All
The Trees Are Thorny Except The Sycamore And The Asclepias.
The Gub, or
Jujube, grows luxuriantly in thickets:
Its dried wood is used by women to
fumigate their hair [19]: the Kedi, a tree like the porcupine,--all
spikes,--supplies the Bedouins with hatchet-handles. I was shown the Abol
with its edible gum, and a kind of Acacia, here called Galol. Its bark
dyes cloth a dull red, and the thorn issues from a bulb which, when young
and soft, is eaten by the Somal, when old it becomes woody, and hard as a
nut. At 9 A.M. we crossed the Lesser Abbaso, a Fiumara with high banks of
stiff clay and filled with large rolled stones: issuing from it, we
traversed a thorny path over ascending ground between higher hills, and
covered with large boulders and step-like layers of grit. Here appeared
several Gudabirsi tombs, heaps of stones or pebbles, surrounded by a fence
of thorns, or an enceinte of loose blocks: in the latter, slabs are used
to make such houses as children would build in play, to denote the number
of establishments left by the deceased. The new grave is known by the
conical milk-pails surmounting the stick at the head of the corpse, upon
the neighbouring tree is thrown the mat which bore the dead man to his
last home, and hard by are the blackened stones upon which his funeral
feast was cooked. At 11 A.M. we reached the Greater Abbaso, a Fiumara
about 100 yards wide, fringed with lovely verdure and full of the antelope
called Gurnuk:
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