86 AFRICAN WANDE KINGS.

long and beg for medicines, and witli the dose the illness must at once vanish, or else both doctor and medicine are held valueless. To repay the doctor for advice or medicine, never, by any chance, enters their heads ; they hold tlie furnishing of the one as the other to be only the doctor's duty, before both man and Allah.

After we were thus for some time pestered, we again mounted our dromedaries, and left the Arabs to their own devices, who gazed after us witli no pleased eyes, and sliowered curses on us, as Ave would not remain and serve out medicines to them ; although not one of them would, on being asked, procure us eveil a little milk, but slunk away behind his companions on our requesting it, and pointed to his neighbour as better able to furnish it than he. For more than half-an-hour we rode on through the far scattered village, nor even then did we see any thing like the half of it, as most of the huts lay off the main patli, concealed among bushes and trees ; and great numbers of the tribe, also, had no huts at all, but lived under the forest's shade. All the huts we saw were composed of palm mats, circular and kiln-shaped, high behind, but so low in front, that one has to stoop much to enter them. The interior arrangement is most simple ; a raised sleeping-place, called an angareb; a few stakes driven into the ground, or a low bench covered with mats, woven of reeds of dried twigs, form the whole furniture.

If the owner is well to do, the sleeping-place is covered or surrounded with a great coarse grey woollen cloth, to keep off wind and weather. A murhaka (two stones to grind grain with), and earthen pot are all the moveables, as these, with a girbe (leathern water-bucket) are all required for Arab housekeeping ; so that, without any great preparation or loss, they can desert the bii-sch (huts), and proceed on their constant wandei'ings. Some twenty or forty huts, inhabited by families related to each other, are genei'ally surrounded with an enclosure or thorn fence, called a seriba ; and so a settlement or village is made up out of a number of these smaller squattings. Each of such family seribas has the most respected or oldest of its occupiers as its head or Sheik ; and this dignity is often even hereditary, so that the children frequently have a wokil. In the evenings a fire burns before each tent, on each of which may be seen, in every position and posture, the