THE HADHRAMOUT

From "Southern Arabia" by Theodore and Mabel Bent
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/21569/pg21569.txt 


In the proper acceptation of the term, the Hadhramout at the present time
is not a district running along the south-east coast of Arabia between
the sea and the central desert, as is generally supposed, but it is
simply a broad valley running for 100 miles or more parallel to the
coast, by which the valleys of the high Arabian table-land discharge
their not abundant supply of water into the sea at Saihut, towards which
place this valley gradually slopes.

There is every reason to believe that anciently, too, the Hadhramout
meant only this valley; we learnt from Himyaritic inscriptions that five
centuries b.c. the name was spelt by the Himyars as it is now (namely, t
m r d h [Symbol: script]), and meant in that tongue 'the enclosure or
valley of death,' a name which in Hebrew form corresponds exactly to that
of Hazarmaveth of the tenth chapter of Genesis, and which the Greeks, in
their usual slipshod manner--occasioned by their inability, as is the
case still, to pronounce a pure _h_--converted into _Chatramitae_, a form
which still survives in the Italian word _catrame_, or 'pitch.'

Owing to the intense fanaticism of the inhabitants, this main valley has
been reached only by one European before ourselves--namely, Herr Leo
Hirsch, in 1893. In 1846 Von Wrede made a bold attempt to reach it, but
only got as far as the collateral valley of Doan. My husband and I were
the first to attempt (in the latter part of 1893 and the early part of
1894) this journey without any disguise, and with a considerable train of
followers, and I think, for this very reason, that we went openly, we
made more impression on the natives, and were able to remain there longer
and see more, than might otherwise have been the case, and to establish
relations with the inhabitants which, I hope, will hereafter lead to very
satisfactory results.

Having arrived at Aden with letters of recommendation to the Resident
from the Indian Government and the India Office, besides private
introductions, we were amazed at all the difficulties thrown in our way.
It quite appeared as if we had left our native land to do some evil deed
to its detriment, and we were made to feel how thoroughly degrading it is
to take up the vocation of an archaeologist and explorer.

Many strange and unexpected things befell us, but the most remarkable of
all was that when a certain surgeon-captain asked for leave to accompany
us, it was refused to him on the ground that 'Mr. Theodore Bent's
expedition was not sanctioned by Government,' in spite of the fact that
the Indian Government had actually placed at my husband's disposal a
surveyor, Imam Sharif, Khan Bahadur. We had no assistance beyond two very
inferior letters to the sultans of Makalla and Sheher, which made them
think we were 'people of the rank of merchants,' they afterwards said.

Imam Sharif has travelled much with Englishmen, so he speaks our language
perfectly, and having a keen sense of humour, plenty of courage and tact,
and no Mohammedan prejudices, we got on splendidly together. He was a
very agreeable member of the party. My husband paid all his expenses from
Quetta _via_ Bombay, with three servants, including their tents and camp
equipage, and back to Quetta.

Our party was rather a large one, for besides ourselves and our faithful
Greek servant Matthaios, who has accompanied us in so many of our
journeys, we had with us not only the Indians, but a young gardener from
Kew, William Lunt by name, as botanist, and an Egyptian named Mahmoud
Bayoumi, as naturalist, sent by Dr. Anderson, whose collections are now
in the British Museum of Natural History at South Kensington.

The former was provided with all the requisites for digging up forest
trees, and Mahmoud had with him all that was necessary for pickling and
preserving large mammals, for no one knew what might be found in the
unknown land; and many were the volunteers to join the party as hunters,
who promised to keep us in game, whereas if they had come they would only
have found reptiles.

As interpreter was recommended to us by the native political agent at
Aden, Saleh Mohammed Jaffer, Khan Bahadur--a certain Saleh Hassan. He
proved to be a fanatical Moslem, whose only object seemed to be to
terrify us and to raise enemies against us, in order to prevent our
trampling the holy land where Mohammed was born. Throughout our journey
he was a constant source of difficulty and danger.

Our starting-point for the interior was Makalla, which is 230 miles from
Aden, and is the only spot between Aden and Maskat which has any
pretensions to the name of port. The name itself means 'harbour.' It is
first mentioned by Ibn Modjawir; Hamdani calls it El Asa-Lasa, and Masudi
gives the name as Lahsa. The harbour is not available during the
south-west monsoon, and then all the boats go off to Ras Borum or the
Basalt Head.

Here we were deposited in December 1893 by a chance steamer, one which
had been chartered and on which for a consideration we were allowed to
take passage. I took turns with the captain to sleep in his cabin, but
there was nothing but the deck for the others.

Immediately behind the town rise grim, arid mountains of a reddish hue,
and the town is plastered against this rich-tinged background. By the
shore, like a lighthouse, stands the white minaret of the mosque, the
walls and pinnacles of which are covered with dense masses of sea-birds
and pigeons; the gate of this mosque, which is really nearly in the sea,
is blocked up by tanks, so that no one can enter with unwashed feet. Not
far from this rises the huge palace where the sultan dwells, reminding
one of a whitewashed mill; white, red, and brown are the dominant colours
of the town, and in the harbour the Arab dhows, with fantastic sterns,
rock to and fro in the unsteady sea, forming altogether a picturesque and
unusual scene.

Beyond the Bab Assab are huts where dwell the Bedouin who come from the
mountains. They are not allowed to sleep within the town. There is a
praying-place just outside the gate. In the middle of the town is a great
cemetery full of tamarisks, and containing the sacred tomb of the sainted
Wali Yakoub in the centre.

We were amused by a dance at a street corner to the beating of drums. It
consisted of a hot, seething mass of brown bodies writhing about and
apparently enjoying themselves.

Stone tobacco pipes are made here of a kind of limestone, very curly
silver powder-flasks, rather like nautilus shells, and curious guns
without stocks. The Bedou women wear tremendously heavy belts and very
wide brass armlets. Their faces are veiled with something like the
_yashmak_ of Egypt, but it is of plain blue calico, a little embroidered.

Makalla is ruled over by a sultan of the Al Kaiti family, whose
connection with India has made them very English in their sympathies, and
his majesty's general appearance, with his velvet coat and jewelled
daggers, is far more Indian than Arabian. Really the most influential
people in the town are the money-grubbing Parsees from Bombay, and it is
essentially one of those commercial centres where Hindustani is spoken
nearly as much as Arabian. The government of the country is now almost
entirely in the hands of the Al Kaiti family, which at present is the
most powerful family in the district, and is reputed to be the richest in
Arabia.

About five generations ago the Seyyids of the Aboubekr family, at that
time the chief Arab family at the Hadhramout, who claimed descent from
the first of the Khalifs, were at variance with the Bedou tribes, and in
their extremity they invited assistance from the chiefs of the Yafei
tribe, who inhabit the Yafei district, to the north-east of Aden. To this
request the Al Kaiti family responded by sending assistance to the
Seyyids of the Hadhramout, putting down the troublesome Bedou tribes, and
establishing a fair amount of peace and prosperity in the country, though
even to this day the Bedouin of the mountains are ever ready to swoop
down and harass the more peaceful inhabitants of the towns. At the same
time the Al Kaiti family established themselves in the Hadhramout, and
for the last four generations have been steadily adding to the power
thus acquired. Makalla, Sheher, Shibahm, Haura, Hagarein, all belong to
them, and they are continually increasing, by purchase, the area of their
influence in the collateral valleys, building substantial castles, and
establishing one of the most powerful dynasties in this much-divided
country. They get all their money from the Straits Settlements, for it
has been the custom of the Hadhrami to leave their own sterile country to
seek their fortunes abroad. The Nizam of Hyderabad has an Arab regiment
composed entirely of Hadhrami, and the Sultan Nawasjung, the present head
of the Al Kaiti family, is its general: he lives in India and governs his
Arabian possessions by deputy. His son Ghalib ruled in Sheher, his nephew
Manassar, who receives a dollar a day from England, ruled in Makalla, and
his nephew Salah ruled in Shibahm, and the governors of the other towns
are mostly connections of this family. The power and wealth of this
family are almost the only guarantee for peace and prosperity in an
otherwise lawless country.

The white palace of the Sultan Manassar is six stories high, with little
carved windows and a pretty sort of cornice of open-work bricks, unbaked
of course, save by the sun. It stands on a little peninsula, and like
Riviera towns, has pretty coast views on either side. The sultan received
us with his two young sons, dressed up in as many fine clothes as it was
possible to put on, and attended by his vizier, Abdul Kalek; no business
was done as to our departure, but only compliments were paid on both
sides. After we had separated presents were sent by us, loaves of sugar
being an indispensable accompaniment.

The so-called palace in which we were lodged was next to the mosque and
close to the bazaar; the smells and noise were almost unendurable, so we
worked hard to get our preparations made, and to make our sojourn here
as short as possible. This 'palace' was a large building; a very dirty
staircase led to a quantity of rooms, large and small, inhabited in
rather a confusing manner, not only by our own party, but by another, and
to get at our servants we had to pick our way between the prostrate forms
of an Arabian gentleman and his attendants. We were the first arrivals,
so we collected from the various rooms as many bits of torn and rotten
old matting as we could find, to keep the dust down in our own room,
which was about 40 feet long by 30 feet wide, so very much covered with
dust that no pavement could be seen without digging. It would have been
necessary to have 'seven maids with seven brooms to sweep for half a
year' before they could have cleared that room. Windows were all round,
unglazed of course, and quite shutterless. We set out our furniture and
had plenty of room to spread the baggage round us. An enormous packing
case from Kew Gardens had little besides a great fork in it, so that case
came no farther. Another case, to which the botanist had to resort
constantly, had always to be tied up with rope, as it had neither lock
nor hinges.

We were six days at Makalla arranging about camels and safe conduct, and
wondering when we should get away; so of course we had plenty of time to
inspect the town, which on account of the many Parsees had quite an
Indian air in some parts. Sometimes one comes upon a deliciously scented
part in the bazaars where myrrh and spices, attar of roses, and rose
leaves are sold in little grimy holes almost too small to enter; but for
the part near the fish market, I can only say that awful stenches
prevail, and the part where dates and other fruits are sold is almost
impassable from flies.

For our journey inland we were entrusted by the sultan to a tribe of
Bedouin and their camels. Mokaik was the name of our Mokadam or
head-man, and his tribe rejoiced in the name of Khailiki. They were tiny
spare men, quite beardless, with very refined, gentle faces; they might
easily have been taken for women, so gentle and pretty were they. They
were naturally dark, and made darker still by dirt and indigo. Their long
shaggy hair was twisted up into a knot and bound by a long plaited
leather string like a bootlace, which was wound round the hair and then
two or three times round the head, like the fillet worn by Greek women in
ancient times. They were naked save for a loin-cloth and the girdle to
which were attached their brass powder flasks, shaped like a ram's horn,
their silver cases for flint and steel, their daggers, and their thorn
extractors, consisting of a picker and tweezers, fastened together. They
are very different from the stately Bedouin of Syria and Egypt, and are,
both as to religion and physique, distinctly an aboriginal race of
Southern Arabia, as different from the Arab as the Hindoo is from the
Anglo-Saxon.

Our ideas as to _Bedouin_ and _Bedawi_, which latter word we never heard
while we were in Southern Arabia, were that they were tall, bearded men,
not very dark in colour, and our imaginations connected them with
hospitality and much clothes. None of these characteristics are found
among the Bedouin of this district. _Bedouin_ is not a word in use, but
_Bedou_ for both singular and plural. They speak of themselves as _el
Bedou_, and when they have seen us wondering at some strange custom, they
have said apologetically, 'Ah! Bedou, Bedou!' I have heard them address a
man whose name they did not know 'Ya Bedou.' I mean to use _Bedou_ for
singular and _Bedouin_ for plural.

Besides the Bedouin we were accompanied by five soldiers,
Muofok-el-Briti, Taisir-i-Fahari, Bariki, and an old man. For the
twenty-two camels we paid 175 dollars to Hagarein, a journey, we were
told, of twenty days.

