FATE OF THE “FRIENDLIES."

Pahiatua Herald, Volume XVIII, Issue 4656, 9 October 1913, Page 6

FATE OF THE “FRIENDLIES."

A SOMALILAND RAID AND ITS AVENGERS.

(By Allan Ostler, in Daily Express.) It was nightfall. Already the camels, kneeling in hollow square, had ceased the bitter snarling and groaning with which they greet alike the loading or off-saddling. The zareba thrown up by the C.O’s orders round the bivouac had lost the sharpness'of its outline in the swiftly gathering shadows; and the luminous glory of rose and- gold and violet that makes the desert at sunset more lovely than the most fertile meadow-land had darkened into shades of purple and soft indigo. The pungent scent of cactus freshly cut for use in the zareba mingled with the acrid reek of the little cooking fires of camel dung. Now and then the rich, hoarse tones of negro voices were heard as the men padded softly to and' fro over the sand about their camp duties.

The two white officers, sitting upon camp stools before a collapsible travel-ling-table, frowned over the intelligence brought in by scouts and “friendlies.” “If what that mutilated fellow told us is anything like the truth,” muttered the C. 0., “we’ll probably have a very pretty pack of them on top of us before we can get reinforcements. Only one thing to do its sit tight. Wo can't do much for the friendlies if they are raided in any force.” The other nodded.

“Jove!” he burst out suddenly, “that chap nearly made me sick. No lips, no nose, eyelids gone!—and he’s alive and as nippy as a monkey. Eight years ago he said it happened. And I s’pose the Mullah’s chaps still do that sort of thing.' What?” HORRORS OF AFRICA.

“ That and worse,” The C.O. narrated one or two of the pleasantries of Mohammed bin Abdullah’s men for the benefit of his less experienced sec-ond-in-command; horrors as old as Africa, and as infinitely various as the moods of Cleopatra. From Gardafui to Cape Blanco, with the Mediterranean as its northern boundary, there is a vast strip of the world where things are done, to this day, rivalling the most gruesome cruelties related in the chronicles of the Dark and Middle Ages. Mulai Hafid, lately Sultan of Morocco, was wont to practise in his garden in Fez tortures which —but this is a tale of Somaliland.

“And we’ve left these poor wretches at the mercy of devils like that!” commented the second-in-command. “After we’d taught ’em to look to us for protection. My God!”

He broke off suddenly. “What’s that?” he cried, pointing across the zareba. Far away, almost at the foothills of tho Golia range, two tiny red sparks were glowing. Even with tho naked eye one could see that they were not ordinary bonfires; and they grew apace. Through field-glasses they showed as oblong blurrs of moving red. Occasionally there came a flickering, transient blackness across them. Listening acutely, one heard now and then a faint, a very faint, “pit, pit, pit,” as though some one were tacking down a carpet in the next house but one. A DERVISH RAID. Mohammed bin Abdullah’s dervishes were raiding the friendly villages

within two or three hours’ ride of the British force's bivouac. It was, to

them, an amusement and an act of derision in one. Even as the Englishmen watched, another point of fire sprang into being, a little to tho right of the other two.

The C.O. snapped to the leather case of his field-glasses. “Turn ’em out, Carter,” lie ordered curtly, and reached for his discarded belt and helmet.

On the way the detachment met many friendlies; some on pack-cam-els, siimc afoot, and one or twc. on tiny, toddling donkeys. Only a fewbad saved any of their stock or wretched chattels. Women, with strings of children, paddling tearfully in their wakes, toiled over the broken ground, some lamenting, some apathetically dumb. One drove a new-born camelcalf before her, and had a huge wooden dish set ITatwi.se on her head. Tears had drawn furrows in the dirt upon her face, and she sobbed and hiccoughed as she stumbled through tho scrub. Her babies were somewhere back in. the blazing village. It was growing light when the Camel Company reached the first of the raided villages. The hovels were burnt down or roofless. From the interior of those whoso walls still stood, pale smoke ascender! against tho pal-

ing sky. A stork’s nest, with dead young ones in it, lay on the ground beside the stfiouldering ashes of what had been the largest hut of the village. The raiders, linked arm in arm, had stamped back and forth through the miserable crops, trampling them flat, and had carried off all the stock. AMAZONS OF THE DESERT. Women who had hidden themselves began to emerge from the six-foot “durr” grass on the outskirts iof the village. They raised their voices in shrill barbaric lamentation; and tha men who had returned with the Camel Company sent desolate cries to swell their chorus.

Suddenly one of these men raised his rifle, and fired into the heart of a patch of durr grass. Another followed suit, and then another. A man leapt waist-high above the grass, fell hack, and leapt again. Before the camel men could stop them half a score of villagers dashed in and hunted him out of his cover. He was a dervish, wounded in the knee, and, save for & broken stick, unarmed. Left behind by his comrades, he had hoped to hide in the grass until nightfall, and then crawl off unobserved. He came forth now on hands and knees, his lips writhed back, exposing the teeth in a dauntless grin of rage. The men of the village mocked him. He knelt, menacing them with his futile splinter of wood. He showed no fear —only anger. All happened in a moment of ’time. No sooner was he clear of the long grass than the women flung themselves non him. "With sticks, teeth, nails, sickles, stones, they tore and battered him to death before a hand could have been raised to save him. Their own men stood back, aghast at their fury. When the camel men ber.t off the women, the dervish lay, shapeless, face uppermost, across a boulder, his twitching, shattered body feeding the red soil with rivulets of slow, dark blood.