The Skin, Amongst The Tribes
Inhabiting The Hot Regions, Is Smooth, Black, And Glossy; As The Altitude
Increases It Becomes Lighter, And About Harar It Is Generally Of A _Cafe
Au Lait_ Colour.
The Bedouins are fond of raising beauty marks in the
shape of ghastly seams, and the thickness of the epidermis favours the
size of these _stigmates_.
The male figure is tall and somewhat ungainly.
In only one instance I observed an approach to the steatopyge, making the
shape to resemble the letter S; but the shoulders are high, the trunk is
straight, the thighs fall off, the shin bones bow slightly forwards, and
the feet, like the hands, are coarse, large, and flat. Yet with their
hair, of a light straw colour, decked with the light waving feather, and
their coal-black complexions set off by that most graceful of garments the
clean white Tobe [17], the contrasts are decidedly effective.
In mind the Somal are peculiar as in body. They are a people of most
susceptible character, and withal uncommonly hard to please. They dislike
the Arabs, fear and abhor the Turks, have a horror of Franks, and despise
all other Asiatics who with them come under the general name of Hindi
(Indians). The latter are abused on all occasions for cowardice, and a
want of generosity, which has given rise to the following piquant epigram:
"Ask not from the Hindi thy want:
Impossible that the Hindi can be generous!
Had there been one liberal man in El Hind,
Allah had raised up a prophet in El Hind!"
They have all the levity and instability of the Negro character; light-
minded as the Abyssinians,--described by Gobat as constant in nothing but
inconstancy,--soft, merry, and affectionate souls, they pass without any
apparent transition into a state of fury, when they are capable of
terrible atrocities.
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