It would have been useless to have had riding camels, as one could get no
faster than the baggage and soldiers, and travelling so far daily, and up
such rocks, one had to go at foot-pace. We should have had to wait longer
at Makalla while more camels were collected, and the more camels you have
the farther they stray when food is scarce, and the more chance there is
of the annoyance of waiting for lost camels to be found, and sometimes
found too late to start that day. We need not have had twenty-two camels,
and once, later, all the baggage was sent on ten, but this was to suit
the purposes of the Bedouin.

Before proceeding further with our journey, I will here say a few words
concerning the somewhat complex body politic of this portion of Arabia,
the inhabitants of which may be divided into four distinct classes.

Firstly, there are numerous wild tribes of Bedouin scattered all over the
country, who do all the carrying trade, rear and own most of the camels,
and possess large tracts of country, chiefly on the highlands and smaller
valleys. They are very numerous and powerful, and the Arabs of the towns
are certainly afraid of them, for they can make travelling in the country
very difficult, and even blockade the towns. They never live in tents, as
do the Bedouin of Northern Arabia; the richer ones have quite large
houses, whilst the poorer ones--those in Shabwa and the Wadi Adim, for
instance--dwell in caves.

Secondly, we have the Arabs proper, a decidedly later importation into
the country than the Bedouin. They live in and cultivate the lands around
the towns; many of them carry on trade and go to India and the Straits
Settlements, and some of them are very wealthy. They also are divided
into tribes. The chief of those dwelling in the Hadhramout are the Yafei,
Kattiri, Minhali, Amri, and Tamimi. The Bedouin reside amongst them, and
they are constantly at war with one another, and the complex system of
tribal union is exceedingly difficult to grasp.

Thirdly, we have the Seyyids and Sherifs, a sort of aristocratic
hierarchy, who trace their descent from the daughter and son of the
Prophet. Their influence in the Hadhramout is enormous, and they fan the
religious superstition of the people, for to this they owe their
existence. They boast that their pedigree is purer than that of any other
Seyyid family, even than those of Mecca and Medina. Seyyids and Sherifs
are to be found in all the large towns and considerable villages, and
even the Arab sultans show them a marked respect and kiss their hands
when they enter a room. They have a distinct jurisdiction of their own,
and most disputed points of property, water rights, and so on, are
referred to their decision. They look with peculiar distrust on the
introduction of external influence into their sacred country, and are the
obstructionists of the Hadhramout, but at the same time their influence
is decidedly towards law and order in a lawless land. They never carry
arms.

Lastly, we have the slave population of the Hadhramout, all of African
origin, and the freed slaves who have married and settled in the country.
Most of the tillers of the soil, personal servants, and the soldiers of
the sultans are of this class.




CHAPTER VII

OUR DEPARTURE INTO THE INTERIOR


Never shall I forget the confusion of our start. Mokaik and ten of his
men appeared at seven in the morning of the day before in our rooms, with
all the lowest beggars of Makalla in their train, and were let loose on
our seventy packages like so many demons from Jehannam, yelling and
quarrelling with one another. First of all the luggage had to be divided
into loads for twenty-two camels, then they drew lots for these loads
with small sticks, then they drew lots for us riders, and finally we had
a stormy bargain as to the price, which was finally decided upon when the
vizier came to help us, and ratified by his exchanging daggers with
Mokaik, each dagger being presented on a flat hand. In the bazaars
bargains are struck by placing the first two fingers of one contractor on
the hand of the other. All that day they were rushing in and weighing,
and exhorting us to be ready betimes in the morning, so we were quite
ready about sunrise.

We felt worn and weary when a start was made at two o'clock, and our cup
of bitterness was full when we were deposited, bag and baggage, a few
hundred yards from the gate, and told that we must spend the night amidst
a sea of small fish drying on the shore, and surrounded on all sides by
dirty Bedou huts. These fish, which are rather larger than sardines, are
put out to dry by thousands along this coast. Men feed on them and so do
the camels; they make lamp-oil out of them; they say the fish
strengthens the camel's back, and they consider it good for camels to go
once a year to the sea. Large sacks of them are taken into the interior
as merchandise; they are mixed with small leaves like box, and carried in
palm-leaf sacks, about 3 feet wide and 11/2 feet high, and the air
everywhere is redolent of their stench.

At this point we had the first of many quarrels with our camel-men; we
insisted on being taken two miles farther on, away from the smells;
nothing short of threats of returning and getting the sultan to beat them
and put them in prison enabled us to break through the conventional Arab
custom of encamping for the first night outside the city gates. However,
we succeeded in reaching Bakhrein, where white wells are placed for the
benefit of wayfarers, and there beneath the pleasant shade of the
palm-trees we halted for the remainder of the day and recovered from the
agonies of our start. Among the trees was a bungalow belonging to the
sultan where we had hoped to have been able to sleep, but it was pervaded
by such a strong smell of fish that we preferred to pitch our tents.

Between this place and Makalla all is arid waste, but near the town, by
the help of irrigation, bananas and cocoanut trees flourish in a shallow
valley called 'the Beginning of Light.' There are numerous fortresses
about Bakhrein, so the road is now quite safe for the inhabitants of
Makalla; the sultan has done a good deal to repress the Bedouin who used
to raid right into the town. He crucified many of them.

We took a couple of hours over our start next day, the Bedouin again
quarrelling over the luggage, each trying to scramble for the lightest
packages and the lightest riders. They tried to make me ride a camel and
give up my horse to my husband. As he was so tall, he could obtain
neither a horse nor a donkey, so had perforce to ride a camel.

He had been able to buy a little dark donkey for Imam Sharif and the
sultan gave me a horse, but all the rest were on camels. I thought I
should enjoy riding by the camels and talking to everyone, but my hopes
were not carried out.

The difficulty of passing the strings of camels was enormous. The country
was so very stony that if you left the narrow path it took a long time to
pick your way.

I used to start first with Imam Sharif, and then my horse, at foot-pace,
got so far ahead that the soldiers said, 'We cannot guard both you and
the camels.' I had then to pull in the horse with all my might. Sometimes
I went on with Imam Sharif, one soldier and a servant carrying the
plane-table. He used to go up some hill to survey, and I, of course, had
to climb too for safety. I had to rush down when I saw our _kafila_
coming and mount, to keep in front. If I got behind, the camels were so
terrified that they danced about and shed their loads, and I was cursed
and sworn at by their drivers.

We stopped three hours at Basra (10 miles), where there are a few houses,
water, and some cultivation, and where the camels were suddenly unloaded
without leave, and there was a great row because we moved the soldiers'
guns from the tree, the shade of which we wished to have ourselves. We
again threatened to return, but at last, as Taisir fortunately could
speak Hindustani, he could make peace, and they ended by kissing hands
and saying salaam (peace).

The sun was setting when we reached a sandy place called Tokhum (another
5 miles on), where we camped near some stagnant water. We had to wait for
the moon, to find our baggage and get out the lantern. We had travelled
over almost leafless plains save that they had little patches of
mesembryanthemum, and the inevitable balloon-shrub (_madhar_). Rising and
starting by moonlight on Christmas morning, we stopped in Wadi Ghafit
(_madhar_), a very pretty side valley, with warm water and palm-trees,
and what looked like a grassy sward near the water, but which really
consisted of a tiny kind of palm. The camel-men wanted to pass this place
and camp far away on the stones, sending skins for water, but somehow my
husband found this out after we had passed Wadi Ghafit, and managed to
carry off the camels, tied tail after tail to his own camel, so the
Bedouin had to follow unwillingly. We gave them some presents, saying it
was not an everyday occurrence, but that this was a great feast with us;
so we made friends.

The Bedouin were very unruly about the packing. We could not get our most
needful things kept handy, and they liked to pack our bread with their
fish, and the waterskins anywhere among our bedding.

Mokaik did not seem to have much authority over the various owners of the
camels, and they were always quarrelling among themselves, robbing each
other of light loads and leaving some heavy thing, that no one wished
for, lying on the ground; this often occasioned re-packing. They had for
each camel a stout pair of sticks with strong ropes attached, and having
bound a bundle of packages to each stick, two men lifted them and wound
the ropes round the sticks over a very tiny pack-saddle and a mass of
untidy rags. When we arrived they liked to simply loose the ropes from
the sticks and let the baggage clatter to the ground and lead away the
camels. As they would not be persuaded to sort the things, and as
twenty-two camels cover a good deal of space, it was like seeking the
slain on a battlefield when we had to wander about having every bundle
untied.

Three days' camel-riding up one of the short valleys which lead towards
the high table-land offered little of interest beyond arid, igneous
rocks, and burnt-up, sand-covered valleys, with distorted strata on
either side. Here and there, where warm volcanic streams rise out of the
ground, the wilderness is converted into a luxuriant garden, in which
palms, tobacco, and other green things grow. One of the scrub trees which
clothe the wilderness is called by the Arabs _rack_, and is used by them
for cleaning their teeth. It amused us to chew this as we went along: it
is slightly bitter, but cleans the teeth most effectually.

There is also a poisonous sort of cucumber, called by the Arabs
_madakdak_. They clean out the inside and fill the skin with water, which
they drink as a medicine. At Sibeh, which we reached after a very hot
ride of twelve or thirteen miles, we found water with scores of camels
lying round it, for there were two or three other _kafilas_, or caravans,
beside our own. It was dreadfully cold that night, and we could not get
at our bag of blankets.

Next we entered the narrow, tortuous valley of Howeri, which ascends
towards the highland, in which the midday heat was intense; and at our
evening halts we suffered not a little from camel-ticks, which abound in
the sand, until we learnt to avoid old camping-grounds and not to pitch
our tents in the immediate vicinity of the wells.

We encamped in a narrow, stony river-bed, between walls of rock, near a
little village called Tahiya. There is a good deal of cultivation about.
The closeness of the situation made the smell of the dried fish we
carried for the camels almost unbearable.

These sacks are stretched open in the evening and put in the middle of a
circle of camels, their masters often joining in the feast. One of the
men was attacked by fever, so he was given quinine, and his friends were
told to put him to bed and cover him well. When we went to visit him
later we found him quite contented in one of these fish sacks, his head
in one corner and his legs all doubled up and packed in; only a bare
brown back was exposed, so we had a few of the camel's rags thrown on
his back, and he was well next day.

We went on ten miles to Al Ghail, rising to an altitude of 2,000 feet
above the sea-level. This word _ghail_ begins with the Arabic _ghin_,
which is a soft sound between _r_ and _g_.

There are two villages near the head of the Wadi Howeri, where there is
actually a _ghail_--that rare phenomenon in Arabia, a rill or running
stream. Here the Bedou inhabitants cultivate the date palm, and have
green patches of lucerne and grain, very refreshing to the eye.

We had come up one of the narrowest of gorges, but with hundreds of
palm-trees around Al Ghail, the first of the two villages, which is in
the end of the Wadi Howeri. It is an uninteresting collection of stone
huts, with many pretty little fields, and maidenhair fern overhanging the
wayside. There are little enclosures with walls round them, and small
stones in them, on which they dry the dates before sending them to Aden.
The rocky river-bed itself is waterless, the _ghail_ being used up in
irrigation.

At Al Bat'ha, which is just above the tableland, we actually encamped
under a spreading tree, a wild, unedible fig called _luthba_ by the
Arabs, a nickname given to all worthless, idle individuals in these
parts. Bedou women crowded around us, closely veiled in indigo-dyed
masks, with narrow slits for their eyes, carrying their babies with them
in rude cradles resembling hencoops, with a cluster of charms hung from
the top, which has the twofold advantage of amusing the baby and keeping
off the evil eye. After much persuasion we induced one of the good ladies
to sit for her photograph, or rather to sit still while something was
being done which she did not in the least understand.

There is very good water at Al Bat'ha, and so much of the kind of herbs
that camels like that we delayed our departure till eight, shivering by
a fire and longing as ardently for the arrival of the sun as we should
for his departure. The road had been so steep and stony that the
camel-riders had all been on foot for two days. I am sure that, except
near a spring, no one dropped from the skies would dream he was in Arabia
the Happy. It is hard to think that 'the Stony' and 'the Desert' must be
worse.




