches long. His secretary was yet smaller, and decorated
in the same way. The chief of the police was a very fat,
good-humoured man, with two little perpendicular cuts
beside each eye. These are tribal marks.
There was great palavering about our journey into the
interior. Though several travellers had visited the Eed Sea
side of the massive group of Mount Erba on holidays from
Sawakin in search of sport, no one had as yet been behind it,
and thither we intended to go. The governor had summoned
three sheikhs from the mountains, into whose hands he
confided us. The day we first landed I thought I never had
beheld such scowling, disagreeable faces, but afterwards we
became good friends. My husband and I went ashore the
second dajv and sat in a sort of audience-arbour near the
madrepore pier, and many maps were drawn on the ground
with camel-sticks, and we were quite proud that my husband
was able to settle it all with no interpreter.
Sheikh Ali Debalohp, the chief of the Kilab tribe, was to
take us to his district, Wadi A seasonal or intermittent watercourse, or the valley in which it flows. Hadai and Wadi A seasonal or intermittent watercourse, or the valley in which it flows. 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 is, as we learnt later, a man of questionable
loyalty to the Egyptian Government, and supposed to be