The Morning Of The 29th January Was Unusually Fine:
The last night's rain
hung in masses of mist about the hill-sides, and the rapid evaporation
clothed the clear background with deep blue.
We began the day by ascending
a steep goat-track: it led to a sandy Fiumara, overgrown with Jujubes and
other thorns, abounding in water, and showing in the rocky sides, caverns
fit for a race of Troglodytes. Pursuing the path over a stony valley lying
between parallel ranges of hill, we halted at about 10 A.M. in a large
patch of grass-land, the produce of the rain, which for some days past had
been fertilising the hill-tops. Whilst our beasts grazed greedily, we sat
under a bush, and saw far beneath us the low country which separates the
Ghauts from the sea. Through an avenue in the rolling nimbus, we could
trace the long courses of Fiumaras, and below, where mist did not obstruct
the sight, the tawny plains, cut with watercourses glistening white, shone
in their eternal summer.
Shortly after 10 A.M., we resumed our march, and began the descent of the
Ghauts by a ravine to which the guide gave the name of 'Kadar.' No sandy
watercourse, the 'Pass' of this barbarous land, here facilitates the
travellers' advance: the rapid slope of the hill presents a succession of
blocks and boulders piled one upon the other in rugged steps, apparently
impossible to a laden camel. This ravine, the Splugen of Somaliland, led
us, after an hour's ride, to the Wady Duntu, a gigantic mountain-cleft
formed by the violent action of torrents. The chasm winds abruptly between
lofty walls of syenite and pink granite, glittering with flaky mica, and
streaked with dykes and veins of snowy quartz: the strata of the
sandstones that here and there projected into the bed were wonderfully
twisted around a central nucleus, as green boughs might be bent about a
tree. Above, the hill-tops towered in the air, here denuded of vegetable
soil by the heavy monsoon, there clothed from base to brow with gum trees,
whose verdure was delicious to behold. The channel was now sandy, then
flagged with limestone in slippery sheets, or horrid with rough boulders:
at times the path was clear and easy; at others, a precipice of twenty or
thirty feet, which must be a little cataract after rain, forced us to
fight our way through the obstinate thorns that defended some spur of
ragged hill. As the noontide heat, concentrated in this funnel, began to
affect man and beast, we found a granite block, under whose shady brow
clear water, oozing from the sand, formed a natural bath, and sat there
for a while to enjoy the spectacle and the atmosphere, perfumed, as in
part of Persia and Northern Arabia, by the aromatic shrubs of the desert.
After a short half-hour, we remounted and pursued our way down the Duntu
chasm. As we advanced, the hills shrank in size, the bed became more
level, and the walls of rock, gradually widening out, sank into the plain.
Brisk and elastic above, the air, here soft, damp, and tepid, and the sun
burning with a more malignant heat, convinced us that we stood once more
below the Ghauts.
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