CHAPTER VIII

THE AKABA


Having left these villages behind us, we climbed rapidly higher and
higher, until at an elevation of over 4,000 feet we found ourselves at
last on a broad, level table-land, stretching as far as the eye could
reach in every direction. This is no doubt the 'Maratha Mountains' of
Ptolemy, the Mons Excelsus of Pliny,[8] which shuts off the Hadhramout,
where once flourished the frankincense and the myrrh.

Words cannot express the desolate aspect of this vast table-land, Akaba
or the 'going-up,' as the Arabs call it. It is perfectly level, and
strewn with black lumps of basalt, looking as though a gigantic
coal-scuttle had been upset. Occasionally there rises up above the plain
a flat-topped mound or ridge, some 80 feet high, the last remnant of a
higher level which is now disappearing. There is no sign of habitation.
Only here and there are a few tanks, dug to collect the rain-water, if
any falls. These are protected or indicated by a pair of walls built
opposite one another, and banked up on the outer side with earth and
stones, like shooting butts. The Akaba is exclusively Bedou property, and
wherever a little herbage is to be found, there the nomads drive their
flocks and young camels.

Of the frankincense which once flourished over all this vast area, we saw
only one specimen on the highland itself, though it is still found in the
more sheltered gullies; and farther east, in the Mahri country, there is,
I understand, a considerable quantity left. We were often given lumps of
gum arabic, and myrrh is still found plentifully; it is tapped for its
odoriferous sap. It is a curious fact that the Somali come from Africa to
collect it, going from tribe to tribe of the Bedouin, and buying the
right to collect these two species, sometimes paying as much as fifty
dollars. They go round and cut the trees, and after eight days return to
collect the exuded sap.

In ancient times none but slaves collected frankincense and myrrh. This
fact, taken probably with the meaning of the name Hadhramout (the later
form of the ancient name Hazarmaveth), gave rise to the quaint Greek
legend 'that the fumes of the frankincense-trees were deadly, and the
place where they grew was called the valley or enclosure of death.'

From personal observation it would appear that the ancients held
communication with the Hadhramout almost entirely by the land
caravan-route, as there is absolutely no trace of great antiquity to be
found along the coast-line, whereas the Wadi Hadhramout itself and its
collateral branches are very rich in remains of the ancient Himyaritic
civilisation.

Though we were always looking about for monuments of antiquity, the most
ancient and lasting memorial of far past ages lay beneath our feet in
that little narrow path winding over Akaba and Wadi, and polished by the
soft feet of millions of camels that had slowly passed over it for
thousands and thousands of years.

We found the air of the table-land fresh and invigorating after the
excessive heat of the valleys below. For three days we travelled
northwards across the plateau. Our first stage was Haibel Gabrein. This
is, as it were, the culminating point of the whole district; it is 4,150
feet above the sea. From it the table-land slopes gently down to the
northward towards the main valley of the Hadhramout, and eastwards
towards the Wadi Adim. After two days more travelling we approached the
heads of the many valleys which run into the Hadhramout; the Wadis Doan,
Rakhi, Al Aisa, Al Ain, Bin Ali, and Adim all start from this elevated
plateau and run nearly parallel. The curious feature of most of these
valleys is the rapid descent into them; they look as if they had been
taken out of the high plateau like slices out of a cake. They do not
appear to have been formed by a fall of water from this plateau; in fact,
it is impossible that a sufficient force of water could ever have existed
on this flat surface to form this elaborate valley system. In the valleys
themselves there is very little slope, for we found that, with the
exception of the Wadi Adim, all the valley heads we visited were nearly
of uniform height with the main valley, and had a wall of rock
approaching 1,000 feet in height, eaten away as it were out of the
plateau. We were, therefore, led to suppose that these valleys had
originally been formed by the action of the sea, and that the Hadhramout
had once been a large bay or arm of the sea, which, as the waters of the
ocean receded, leaving successive marks of many strands on the limestone
and sandstone rocks which enclosed them, formed an outlet for the scanty
water-supply of the Southern Arabian highlands. These valleys have, in
the course of ages, been silted up by sand to a considerable height,
below which water is always found, and the only means of obtaining water
in the Hadhramout for drinking purposes, as well as for cultivation, is
by sinking wells. The water of the main valley is strongly impregnated
with salt, but is much sweeter at the sides of the valley than in the
centre. No doubt this is caused by the weight of the alkaline deposits
washed down from the salt hills at Shabwa, at the head of the main
valley.

The steep, reddish sandstone cliffs which form the walls of these valleys
are themselves almost always divided into three distinct stories or
stratifications, which can be distinctly seen on the photographs. The
upper one is very abrupt, the second slightly projecting and more broken,
and the third formed by deposit from above. The descent into the valley
is extremely difficult at all points. Paths down which camels can just
make their way have been constructed by the Bedouin, by making use of the
stratified formation and the gentler slopes; but only in the case of the
Wadi Adim, of all the valleys we visited, is there anything approaching a
gradual descent.

It appears to me highly probable that the systematic destruction of the
frankincense and myrrh trees through countless generations has done much
to alter the character of this Akaba, and has contributed to the gradual
silting up of the Hadhramout and its collateral valleys, to which fact I
shall again have occasion to refer. The aspect of this plateau forcibly
recalled to our minds that portion of Abyssinia which we visited in
1892-93; there is the same arid coast-line between the sea and the
mountains, and the same rapid ascent to a similar absolutely level
plateau, and the same draining northwards to a large river-bed in the
case of Abyssinia, into the valleys of the Mareb and other tributaries of
the Nile, and in the case of this Arabian plateau into the Hadhramout.
Only Abyssinia has a more copious rainfall, which makes its plateau more
productive.

It had not been our intention to visit the Wadi Al Aisa, but to approach
the Hadhramout by another valley called Doan, parallel and further west,
but our camel-men would not take us that way, and purposely got up a
scare that the men of Khoreba at the head of Wadi Doan were going to
attack us, and would refuse to let us pass. A convenient old woman was
found who professed to bring this news, a dodge subsequently resorted to
by another Bedou tribe which wanted to govern our progress.

The report brought to us, as from the old woman, was to this effect: A
large body of sheikhs and seyyids having started from Khoreba[9] to meet
and repel us, Mokaik's father had left home to help us. As we had now
abandoned Khoreba, Mokaik said he was anxious to hurry off to meet his
father and prevent a hostile collision. Mokaik was told _he_ could not go
as he was responsible for our safety, but that some others might go.
'No,' said Mokaik, 'they cannot be spared from the camels; we will get
two men from the village.' My husband agreed to this, but when Mokaik
proposed that my husband should at once pay these men, he told Mokaik
that he must pay them himself, as he was paid to protect us. This attempt
at extortion having failed, we passed a peaceful night and subsequently
found Mokaik's father, Suleiman Bakran, safe at home, which he had never
thought of leaving.

Our first peep down into the Wadi Al Aisa, towards which our Bedouin had
conducted us, was striking in the extreme, and as we gazed down into the
narrow valley, with its line of vegetation and its numerous villages, we
felt as if we were on the edge of another world.

The descent from the table-land to the Wadi is exactly 1,500 feet by a
difficult, but very skilfully engineered footpath. The sun's rays,
reflected from the limestone cliffs, were scorchingly hot. The camels
went a longer way round, nearer the head of the valley, but, so difficult
was our short cut that they arrived before us, and the horse, and the
donkey.

Having humbly descended into the Wadi Al Aisa, because we were not
allowed to go by the Wadi Doan, we found ourselves encamped hard by the
village of Khaila, the head-quarters of the Khailiki tribe, within a
stone's throw of Mokaik's father's house and under the shadow of the
castle of his uncle, the sheikh of the tribe. These worthies both
extorted from us substantial sums of money and sold us food at exorbitant
prices, and so we soon learnt why we were not permitted to go to Khoreba,
and why the old woman and her story had been produced.

We thought Mokaik and his men little better than naked savages when on
the plateau, but when we were introduced to their relatives, and when we
saw their castles and their palm groves and their long line of gardens in
the narrow valley, our preconceived notions of the wild homeless Bedou
and his poverty underwent considerable change.

We climbed up the side of the valley opposite Khaila to photograph a
castle adorned with horns, but were driven away; too late, for the
picture had been taken.

During the two days we encamped at Khaila we were gazed upon
uninterruptedly by a relentless crowd of men, women, and children. It
amused us at first to see the women, here for the most part unmasked,
with their exceedingly heavy girdles of brass, their anklets of brass
half a foot deep, their bracelets of brass, their iron nose rings, and
their massive and numerous earrings which tore down the lobe of the ear
with their weight. Every Bedou, male or female, has a ring or charm of
cornelian set in base silver, and agates and small tusks also set in
silver.

The root with which the women paint themselves yellow is called _shubab_.
It is dried and powdered. It only grows when there is rain. The whole of
the poultry at Khaila was carried about in the arms of the women and
children who owned them, all the time of our sojourn, in the hopes of
selling them. They, at least, were glad of our departure.

Not far from Khaila, we saw a fine village which we were told was
inhabited by Arabs of pure blood, so we sent a polite message to the
seyyid, or head-man of the place, to ask if we might pay him our
respects. His reply was to the effect that if we paid thirty dollars we
might come and pass four hours in the town. Needless to say we declined
the invitation with thanks, and on the morrow when we marched down the
Wadi Al Aisa we gave the abode of this hospitable seyyid a wide berth,
particularly as the soldiers told us it was not safe, for the Arabs meant
to kill us.

Leaving Khaila, where we remained two nights and saw the New Year in, we
passed a good many towered villages: Larsmeh was one, Hadouf another,
also Subak and others. We passed the mouth of the Wadi Doan, which runs
parallel to Wadi Al Aisa, and has two branches, only the largest having
the name Doan. The mouth is about three miles below Khaila; five miles
more brought us to Sief, where we halted for a night. It is also
inhabited by pure Arabs, who treated us with excessive rudeness. It is a
very picturesque spot, perched on a rock, with towers and turrets
constructed of sun-dried brick; only here, as elsewhere in these valleys,
the houses being so exactly the same colour as the rocks behind them,
they lose their effect. The rich have evidently recognised this
difficulty and whitewash their houses, but in the poorer villages there
is no whitewash, and consequently nothing to make them stand out from
their surroundings.

One can pretty well judge of the wealth of the owners of the various
towers and castles by the amount of whitewash. Some have only the
pinnacles white, and some can afford to trim up the windows and put bands
round the building.

At Sief several men came once or twice and begged my husband to let me go
out that the women might see me, but when I went out they would not allow
me to approach or hold any intercourse with the Arab women, using
opprobrious epithets when I tried to make friendly overtures, with the
quaint result that whenever I advanced towards a group of gazing females
they fled precipitately like a flock of sheep before a collie dog, so we
discovered that it was the men themselves who wished to see me. These
women wear their dresses high in front (showing their yellow-painted legs
above the knee) and long behind; they are of deep blue cotton, decorated
with fine embroidery, and patches of yellow and red sewn on in patterns.
It is the universal female dress in the Hadhramout, and looks as if the
fashion had not changed since the days when Hazarmaveth the Patriarch
settled in this valley and gave it his name.[10] The tall tapering straw
hat worn by these women when in the fields contributes with the mask to
make the Hadhrami females as externally repulsive as the most jealous of
husbands could desire.

I am pretty sure that this must be the very same dress which made such an
unfavourable impression upon Sir John Maundeville, when he saw 'the foul
women who live near Babylon the great.' He says: 'They are vilely
arrayed. They go barefoot and clothed in evil garments, large and wide,
but short to the knees, long sleeves down to the feet like a monk's
frock, and their sleeves are hanging about their shoulders.'

The dress is certainly wide, for the two pieces of which it is composed,
exactly like the Greek peplos, when the arms are extended, stretch from
finger-tip to finger-tip, so when this dress is caught into the loose
girdle far below the waist, it hangs out under the arms and gives a very
round-backed look, as is the case with the peplos.

There are a great many Arabs at Sief, a most unhealthy, diseased-looking
lot. They are of the yellow kind of Arab, with Jewish-looking faces.

