should I desire to go? Fortunately I had a good deal of employment
with my gun; for, besides gazelles, antelopes, a lynx, florikans, and
partridges, I shot many very beautiful little honey-birds, as well as
other small birds. Of these former the most beautiful was the
_Nectarinia Habessinica_. It has an exceedingly gaudy plumage, that
glistens in metallic lustre as the rays of light strike upon its
various-coloured feathers. This is the more remarkable on a warm
sunshiny day, when the tiny bird, like a busy humble-bee, bowing the
slender plant with its weight, inserts his sharp curved bill into the
flower-bells to drink their honey-dew, keeping its wings the whole
time in such rapid motion as to be scarcely distinguishable.

Without animal flesh I do not know what I should have done here. The
water was so nitrous I could not drink it. To quench my thirst, I
threw it in gulps down my throat; and rice, when boiled in it,
resembled salts and senna. After returning from sport one day, the
interpreter brought up one of the camel-drivers, to be punished for
having stolen some deer flesh when sent to clean it. He was a Midgar,
or low-caste fellow, who does not object to indulge in cannibalism
when hard pressed by hunger. I would not decide the case myself, but
handed him over, much against his wish, to the _tender_ mercies of the
interpreter and two other men whom the sultan, at parting, appointed
judges on any sudden occasion. It was everybody's interest to make him
guilty, and therefore he was condemned to find two sheep, to be killed
and eaten in the camp. Another case of theft, much more vexatious than
this, occurred when I first arrived here, and turned off some spare
camel-drivers, who took away all the packing-ropes with them, and I
have been obliged to employ the remaining men ever since in chewing
acacia bark into fibres to make new ones.