England: they are fine manly specimens of the race, but noisy and impudent, like all young savages. At two years of age they hold out their right hand for sweetmeats, and if refused become insolent. The citizens amuse themselves with the ball,[1] at which they play roughly as Scotch linkers: they are divided into two parties, bachelors and married men; accidents often occur, and no player wears any but the scantiest clothing, otherwise he would retire from the conflict in rags. The victors sing and dance about the town for hours, brandishing their spears, shouting their slogans, boasting of ideal victories—the Abyssinian Donfatu, or war vaunt,—and advancing in death -triumph with frantic gestures: a battle won would be celebrated with less circumstance in Europe. This is the effect of no occupation—the primum mobile of the Indian prince's kite-flying and all the puerilities of the pompous East.
We usually find an encampment of Badawin outside the gate. Their tents are worse than any gipsy's, low, smoky, and of the rudest construction. These people are a spectacle of savageness. Their huge heads of shock hair, dyed red and dripping with butter, are garnished with a Firin, or long three-pronged comb, a stick, which acts as scratcher when the owner does not wish to grease his fingers, and sometimes with the ominous ostrich feather, showing that the wearer has "killed his man "; a soiled and ragged cotton cloth covers their shoulders, and a similar article is wrapped round their loins.[2] All wear coarse sandals, and appear in the
- ↑ It is called by the Arabs, Kubabah, by the Somal Goasa. Johnston (Travels in Southern Abyssinia, chap. 8) has described the game; he errs, however, in supposing it peculiar to the Dankali tribes.
- ↑ This is in fact the pilgrim dress of Al-Islam; its wide diffusion to the eastward, as well as west of the Red Sea, proves its antiquity as a popular dress.