Saleh retired into Sief on our arrival, and we saw him no more till we
started next day. He was a very useless interpreter. He used to like to
live in the villages, saying he could not bear to live in the camp of
such unbelievers as we were, and used to bring his friends to our kitchen
and show them some little tins of Lazenby's potted meat, adorned with a
picture of a sheep, a cow, and a pig, as a proof that we lived on pork,
whereas we had none with us. He always tried to persuade the people that
he was far superior to any of us, and when places had to be made amongst
the baggage on the camels for my husband and the servants to ride, he
used to have his camel prepared and ride on, leaving some of the servants
with no seat kept on the camels for them. My husband cured him of this,
for one morning, seeing Saleh's bedding nicely arranged, he jumped on to
the camel himself and rode off, leaving Saleh an object of great
derision.

Once we got down into the valley we had to ride very close together for
safety, and I found it most tiresome making my horse, Basha, keep pace
with the camels.

The people at Sief were so disagreeable that I told Saleh to remind them
that, if our Queen wanted their country, she would have had it long
before we were born, and that they were very foolish to fear so small an
unarmed party, who had only come to pass the winter in a country warmer
than their own; at the same time, unless we had been quite confident that
our safety was well secured from behind, such a party, with a woman among
them, would never have come.

We set off early next morning for Hagarein. We passed after one hour
Kaidoun, with its own private little valley to the west, a tributary of
the main one, which in this part is called Wadi Kasr. There is the grave
of a celebrated saint, and a very pious seyyid, called Al Habid Taha Ali
al Hadad, abides near it. He never goes out of his house, but is so much
revered that many thousands of dollars are sent him from India and other
parts, and when his son visited Aden he was received with great honour by
the merchants there. Then we passed several other villages, including
Allahaddi and Namerr. It was at the _ziaret_ or pilgrimage to the grave
in Kaidoun that Herr von Wrede, who was disguised, was discovered to be a
Christian and forced to turn back.

The town of Hagarein or Hajarein is the principal one in the collateral
valleys, and is built on a lofty isolated rock in the middle of the Wadi
Kasr, about twenty miles before it joins the main valley of the
Hadhramout. With its towers and turrets it recalled to our minds as we
saw it in the distance certain hill-set, mediaeval villages of Germany and
Italy. Here a vice-sultan governs on behalf of the Al Kaiti family, an
ill-conditioned, extortionate individual, whose bad reception of us
contributed to his subsequent removal from office. Internally Hagarein is
squalid and dirty in the extreme; each street is but a cesspool for the
houses on either side of it, and the house allotted to us produced
specimens of most smells and most insects. The days of rest we proposed
for ourselves here were spent in fighting with our old camel-men who left
us here, in fighting with the new ones who were to take us on to the main
valley, and in indignantly refusing to pay the sultan the sum of money
which our presence in his town led him to think it his right to demand.


CHAPTER IX

THROUGH WADI KASR


When we reached the foot of the hill on which Hagarein stands we
dismounted; there was tremendous work to get out the sword of the oldest
soldier; he had used it so much as a walking-stick that it was firmly
fixed in the scabbard. The scabbards are generally covered with white
calico. A very steep, winding, slippery road led us to the gate, where
soldiers received us and conducted us to a courtyard, letting off guns
the while. There stood the Sultan Abdul M'Barrek Hamout al Kaiti, a very
fat, evil-looking man, pitted by smallpox. After shaking hands he led us
down the tortuous streets to his palace, and then took us up a narrow mud
staircase, so dark that we did not know whether to turn to the right or
left; we sometimes went one way and sometimes the other. At length we
reached a small room with some goat-hair carpets and we and the sultan,
the soldiers (his and ours), the Bedouin and my groom, M'barrek, all
seated ourselves round the wall, and after a long time a dirty glass of
water was handed round as our only entertainment. As we had had nothing
to eat since sunrise, and it was about two o'clock, we did not feel
cheerful when the sultan abruptly rose and said he must pray. Praying and
sleeping are always the excuses when they want to get rid of guests or
say 'not at home,' and indeed the sleeping excuse prevails in Greece
also.

Some time after, our four chairs were brought, so we sat till near four
o'clock homeless, and getting hungrier and hungrier, when the sultan
reappeared, telling my husband all our things were locked up in a
courtyard and giving him a great wooden key. We hastened to our home, up
a long dark stair, past many floors, all used as stalls and stables, &c.,
only the two top floors being devoted to human habitation. Each floor
consisted of one fair-sized room and one very tiny den, a kitchen. The
whole Indian party had the lower room, and three of our soldiers the den.
I cannot think how they could all lie down at once, and they had to cook
there besides. Above that, we had the best room, the botanist and
naturalist the den, and Matthaios made his abode on the roof, where he
cooked. The Bedouin, having unloaded the camels in the courtyard across
the street, refused to help us, and, as no one else could be got, my
husband and all his merry men had to carry up the baggage, while I
wrestled with the beds and other furniture in our earthy room. The
instant the baggage was up the Bedouin clamoured for payment, and it was
trying work opening the various packages where the bags of money were
scattered, and to begin quarrelling when we were so weary and hungry. We
had been told that our journey to Hagarein would take twenty days,
whereas it only took thirteen, and that we must take two camels for
water, which had proved unnecessary; besides the camels had been much
loaded with fish and other goods belonging to the Bedouin. My husband
said he would pay for the twenty days and they would thus have thirty
dollars as _bakshish_. But, in the end, the soldiers from Makalla said we
must pay _bakshish_: it would be an insult to their sultan if we did not
and they would go no further with us. The local sultan also insisting,
fourteen more dollars had to be produced. Our own soldiers soon came
shouting and saying they must have half a rupee a day for food, which my
husband thought it wise to give, though the _wazir_ at Makalla had said
he was to give nothing.

They were hardly gone when the sultan came back personally conducting two
kids and saying we need think of no further expense; we were his guests
and were to ask for what we wished. All my husband asked for was daily
milk. We got some that day, but never again. My groom, M'barrek, then
came, saying he must have food money; that being settled, he returned
saying the sultan said he must have half a rupee a day for my horse,
which became very thin on the starvation he got.

All this time we could get no water, so not till dark could Matthaios
furnish us with tea, cold meat, bread, and honey.

We were fortunate in having plenty of bread. We had six big sacks of
large cakes of plain bread dried hard, and of this we had learnt the
value by experience. We kept it sheltered, if there was any fear of rain,
as in Abyssinia, for instance, and before a meal soaked it in water,
wrapped it in a napkin a few minutes, and then dried it up to the
consistency of fresh bread. We were often obliged to give it to the
horses, for the difficulty as to forage makes them unfit to travel in
such barren places.

We also took charcoal and found that, with it and the bread, we had our
meals long before the Indian party, who had a weary search for fuel
before they could even begin with 'pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man.'
The making of _chupatties_ also causes delay in starting. As to the honey
it is most plentiful and tastes like orange flowers, but really it is the
date-flower which imparts this flavour. It is much more glutinous than
ours. It is packed, for exportation and to bring as tribute, in large
round tin boxes, stopped up round the edges with mud. It is used in
paying both taxes and tribute.

We were quite worn out with this day. The sultan received a present next
morning of silk for a robe, a turban, some handkerchiefs, two watches,
some knives, scissors, needle-cases, and other things, but he afterwards
sent Saleh to say he did not like his present at all and wanted dollars.
He got ten rupees and was satisfied.

We again visited him with our servants and soldiers and were given tea
while we talked over the future, and all seemed fair. Later the sultan
came to visit us and talk about the escort. He said we must take five
soldiers, bargained for their wages, food, and bakshish, and obtained the
money. My husband inquired about some ruins near Meshed, three hours by
camel from Hagarein, and said that if the sultan would arrange that we
should dig safely, he should have forty dollars, and he settled to go
with my husband next day to see the place. Accordingly next day the
sultan came with eight soldiers, singing and dancing all the way, and
some men of the Nahad tribe as _siyara_, as we were then in their land.

The sultan showed us two letters in which it was said that we were to
have been attacked between Sief and Kaidoun, and we remembered having
seen a man on a camel apparently watching for us, but instead of coming
forward he galloped away; and thus it appears we got past the place from
which they meant to set upon us, before the attacking party could arrive.

During the days we were at Hagarein several weddings were celebrated. To
form a suitable place for conviviality they cover over a yard with mats,
just as the Abyssinians do, and the women, to show their hilarity on the
occasion, utter the same gurgling noises as the Abyssinian women do on a
like occasion, and which in Abyssinia is called _ululta_. From our roof
we watched the bridegroom's nocturnal procession to his bride's house,
accompanied by his friends bearing torches, and singing and speechifying
to their hearts' content.

On our return from the ruins near Meshed, Taisir (our soldier) came to us
and was very indignant about the price the sultan charged for his
soldiers. He was given ten rupees to attach himself to us, as an earnest
of the good bakshish he would get at the coast, as he said all the other
soldiers would go back from Shibahm, and really in that case I think he
would have been glad of our escort.

Then Saleh, who had 100 rupees a month and ate with everyone, came to
demand half a rupee a day for food; this was granted, as we thought it
could come off his bakshish, and he soon appeared to make the same
request for Mahmoud, the naturalist. Matthaios was furious, as Mahmoud
ate partly with him, and no one was angrier with him than Saleh. It was
settled that we should give him tea, bread, and four annas, and they all
went off bawling. Afterwards we heard Saleh had said, 'Mr. Bent is giving
so much money to the sultan, why should we not have some?'

We really thought at first that we should be able to encamp at Meshed and
dig, for there was a seyyid who had been in Hyderabad and was very civil
to us, but this happiness only lasted one hour. The sultan said it would
really not be safe unless we lived in Hagarein, so we had to give it up
as it was an impossibility to dig in the heat of the day, with six hours'
journey to fatigue us; besides we must have paid many soldiers and we
were told no one would dig for us. So much was said about the dangers of
the onward road that Saleh was sent with the letters for Shibahm and
Sheher and told to hold them tight, and say that if we could not deliver
these in person we should return to the wali of Aden and say that the
sultan of Hagarein would not let us go on. This frightened him, so he
made a very dear bargain for fifteen camels, and we were to leave next
day.

We were glad enough to depart from Hagarein, which is so picturesque that
it really might be an old, mediaeval, fortified town on the Rhine, built
entirely of mud and with no water in its river. All the houses are
enormously high, and have a kitchen and oven on each floor. The bricks of
which they are built are about one foot square and with straw in them.
They have shooting holes from every room and machicolations over the
outer doors and along the battlements, and what makes the houses seem to
contain even more stories than they do, is that each floor has two ranges
of windows, one on the ground so that you can only see out if you sit on
the floor, and another too high to see out of at all; below every lower
window projects a long wooden spout. The narrow lanes are mere drains,
and the whole place a hotbed of disease; the people looked very
unhealthy: when cholera comes they die like flies. As a wind up to this
last evening Mahmoud came into our room and soon began to say his
prayers; we could not make out why, but it turned out he had no light in
his room.

Altogether we had not a reposeful time in Hagarein. We were told early
next day that fourteen men of the Nahad tribe had come as our _siyara_,
though we had been told two would be sufficient; so we had to agree to
take four. Then we were asked to pay those who had come unbidden. The
sultan came himself about it, and his children came to beg for annas. At
last the sultan, who had often said he felt as if he were our brother,
obtained twelve rupees which he asked for to pay his expenses for the
kids and honey, and said my horse had eaten the worth of twice as much
money as he had asked before.

When we finally got off we found the old rascal had only sent half the
Nahadi and had only sent two soldiers, and so had really made forty
dollars out of us over that one item. The Nahad men had ten dollars
each. They are not under the sultan of Makalla, but independent. The
Nahad tribe occupy about ten miles of the valley through which we passed,
and the toll-money we paid to this tribe for the privilege of passing by
was the most exorbitant demanded from us on our journey. When once you
have paid the toll-money (_siyar_), and have with you the escort
(_siyara_) of the tribe in whose territory you are, you are practically
safe wherever you may travel in Arabia, but this did not prevent us from
being grossly insulted as we passed by certain Nahad villages. Kaidoun,
where dwells the very holy man so celebrated all the country round for
his miracles and good works, is the chief centre of this tribe. We had
purposely avoided passing too near this town, and afterwards learnt that
it was owing to the influence of this very holy seyyid that our reception
was so bad amongst the Nahad tribe.

