The Pretty Wife Sudiyah And The Good
Khayrah Were Made Happy By Sundry Gifts Of Huge Birmingham Ear-Rings,
Brooches And Bracelets, Scissors, Needles, And Thread.
The evening as
usual ended in a feast.
"We halted a week at Wilensi to feed,--in truth my companions had been
faring lentenly at Harar,--and to lay in stock and strength for the long
desert march before us. A Somali was despatched to the city under orders
to load an ass with onions, tobacco, spices, wooden platters, and Karanji
[2], which our penniless condition had prevented our purchasing. I spent
the time collecting a vocabulary of the Harari tongue under the auspices
of Mad Said and All the poet, a Somali educated at the Alma Mater. He was
a small black man, long-headed and long-backed, with remarkably prominent
eyes, a bulging brow, nose pertly turned up, and lean jaws almost
unconscious of beard. He knew the Arabic, Somali, Galla, and Harari
languages, and his acuteness was such, that I found no difficulty in what
usually proves the hardest task,--extracting the grammatical forms. "A
poet, the son of a Poet," to use his own phrase, he evinced a Horatian
respect for the beverage which bards love, and his discourse, whenever it
strayed from the line of grammar, savoured of over reverence for the
goddess whom Pagans associated with Bacchus and Ceres. He was also a
patriot and a Tyrtaeus. No clan ever attacked his Girhis without smarting
under terrible sarcasms, and his sneers at the young warriors for want of
ardour in resisting Gudabirsi encroachments, were quoted as models of the
"withering." Stimulated by the present of a Tobe, he composed a song in
honor of the pilgrim:
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