All about Hagarein are many traces of the olden days when the
frankincense trade flourished, and when the town of Doan, which name is
still retained in the Wadi Doan, was a great emporium for this trade.
Acres and acres of ruins, dating from the centuries immediately before
our era, lie stretched along the valley here, just showing their heads
above the weight of superincumbent sand which has invaded and overwhelmed
the past glories of this district. The ruins of certain lofty square
buildings stand upon hillocks at isolated intervals; from these we got
several inscriptions, which prove that they were the high 'platforms'
alluded to on so many Himyaritic inscribed stones as raised in honour of
their dead. As for the town around them, it has been entirely engulfed in
sand; the then dry bed of a torrent runs through the centre, and from
this fact we can ascertain, from the walls of sand on either side of the
stream, that the town itself has been buried some 30 feet or 40 feet by
this sand. It is now called Raidoun. The ground lies strewn with
fragments of Himyaritic inscriptions, pottery, and other indications of a
rich harvest for the excavator, but the hostility of the Nahad tribe
prevented us from paying these ruins more than a cursory visit, and even
to secure this we had to pay the sheikh of the place nineteen dollars,
and his greeting was ominous as he angrily muttered, 'Salaam to all who
believe Mohammed is the true prophet.'

We were warned 'that our eyes should never be let to see Meshed again;'
we might camp before we got there, or after, as we wished, so were led by
a roundabout way to Adab, and saw no more of the leprous seyyid who told
such wondrous tales about the English king who once lived in Hagarein,
and how the English, Turks, and Arabs were all descended from King Sam.
Also he told the Addite fable of how the giants and rich men tried to
make a paradise of their own, the beautiful garden of Irem, and defied
God, and so destruction came upon the tribe of Ad, the remnant of whom
survive at Aden on Jebel Shemshan, in the form of monkeys. This is the
Mohammedan legend of the end of the Sabaean Empire.

We were much amused with what Imam Sharif said to this seyyid. Imam
Sharif is himself a seyyid or sherif, a descendant of Mohammed, his
family having come from Medina, so he was always much respected. He said
to him: 'You think these English are very bad people, but the Koran says
that all people are like their rulers; now we have no spots or diseases
on our bodies, but are all clean and sound, which shows plainly that our
ruler and the rest of us must be the same. Now you, my brother, must be
under the displeasure of God, for I see that you are covered with
leprosy.' This was not a kind or civil speech, I fear, but not a ruder
one than those addressed to us. This leprosy shows itself by an
appearance as if patches of white skin were neatly set into the dark
skin.

At Adab they would not allow us to dip our vessels in their well, nor
take our repast under the shadow of their mosque: even the women of this
village ventured to insult us, peeping into our tent at night, and
tumbling over the jugs in a manner most aggravating to the weary
occupants. The soldiers had abandoned us and gone to sleep in the
village.

A dreary waste of sand led past Kerren to Badorah. I arrived first with
Imam Sharif, a servant, and a soldier. We dismounted, as there was some
surveying to be done. The people were quite friendly, we thought, though
they crowded round me shouting to see the 'woman.' I went to some women
grouped at a little distance, and we had no trouble as long as we were
there. We had left before the camels came and heard that the rest of the
party had been very badly received, stones were thrown, and shouts raised
of 'Pigs! Infidels! Dogs! Come down from your camels and we will cut your
throats.' We attributed this to Saleh Hassan, for he made enemies for us
wherever we went. At this village they were busy making indigo dye in
large jars like those of the forty thieves. We were soon out of the Nahad
country.

Our troubles on the score of rudeness were happily terminated at Haura,
where a huge castle, belonging to the Al Kaiti family, dominates a humble
village, surrounded by palm groves. Without photographs to bear out my
statement, I should hardly dare to describe the magnificence of these
castles in the Hadhramout. That at Haura is seven stories high, and
covers fully an acre of ground beneath the beetling cliff, with
battlements, towers, and machicolations bearing a striking likeness to
Holyrood; but Holyrood is built of stone, and Haura, save for the first
story, is built of sun-dried bricks, and if Haura stood where Holyrood
does, or in a rainy climate, it would long ago have crumbled away.

Haura is supposed to be the site of an ancient Himyaritic town. We were
told that the sultan of Hagarein is not entirely under Makalla, but that
he of Haura is.

The castle of the sultan is nice and clean inside, and it was pleasant,
after some very reviving cups of coffee and ginger, and some very public
conversation, to find our canvas homes all erected on a hard field--a
pleasant change from our late dusty places. Mahmoud obtained a fox, which
was his first mammal, saving a bushy-tailed rat. We were sent a lamb and
a box of honey, and soon after the governor arrived to request a present.
He asked thirty rupees but got twenty, and the new soldiers in place of
the Nahadi men were to have five rupees on arrival at Koton. We were now
nearing the palace of Sultan Salah-bin-Mohammad al Kaiti of Shibahm, the
most powerful monarch in the Hadhramout, who has spent twelve years of
his life in India, and whose reception of us was going to be magnificent,
our escort told us.

As we were leaving Haura, just standing about waiting to mount, I felt
something hard in one finger of my glove which I was putting on. I
thought it was a dry leaf and hooked it down with my nail and shook it
into my hand. Imagine my terror on lifting my glove at seeing a scorpion
wriggling there. I dropped it quickly, shouting for Mahmoud and the
collecting-bottle, and then caught it in a handkerchief. This was the way
that _Buthia Bentii_ introduced himself to the scientific world, for he
was of a new species. It turned out that the 'oldest soldier' was father
to the sultan of Haura. He went no farther with us.

The next day, three miles after leaving Haura, we quitted the Wadi Kasr
and at last, at the village of Alimani, entered the main valley of the
Hadhramout. It is here very broad, being at least eight miles from cliff
to cliff, and receives collateral valleys from all sides, forming, as it
were, a great basin. Hitherto our way had been generally northward, from
Makalla to Tokhum, north-east, and then north-west; now we turned
westward down the great valley, though still with a slight northward
tendency.

We passed Ghanima, Ajlania on a rock to the right, and Henan and the Wadi
Menwab behind it on our left. Wellsted, in his list of the Hadhramout
towns, mentions Henan as Ainan, and as a very ancient town, on the hill
near which are inscriptions and rude sculptures.

For seven hours we travelled along the valley, which from its width was
like a plain till we were within a mile of the castle of Al Koton, where
the sultan of Shibahm resides. Thus far all was desert and sand, but
suddenly the valley narrows, and a long vista of cultivation was spread
before us. Here miles of the valley are covered with palm groves. Bright
green patches of lucerne called _kadhlb_, almost dazzling to look upon
after the arid waste, and numerous other kinds of grain are raised by
irrigation, for the Hadhramout has beneath its expanse of sand a river
running, the waters of which are obtained by digging deep wells. Skin
buckets are let down by ropes and drawn up by cattle by means of a steep
slope, and then the water is distributed for cultivation through narrow
channels; it is at best a fierce struggle with nature to produce these
crops, for the rainfall can never be depended upon. We had intended to
push on to Al Koton, but Sultan Salah sent a messenger to beg us not to
arrive till the following morning, that his preparations to receive us
might be suitable to our dignity, as the first English travellers to
visit his domains. So we encamped just on the edge of the cultivation,
about a mile off, at Ferhud, where under the shade of palm-trees there is
a beautiful well of brackish water, with four oxen, two at each side to
draw up the water.

Outside the cultivation in its arid waste of sand the Hadhramout produces
but little; now and again we came across groups of the camelthorn, tall
trees somewhat resembling the holm oak. It is in Arabic a most
complicated tree. Its fruit, like a small crab apple, is called _b'dom_,
very refreshing, and making an excellent preserve; its leaves, which they
powder and use as soap, are called _ghasl_, meaning 'washing'; whereas
the tree itself is called _ailb_, and is dearly loved by the camels, who
stretch their long necks to feed off its branches.

We wondered what kind of reception we should have, for people's ideas on
this point vary greatly. In order not to offend the sultan's prejudices
too much, we determined to dissemble, and I decided not to wear my little
camera, and Imam Sharif packed the plane-table out of sight. We settled
that he should have the medicine chest in his charge and be the doctor of
the party, and addressed him as Hakim. Even Saleh feared so much what the
future might hold in store, that he removed his drawers and shoes, and
advised Imam Sharif to do the same, as Mohammed had never worn such
things. Imam Sharif refused to take these precautions, saying that if
Mohammed had been born in Cashmere he would have assuredly worn both
drawers and shoes. Imam Sharif wore a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers
and a turban when on the march, but in camp he wore Indian clothes.
However, we were soon visited by the sultan's two wazirs on spirited Arab
steeds: magnificent individuals with plaided turbans, long lances, and
many gold mohurs fixed on their dagger handles, all of which argued well
for our reception on the morrow by the sultan of Shibahm.

We were a good deal stared at, but not disagreeably, for all the soldiers
were on their best behaviour. At Khaila and Sief we had to be tied up,
airless, in our tents, as if we left them open a minute when the crowd,
tired of seeing nothing, had dispersed, and one person saw an opening,
the whole multitude surged round again, pressing in, shouting and
smelling so bad that we regretted our folly in having tried to get a
little light and air. We saw among others a boy who had a wound in his
arm, and therefore had his nostrils plugged up; bad smells are said not
to be so injurious as good ones. Some women came and asked to see me, so
I took my chair and sat surrounded by them. They begged to see my hands,
so I took off my gloves and let them lift my hands about from one sticky
hand to another. They looked wonderingly at them and said 'Meskin' so
often and so pityingly that I am sure they thought I had leprosy all
over. Then they wished to see my head, and having taken off my hat, my
hair had to be taken down. They examined my shoes, turned up my gaiters,
stuck their fingers down my collar, and wished to undress me, so I rose
and said very civilly, 'Peace to you, oh women, I am going to sleep now,'
and retired.

Arab girls before they enter the harem and take the veil are a curious
sight to behold. Their bodies and faces are dyed a bright yellow with
turmeric; on this ground they paint black lines with antimony, over their
eyes; the fashionable colour for the nose is red; green spots adorn the
cheek, and the general aspect is grotesque beyond description.

We stayed in bed really late next morning, till the sun rose, and then
prepared ourselves to be fetched.

The two young wazirs, Salim-bin-Ali and Salim-bin-Abdullah, cousins, came
again at 7.30 with two extra horses, which were ridden by my husband and
Saleh, as Imam Sharif stuck to the donkey which we named Mahsoud
(Happy).




CHAPTER X

OUR SOJOURN AT KOTON


Like a fairy palace of the Arabian Nights, white as a wedding cake, and
with as many battlements and pinnacles, with its windows painted red, the
colour being made from red sandstone, and its balustrades decorated with
the inevitable chevron pattern, the castle of Al Koton rears its
battlemented towers above the neighbouring brown houses and expanse of
palm groves; behind it rise the steep red rocks of the encircling
mountains, the whole forming a scene of Oriental beauty difficult to
describe in words. This lovely building, shining in the morning light
against the dark precipitous mountains, was pointed out to us as our
future abode. My horse, Basha, seemed to have come to life again and
enjoy galloping once more, for we had left the servants, camels, &c. to
follow.

As we approached _feux de joie_ announced our arrival, and at his gate
stood Sultan Salah to greet us, clad in a long robe of canary-coloured
silk, and with a white silk turban twisted around his swarthy brow. He
was a large, stout man, negroid in type, for his mother was a slave, and
as generous as he was large, to Arab and European alike. He looked about
fifty-five or sixty, but said his age was 'forty-five or forty.' At
first, on being seated in his reception-room, we were very cautious in
speaking of our plans, as we were surrounded with all sorts and
conditions of men.

He placed at our disposal a room spread with Daghestan carpets and
cushions, furnished with two tables and three chairs, and not a mouthful
of our own food would he allow us to touch, a hospitality which had its
drawbacks, for the Arab _cuisine_ is not one suited to Western palates.

We were very glad of this hospitality at first as it would give Matthaios
a holiday, which he could devote to the washing of clothes, water being
so plentiful. I will describe one day's meals, which were invariably the
same. At eight o'clock came several cups, all containing coffee and milk,
honey, eggs, hard boiled and peeled, and a large thin leathery kind of
bread made plain with water, and another large thin kind made with _ghi_,
and like pastry.

About 2.30 came two bowls like slop-bowls, one containing bits of meat,
vegetables, eggs and spices in sauce, under about an inch of melted
_ghi_, the other a kind of soup. They were both quite different, but at
the same time very much alike, and the grease on the top kept them
furiously hot. There were little pieces of boiled lamb, and little pieces
of roast lamb; tiny balls of roast meat and also of boiled; a mound of
rice and a mound of dates; and upon requesting some water we were given
one large glassful. Identically the same meal came at 9.30, an hour when
the _bona-fide_ traveller pines to be in his bed. These things were laid
on a very dirty coloured cotton cloth, but no plates or knives, &c. were
provided.

At several odd times through the day a slave walked in and filled several
cups of tea, a few for each of us. The cups were never washed by him.

After struggling for a few days, many of the party having had recourse to
the medicine-chest, we were at length compelled humbly to crave his
majesty to allow us to employ our own cook. This he graciously permitted,
and during the three weeks we passed under his hospitable roof, our cook
was daily supplied by the 'sultanas'--most excellent housewives we
thought them--with everything we needed.

One of the most striking features of these Arabian palaces is the
wood-carving. The doors are exquisitely decorated with it, the supporting
beams, and the windows, which are adorned with fretwork instead of glass.
The dwelling-rooms are above, the ground floor being exclusively used for
merchandise and as stables and cattle stalls, and the first floor for the
domestic offices. The men-servants lie about in the passages. We lived on
the second floor, the two next stories were occupied by the sultan and
his family, and above was the terraced roof where the family sleep during
the summer heat. Every guest-room has its coffee corner, provided with a
carved oven, where the grain is roasted and the water boiled; around are
hung old china dishes for spices, brass trays for the cups, and fans to
keep off the flies; also the carved censers, in which frankincense is
burnt and handed round to the guests, each one of whom fumigates his
garments with it before passing it on. It is also customary to fumigate
with frankincense a tumbler before putting water into it, a process we
did not altogether relish, as it imparts a sickly flavour to the fluid.

We found the system of door-fastening in vogue a great nuisance to us.
The wooden locks were of the 'tumbler' order. The keys were about 10
inches long, and composed of a piece of curved wood: at one end were a
number of pegs stuck in irregularly, to correspond with a number of the
tumbling bolts which they were destined to raise. No key would go in
without a tremendous lot of shaking and noisy rattling, and you always
had to have your key with you, for if you did not lock your door on
leaving your room there was nothing to prevent its swinging open; and if
you were inside you must rise and unbolt it to admit each person, and to
bolt it behind him for the same reason.

We got very friendly with Sultan Salah during our long stay under his
roof, and he would come and sit for hours together in our room and talk
over his affairs. Little by little he was told of all our sufferings by
the way, and was very angry. We also consulted him as to our plans, and
told him how badly Saleh was behaving.

We used sometimes to think of dismissing Saleh, but thought him too
dangerous to part with. It was better to keep him under supervision, and
leave him as much in the dark as possible about our projects.

The sultan took special interest in our pursuits, conducting us in person
to archaeological sites, and manifesting a laudable desire to have his
photograph taken. He assisted both our botanist and naturalist in
pursuing their investigations into the somewhat limited flora and fauna
of his dominions, and was told by Imam Sharif that his work with the
sextant was connected with keeping our watches to correct time.

He would freely discourse, too, on his own domestic affairs, giving us
anything but a pleasing picture of Arab harem life, which he described as
'a veritable hell.' Whenever he saw me reading, working with my needle,
or developing photographs, he would smile sadly, and contrast my
capabilities with those of his own wives, who, as he expressed it, 'are
unable to do anything but painting themselves and quarrelling.' Poor
Sultan Salah has had twelve wives in his day, and he assured us that
their dissensions and backbitings had made him grow old before his time;
his looking so old must be put down to the cares of polygamy. At Al Koton
the sultan had at that time only two properly acknowledged wives, whom he
wisely kept apart; his chief wife, or 'sultana,' was sister to the sultan
of Makalla, and the sultan of Makalla is married to a daughter of Sultan
Salah by another wife; in this way do Arabic relationships get
hopelessly confused. The influence of the wife at Al Koton was
considerable, and he was obviously in awe of her, so much so that when he
wanted to visit his other wife he had to invent a story of pressing
business at Shibahm. 'Our wives,' said he one day, 'are like servants,
and try to get all they can out of us; they have no interest in their
husband's property, as they know they may be sent away at any time.' And
in this remark he seems to have properly hit off the chief evil of
polygamy. He also told us that, having got all they can from one husband,
they go off to a man that is richer, though how they make these
arrangements, if they stick to their veils, is a mystery to me.

Then again, he would continually lament over the fanaticism and folly of
his fellow-countrymen, more especially the priestly element, who
systematically oppose all his attempts at introducing improvements from
civilised countries into the Hadhramout. The seyyids and the mollahs
dislike him; the former, who trace their descent from the daughter of
Mohammed, forming a sort of hierarchical nobility in this district; and
on several occasions he has been publicly cursed in the mosques as an
unbeliever and friend of the infidel. But Sultan Salah has money which he
made in India, and owns property in Bombay; consequently he has the most
important weapon to wield that anyone can have in a Semitic country.

The sultan told us a famous plan they have in this country for making a
fortune. Two Hadhrami set out for India together, a father and son, or
two brothers. They collect enough money before starting to buy a very
fine suit of clothes each, and to start trade in a small way. They then
increase the business by credit, and when they have got enough of other
people's money into their hands, one departs with it to the inaccessible
Hadhramout, while the other waits to hear of his safe arrival, and then
he goes bankrupt and follows him.

Sultan Salah had not a high opinion of his countrymen, and told us
several other tales that did not redound to their credit.

'Before I went to India I was a rascal (_harami_) like these men here,'
he constantly asseverated, and his love for things Indian and English is
unbounded. 'If only the Indian Government would send me a Mohammedan
doctor here, I would pay his expenses, and his influence, both political
and social, would be most beneficial to this country.' It is certainly a
great thing for England to have so firm a friend in the centre of the
narrow habitable district between Aden and Maskat, which ought by rights
to be ours, not that it is a very profitable country to possess, but in
the hands of another power it might unpleasantly affect our road to
India, and in complying with this simple request of Sultan Salah's an
easy way is open to us for extending our influence in that direction.

Likewise from a humane point of view, this suggestion of Sultan Salah's
is of great value, for the inhabitants of the Hadhramout are more
hopelessly ignorant of things medical than some of the savage tribes of
Africa. Certain quacks dwell in the towns, and profess to diagnose the
ailments of a Bedou woman by smelling one of her hairs brought by her
husband. For every pain, no matter where, they brand the patient with a
red-hot iron (_kayya_); to relieve a person who has eaten too much fat,
they will light a fire round him to melt it; to heal a wound they will
plug up the nostrils of the sufferer, believing that certain scents are
noxious to the sore; the pleasant scents being the most harmful. Iron
pounded up by a blacksmith is also a medicine.

On an open sore they tie a sheet of iron, tin, or copper with four holes
in the corners for strings. We heard of the curious case of a man who
for a wager ate all the fat of a sheep that was killed at a pilgrimage.
He lay down to sleep under a shady tree and all the fat congealed in his
inside. The doctor ordered him to drink hot tea, while fires were lit all
around him, and thus he was cured and was living in Shibahm when we were
there.

We had a crowd of patients to treat whilst stationed at Al Koton, and I
have entered quantities of quaint experiences with these poor helpless
invalids in my note-book.

We had many an interesting stroll round the sultan's gardens at Al Koton,
and watched the cultivation of spices and vegetables for the royal table,
or rather floor; the lucerne and clover for his cattle, the indigo and
henna for dyeing purposes, and the various kinds of grain. But on the
cultivation of the date-palm the most attention is lavished; it was just
then the season at which the female spathe has to be fructified by the
male pollen, and we were interested in watching a man going round with an
apron full of male spathes. With these he climbed the stem of the female
palm, and with a knife cut open the bark which encircles the female
spathe, and as he shook the male pollen over it he chanted in a low
voice, 'May God make you grow and be fruitful.' No portion of the palm is
wasted in the Hadhramout: with the leaves they thatch huts and make
fences, the date stones are ground into powder as food for cattle, and
they eat the nutty part which grows at the bottom of the spathes, and
which they called _kourzan_. On a journey a man requires nothing but a
skin of dates, which will last him for days, and, when we left, Sultan
Salah gave us three goat-skins filled with his best dates, and large tins
of delicious honey--for which the Hadhramout was celebrated as far back
as Pliny's time[11]--which he sent on camels to the coast for us, as
well as a large inscribed stone that I now have in my house.

Innumerable wells are dotted over this cultivated area, the water from
which is distributed over the fields before sunrise and after sunset. The
delicious creaking noise made by heaving up the buckets greeted us every
morning when we woke, delicious because it betokened plenty of water: and
these early morning views were truly exquisite. A bright crimson tinge
would gradually creep over the encircling mountains, making the parts in
shade of a rich purple hue, against which the feathery palm-trees and
whitewashed castles stood out in strong contrast. All the animals
belonging to the sultan are stabled within the encircling wall, and
immediately beneath the palace windows; the horses' stable is in the open
courtyard, where they are fed with rich lucerne and dates when we should
give corn. Here also reside the cows and bullocks, which are fed every
evening by women, who tie together bunches of dried grass and make it
appetising by mixing therewith a few blades of fresh lucerne; the sheep
and the goats are penned on another side, whilst the cocks and hens live
in and around the main drain. All is truly patriarchal in character.

The sultan only possesses four horses, and one of these, a large white
mare, strangely enough came from the Cape of Good Hope, _via_ Durban and
Bombay. The sultan of Makalla had three. The 'Arab courser' lives farther
north.

As for the soldiers, they sent, as if it were a matter of course, for
some money to buy tobacco and were given two or three dollars each, and
we gladly parted from them friends. The sultan of Makalla had paid them
for a fortnight's food, and had written to Sultan Salah to pay what was
owing. My groom was dismissed also without bakshish: he was only a rough
fellow taken from the mud brick works at Makalla, and my poor Basha would
have fared ill if really dependent on M'barrek for care. My entreaties
alone saved him from being publicly bastinadoed, as the sultan wished,
when he heard of all his rudeness and disobedience.

The sultan was most anxious to arrange for our onward journey, and wrote
seven letters to different sheikhs and sultans, and sent them to us to
read, but we could not read them ourselves, and would not let Saleh, so
we were none the wiser. The sultans of Siwoun and Terim are brothers, of
the Kattiri tribe, but have no real authority outside their towns. We
were anxious to proceed along the Hadhramout valley and to reach the tomb
of the prophet Houd. The sultan also went to Shibahm to meet some of the
arbiters of our fate, and the sultan of Siwoun agreed to let us pass: but
others said we had five hundred camels loaded with arms, and all sorts of
other fables, and they all quarrelled dreadfully about us, so the sultan
returned to Al Koton to await replies to his letters.

The day the sultan was absent, the women were determined to have a little
enjoyment from our presence themselves, so a great many servants came
bringing the sultan's ten-year-old daughter Sheikha, a rather pretty
little girl, with long earrings all round her ears, which, like all the
other women's, hang forward like fringed bells. An uneven number is
always worn, and a good set consists of twenty-three. They are rings
about two inches in diameter, with long drops attached. Her face was
painted with large dots, stripes, and patterns of various colours, and
she had thick antimony round the eyes. Her neck, arms, and shoulders were
yellow, and her hands painted plain black inside and in a pattern like a
lace mitten on the back, the nails being red with henna.

I was also asked to pay a visit to the ladies. I went upstairs. Every
floor is like a flat, with its bath-room containing a huge vase called
_kazbah_, and the bath is taken by pouring over the person, from a
smaller utensil, water which runs away down drain-holes to the wooden
spouts. I found myself in some very narrow passages, among a quantity of
not over-clean women, who all seized me by the shoulders, passing me on
from one to the other till I reached a very large carpeted room, with
pillows round it, some very large looking-glasses and a chandelier.

I advanced across the room amid loud exclamations from the seated ladies,
and was pointed out a position in front of the two principal ones, who
were seated against the wall--one was the chief wife of the sultan, and
the other a daughter married to a seyyid, whose hand his father-in-law
must always kiss. He is a very disagreeable-looking man, who was much
offended because Imam Sharif would neither kiss his hand, being a seyyid
himself, nor let his own be kissed. I squatted down, and round me soon
squatted many more ladies--they were certainly not beautiful, but one,
who was nearest to me and seemed to be my guardian or showman, had a very
nice, kind, clever face. Her lips were not so large as most.

We seemed all to be presided over, as we literally were, by a kind of
confidential maid, who sat on the little raised hearth in the corner,
amongst all the implements for the making of coffee and burning of
incense, chanting constantly: 'Salek alleh Mohammed' and something more,
of which I can only remember that it was about the faith. Sometimes she
was quiet a little, and then, above all the din, she raised her shout,
accompanying it with an occasional single loud blow with a stone pestle
and mortar. There was no difficulty about seeing the gold anklets the
ladies wore, for their clothes, as they sat, were well above their knees.
Their feet were painted like fanciful black slippers with lace edges.
Their examination of me was very searching, even reaching smelling point,
and I feel sure I was being exorcised, for so much was being said about
Mohammed. At last an old lady said to me, 'There is no god but God!' with
which I agreed, and murmurs of satisfaction went round, while she nodded
her head triumphantly. Later on she pointed to the ceiling, and asked if
I considered this was the direction in which Allah dwells, and seemed
glad when I agreed. Of course no infidel would, she thought.

Presently the woman who had prepared the frankincense brought it down in
a small chafing dish, continuing the same chant and handing it round. I
wondered if I should be left out, or left till the last, but neither
happened, and when my turn came, like the rest, I held my head and hands
over the fumes, and we were all fumigated inside our garments. I may have
been partaking in some unholy rite, but my ignorance will be my excuse, I
hope.

I was then told I might go, which I was glad of, as I had been afraid to
offend them by going too soon. I was asked, as I left, if I should like
to see their jewellery; of course I said 'Yes,' and had hardly got home
and recovered from the deafening row, when I was fetched again.

There were crowds more women of all classes, clean and dirty, and as they
came trooping in to see me, the room seemed to resound with the
twittering sound of their kisses, for the incoming visitor kissed the
sitter's hand, while the sitter kissed her own, and there was kissing of
foreheads besides.

Numerous little baskets were brought in with immense quantities of gold
ornaments, some very heavy, but with few gems in them--absolutely none of
value. They consisted of coral, onyx, a few bad turquoises, crooked
pearls, and many false stones. Everything was of Indian work. Sheikha
came in in a silk dress with a tremendous, much-alloyed silver girdle,
and loaded with chains and bracelets of all sorts, clanking and clashing
as she came.

We had very good coffee with ginger and cloves in it, and at this time
there was a very great deal of religious conversation and argument, and
as they were exciting themselves I thought I would go, for I did not feel
very comfortable; but the chief lady said to me, in a very threatening
and dictatorial voice:

'La illaha il Allah! Mohammed resoul Allah.' I looked as much like an
idiot as I could, and pretended neither to notice nor understand, but I
was patted and shaken up by all that were near-enough neighbours to do
so, and desired to look at that lady.

Again she said 'La illaha il Allah' in the same tone, and I was told I
must repeat it. So she said the first part again in a firm tone, and I
cheerfully repeated after her, 'There is no god but God.'

Then she continued, 'Mohammed is his prophet.' I remained dumb. Then the
name of Issa (Jesus) went round, and I bowed my head.

The coffee woman then called out, 'Issa was a prophet before Mohammed.'

They then asked me if Issa was my prophet. I could only say that He is,
for my Arabic would not allow of a further profession of my faith.

I gladly departed and gave Sheikha afterwards two sovereigns for her
necklace.

They said they would show me their clothes, but they never did. I have
described the shape of these dresses, but I omitted to say that they are
gaily trimmed with a kind of ribbon about two inches wide, made of little
square bits of coloured silks and cottons sewn together. This is put
round the armholes, over the shoulder, and down to the hem of the garment
over the seam, where a curious gusset or gore runs from the front part
to the corner of the train. The dress is trimmed round the neck, which is
cut square and rather low, and generally hangs off one shoulder, and,
across the breast it is much embroidered, beads and spangles being
sometimes introduced. These women seem to live in a perpetual noise: they
gurgled loudly when we arrived, and we could always hear them playing the
tambourine.

Tiny girls wear, as their only garment, a fringe of plaits as in Nubia,
and their heads are shaven in grotesque patterns, or their hair done in
small plaits. Boys have their heads shaven also, all except locks of long
hair dotted about in odd places. I never saw such dreadful objects as the
women make of themselves by painting their faces. When they lift their
veils one would hardly think them human. I saw eyes painted to resemble
blue and red fish, with their heads pointing to the girl's nose. The
upper part of the face was yellow, the lower green with small black
spots, a green stripe down the nose, the nostrils like two red cherries,
the paint being shiny. Three red stripes were on the forehead, and there
was a red moustache, there being also green stripes on the yellow cheeks.

There was a delightful, tiny room on the roof, just a little place to
take and make coffee in, and we were allowed to clamber up to this, but
not without calling a slave and assuring ourselves that there was no
danger of my husband meeting any of the ladies, for it commanded the
roof, to which we had not access. We liked going up there very much, for
the views were splendid, and we could see down into the mosque, which is
built like cloisters, open in the middle. I took some photographs from
there, and also, with the greatest difficulty, managed to get one of the
room itself by tying my camera, without its legs, of course, with a rope
to the outside of the fretwork frame of the little window, which was on a
level with the floor. It was hard work not to be in the way myself, as I
had to put both arms out of the next window to take out the slides, and
to guess at the focus.

The sultan, though his Hindustani was getting a trifle rusty, said he
greatly liked the company of Imam Sharif, whose uncle had in some way
befriended him in India. Intelligent conversation he had not enjoyed for
a long time. He was certainly a little scandalised at Imam Sharif's lax
ways in religion, for he was one day sitting without his turban when some
coffee was brought. The sultan put his hands up to cover Imam Sharif's
head, saying:

'My brother, you are drinking with a bare head, and this is contrary to
the Koran.' The same remark was often made in camp by people who looked
into his tent. They said, 'Look! he is a Christian, his head is bare.' At
the same time no one thought anything of the Bedouin's bare heads.

During this period of uncertainty we made several little explorations of
the surrounding valleys.

One day we started out with the sultan, who had on his long coat, which
made him look like a huge, sulphur-coloured canary. It was lined with
light blue. He, my husband, Saleh, and a groom rode the four horses; Imam
Sharif and I had our Basha and Mahsoud, and a camel most smartly
decorated carried the Wazir Salim-bin-Abdullah and a soldier; other
soldiers followed on foot. We went about five miles to Al Agran to see
some ruins perched on a rock beneath the high wall of the plateau,
prettily situated with palms, gardens, and wells. The ruins, which are
those of a well-built fortress, consist of little more than the
foundation, but all embedded in modern houses, so that excavations would
be impossible. It must once have been a place of considerable importance.
There was a scrap of very well cut ornament, which looked as if it might
have belonged to a temple. It was from Al Agran or Algran that we
obtained a stone with a spout to it, with rather a long Sabaean
inscription on it, a dedication to the god Sayan, known to have been
worshipped in the Hadhramout. We were given coffee in a very dirty room,
which we were all the time longing to tear down that we might dig under
it.


CHAPTER XI

THE WADI SER AND KABR SALEH


On January 17 we started from Al Koton with only seven of our camels and
two of the sultan's packed with forage, to be away several days. The
sultan wished to lend his horses, but my husband refused. However, he had
to ride one, a grey, for fear of giving offence, and this was given to
him as a present afterwards, and he rode it whenever the rocks allowed
till we reached the coast. We eventually sent this horse, Zubda (butter),
and my Basha back to their respective donors, though they really expected
us to take them to Aden. We had two men of the Nahad tribe as our
_siyara_.

Our start took a very long time, for the sultan, attended by many people,
came a mile on foot. We travelled four hours and a half, partly through
land that would have been cultivated had there been rain, and partly
through salt desert, till we turned north-west into the Wadi Ser, where
there is a sandy desert. From the entrance to Wadi Ser we could see
Shibahm in the distance, an unpromising looking spot among sandhills. We
were all able to find shelter at Hanya under an enormous thorny _b'dom_
tree covered with fruit, and we felt like birds out of a cage, for we
never could walk out at Al Koton without a crowd, and the greasiness and
spiciness of the food was beginning to pall. We had a delightful camp,
but had to be very careful not to drop things in the sand, as they so
quickly disappeared. We had a new man called Iselem, who was to take
care of the horses, pluck chickens, and help in pitching the camp. His
wonder at the unfolding and setting up of the beds, chairs, &c., was
great. There was also an old man called Haidar Aboul. He and one of the
soldiers could talk Hindustani, so with Imam Sharif's help we were
somewhat independent of Saleh, though we had thought it necessary to
bring him, to keep him from working us harm.

We continued our way up the Wadi Ser for about five hours and camped at
Al Had in a field near a house, close to some high banks which radiated
intense heat, and suffered the more that we had to wait a long time for
the tea that we always had with our luncheon, as our water had been
stolen in the night. We always tried to save some to carry on and start
with next day, fearing we might fare worse in the next place we came to.

The well at this spot is the last water in this direction, for we were
reaching the confines of the great central desert. Wadi Ser, being such a
waste of sand, is very sparsely populated. The Bedouin here, like the
Turkomans, live in scattered abodes, little groups of two or three houses
dotted about, and solitary homesteads. It belongs to the Kattiri tribe,
who are at war with the Yafei. They once owned Sheher and Makalla and
took Al Koton, but in a war in 1874 the Yafei were supported by the
English; hence their friendship for England. The animosity still
continues and there is little intercourse between Siwoun and Shibahm,
though only twelve miles apart. The Kattiri have more of the Bedou about
them and the Yafei have more of the Arab. Our _siyar_ was twenty-five
dollars.

The people were preparing for rain, which may never come; they had had
none for two years, but if they get it every three years they are
satisfied, as they get a sufficient crop. As it comes in torrents and
with a rush, each field is provided with a dyke and a dam, which they
cut to let the water off. This dyke is made by a big scraper, like a
dustpan, called _mis'hap_, harnessed by chains to a camel or bullocks.
The camel goes over the existing bank and when the dustpan reaches the
summit the men in attendance upset the surface sand or soil, that has
been scraped off, and carry the scraper down. When this is done the field
is lightly ploughed; there is nothing more to do except to sit and wait
for rain. We saw signs of great floods in some parts.

Whenever we found ruins still visible in or near the Hadhramout we found
them on elevated spots above the sand level, from which we may argue that
all centres of civilisation in the middle of the valleys lie deeply
buried in sand, which has come down in devastating masses from the
highland and the central desert. The nature of the sand in this district
is twofold. Firstly we have the _loess_ or firm sand, which can be
cultivated; and secondly the disintegrated desert sand, which forms
itself into heaps and causes sandstorms when the wind is high.

The mountains diminish in height the farther north one goes. The
character of the valleys is pretty much the same as that of those to the
south of the main valley, only they are narrower and much lower, and thus
the deep indenture of the valley system of the Hadhramout gradually fades
away into the vast expanse of the central desert.

The wazir had been given a bag of money to buy fowls and lambs for us,
but Saleh came and said, 'The wazir wants some money for a lamb,' so it
was sent and returned. It had not been asked for and caused some offence,
but that odious little wretch only wished to make mischief.

The Bedouin are rather clever at impromptu verses, and when we were in
Wadi Ser they made night hideous by dancing in our camp. The performers
ranged themselves in two rows, as in Sir Roger de Coverley; time is kept
by a drum and by perpetual hand-clapping and stamping of the feet, whilst
two men execute elaborate capers in the centre, singing as they do so
such words as these: 'The ship has come from Europe with merchandise;
they shot at the minaret with a thousand cannon.' Bedouin women also take
part in these dances, and the Arabs think the dances very impious; it was
very weird by the light of the moon and the camp-fire, but wearisome when
we wanted to sleep, particularly as they kept it up till after we were
all astir in the morning, yelling, bawling, singing, and screeching,
Iselem being the ringleader. The ground was shaken as if horses were
galloping about. A Bedou was playing a flute made of two leg-bones of a
crane bound together with iron.

At a distance of half an hour from our camp there is a stone with an
inscription. This was visited on the day of our arrival, but we went
again next day that I might photograph it, very difficult in the position
in which it is. It is a great rough boulder about 10 feet high, that has
slipped down from the mountain, with large rough Sabaean letters just
punched on the surface, of no depth, but having a whitish appearance. The
letters run in every direction--sometimes side by side, sometimes in
columns.

The central and most important word which my husband was able to make
out, with the help of Professor Hommels' admirable dictionary of hitherto
ascertained Himyaritic words, is _Masabam_ or Caravan road. The stone
seemed to be a kind of sign-post; for as the old Bedou sheikh who was
with us said, there was in olden days, about 500 years ago, a caravan
road this way to Mecca, before the Bahr-Safi made it impassable. The
Bahr-Safi is a quicksand, north of Shabwa, but none of those present had
been there, and they all laughed at Von Wrede's story of King Safi and
his army being engulfed in it.

The Bedou sheikh with his retinue came to see that we took no treasure
out of the stone. There are a good many old stones built into the side of
the stream-bed. Having taken a copy and a photograph, which my husband
sent later to Dr. D. H. Mueller, in Vienna, to decipher, we departed. We
were told that the Wadi Ser goes four hours from that stone to the great
desert.

We then turned back and followed our _kafila_ to Alagoum, at the junction
of Wadi Ser and the Wadi Latat, about two hours' journey. Alagoum is a
large cluster of high houses, surrounded by stables and houses excavated
in the sandhills, where the inhabitants and their cattle live in hot
weather. This is quite an idea suited to the Bedouin, who live in caves,
when they can find them. The Bedouin in Southern Arabia never have tents.

We found that Saleh had joined the camel-men in resisting our own people,
who wanted to encamp under trees. They had unloaded in the open and Saleh
and Iselem had then retired into the village till the tents were pitched,
so, as we were to remain in this place two days, we had them moved. We
had by this time some of the Kattiri tribe with us as _siyara_.

At Al Garun the Wadi Ser is entered by a short collateral valley called
the Wadi Khonab, in which valley is the tomb of the prophet Saleh, one of
the principal sacred places of the district. Kabr Saleh is equally
venerated with the Kabr Houd, also called the tomb of the prophet Eber
(for, from what we could gather from the statements of intelligent
natives, Eber and Houd are synonymous terms) which is to be found in the
Tamimi country further up the main valley.

The prophet Houd was sent to reclaim the tribe of Ad. The Mahra tribe are
descended from a remnant of the Addites, as also are the Hadhrami,
according to the legends. Once a man named Kolabeh, when seeking for
camels came upon the beautiful garden of Irem-Dhatul-Imad, which is
supposed to have been in the desert near Aden; he found and brought away
a priceless jewel which came into possession of the first Ommiad Caliph
Nourrijaht. Those who embraced Islamism on the preaching of the prophet
Houd were spared, but the rest either were suffocated by a stifling wind
or survived in the form of apes, whose descendants still inhabit Jebel
Shemshan at Aden.

A remnant are also said to have fled to the Kuria Muria Islands.

We again met with considerable opposition from the Bedouin and our escort
when we proposed to visit the Kabr Saleh next day. However, this was
overcome by threats of reporting the opposition to Sultan Salah on our
return to Al Koton. So next morning we started. The sultan of Shibahm's
people were just as anxious to go as we were, for they were delighted to
get the chance of making this pilgrimage to so holy a place, which being
in an enemies' country they could not have done but for our escort.

A short ride of two hours brought us nearly to the head of the Wadi
Khonab, and there, situated just under the cliff, in an open wilderness,
is the celebrated tomb. It consists simply of a long uncovered pile of
stones, somewhat resembling a potato-pie, with a headstone at either end,
and a collection of fossils from the neighbouring mountains arranged
along the top. Hard by is a small house where the pilgrims take their
coffee, and the house of the Bedou mollah, who looks after the tomb, is
about a quarter of a mile off. Beyond this there is no habitation in
sight. A more desolate spot could hardly be found. The tomb is from 30 to
40 feet in length, and one of the legends concerning it is that it never
is the same length, sometimes being a few feet shorter, sometimes a few
feet longer. The Bedouin have endless legends concerning this prophet.
He was a huge giant, they said, the father of the prophet Houd, or Eber;
he created camels out of the rock, and hence is especially dear to the
wandering Bedou; and he still works miracles, for if even unwittingly
anyone removes a stone from this grave, it exhibits symptoms of life, and
gives the possessor much discomfort until it is returned. Once a domed
building was erected over the tomb, but the prophet manifested his
dislike of being thus inclosed and it was removed.

Men are said to go blind if they steal anything connected with the tomb;
once a man took a cup from the coffee-house, unaware of the danger he
incurred, tied it to his girdle, and carried it off. It stuck to him till
he restored it. Another man took a stone away and gave it to his children
to play with, but it hopped about till taken back again.

At the time of the _ziara_ or pilgrimage which takes place in November,
crowds of Bedouin, we were told, come from all the valleys and hills
around to worship. All our men treated the grave with the greatest
respect, and said their prayers around it barefoot.

I do not know what they would have done to Imam Sharif if he had not
comported himself as the others did, so that wretched man had to walk
barefoot all round on the sharp stones, and thus we obtained the
measurements. He got dreadfully pricked by thorns and coveted the fossils
very much. The stones of which the tomb is composed are about the size of
cannon-balls, and look just as if newly put together and quite weedless.
People stroke the upright stone at the head and then rub their hands on
their breast and kiss them, and do the same at the foot. The wazir would
have led us up close to it; but the Bedouin hated our being there at all,
and would by no means let us sleep there, as we wished to do. We
overheard our horrid little Saleh Hassan telling the bystanders that we
live on pork.

When we first got there, we were permitted to approach within a few yards
of the tomb, so that we saw it very distinctly; but when, after eating
our luncheon, and taking a siesta under a tree, we again advanced to
inspect it, the Bedou mollah attacked us with fierce and opprobrious
language, and, fearing further to arouse the fanaticism of these wild
people, we speedily mounted our horses and rode away.

We hoped to be able to visit Kabr Houd, the tomb of Nebi Saleh's son, in
the main valley, but, as it will appear, we were to be disappointed. I am
told, on reliable Arab authority, that it is similar in every way to the
Kabr Saleh--just a long pile of stones, about 40 feet in length,
uncovered, and with its adjacent mosque. These two primitive tombs of
their legendary prophets, zealously guarded and venerated by the Bedouin,
are a peculiar and interesting feature of the Hadhramout. It is a curious
fact that when one turns to the tenth chapter of Genesis (the best record
we have of the earliest populations of our globe) we find the patriarchal
names Salah, Eber, and Hazarmaveth (which last, as I previously stated,
corresponds to Hadhramout) following one another in their order, though
not in immediate sequence. I am at a loss to account for these names
being still venerated by the Bedouin, unless one admits a continuity of
legendary history almost too wonderful to contemplate, or else one must
consider that they were heathen sites of veneration, which have, under
Moslem influence, been endowed with orthodox names. Certain it is that
these tombs in the midst of the wilderness are peculiarly the property of
the Bedouin, and, though visited, and to a certain extent venerated, by
the Arabs, the latter do not attach so much importance to them as they do
to the tombs of their own walis or saints, which are always covered
tombs, near or in the centre of the towns. Another curious point I may
mention in connection with these tombs is that the Arab historian, Yaqut,
in his 'Mu'gam,'[12] tells us of a god in the Hadhramout, called Al
Galsad, who was a gigantic man; perhaps this god may have some connection
with the giant tombs of Saleh and Eber. Also Makrisi, who wrote in the
tenth century, a.d., speaks of a giant's grave he saw near Shabwa.

Near Al Agoum we saw a quantity of very ancient stone monuments, situated
on slightly elevated ground, above the sand. At first we imagined them to
be tombs, but on closer inspection we discovered that the erections,
which are large unhewn ones of the cromlech type, are decorated inside
with geometric patterns somewhat similar to those we found in the
Mashonaland ruins, and therefore my husband was more inclined to believe
they were originally used for religious purposes. There are traces of
letters above the pattern. The buildings are about 20 feet square and
several are surrounded by circular walls. They are apparently of extreme
antiquity, and doubtless far anterior in date to any other Himyaritic
remains that we saw in the Hadhramout.

The wazir joined us as usual on our return from Kabr Saleh, as we sat
outside our tent in the moonlight with Imam Sharif and the Indian
interpreters, and we had a pleasant evening. We were perfectly charmed to
see great preparations for sleep going on among the Bedouin. We thought
they really must be tired after dancing the whole night and walking the
whole day. They were busy putting themselves to bed in graves which they
dug in the loose dust, not sand; turbans, girdles, and so forth being
turned into bedclothes. Just as they were still Iselem began capering
about and they all got up shouting and screaming, but the wazir, seeing
my distress, with the greatest difficulty quieted them, as he did when
they broke out again at three o'clock in the morning.

It took us six hours the following day to ride back to Al Koton, where,
not being expected, we could not get a meal of even bread, honey, and
dates for about an hour and a half, and then had to wait till we were
very sleepy indeed for supper. We endured great hunger that day.

Salim-bin-Ali, the other wazir, had not come with us because he was not
well. The day of our reception, in curvetting about, he fell from his
horse and had suffered various pains ever since.

The sultan had had another stone brought for us from Al Gran; we did not
care to take this away as it had very little writing on it, only [Symbol:
script] (_al amin_, to the protection). It is circular, 1 foot 41/2 inches
in diameter, 21/2 inches high, made of coarse marble. We saw a similar
circular stone at Raidoun.

The wildest reports were going about as to the water-stone we already
had. It was almost the cause of an insurrection against the sultan of
Shibahm. They said 'It was very wrong to give that stone to a
"gavir"'--as they call us (for all the _k_'s are pronounced _g_)--'only
think of our carelessly letting him have it. The Englishman has taken
fifteen jewels of gold and gems out of it,' and named a high value.

'You are sure of this?' said the sultan to the ringleader.

'Oh, yes! quite certain!' he said.

So the sultan led him to our room, where the stone was, and said:

'Do you know the stone again? Look closely at it. Has anything happened
to it but a washing?'

The man looked extremely small. They said my husband's only business was
to extract gold from stones. It is extraordinary how widespread this
belief is. It is firmly rooted in Greece. Many a statue and inscription
has been shivered to atoms because of it, and our interest in
inscriptions was constantly attributed to a wish to find out treasure. We
once saw two men in Asia Minor industriously boring away into a
column--to find gold they told us. They already had made a hole about 8
inches deep and 4 or 5 inches wide. They think that the ancients had a
way of softening marble with acid.

We had again at this time a great many patients; for, as we really had
effected some cures the first time we were at Al Koton, our fame had
spread. We always had Matthaios and Imam Sharif to help us to elicit the
symptoms, and also to consult with as to the cures, because some remedies
which suit Europeans were by no means suited to the circumstances of our
patients. For instance, the worst coughs I ever heard were very
prevalent, but it would be useless to ask the sick to take a hot footbath
and stay in bed. The one blue garment, which in different shapes was all
the men and women wore, was little protection from the chill of the
evening. The women's dresses were always hanging off their backs; and the
men, who had each two pieces of thick blue cotton about 2 yards long by
11/2 yard wide, with fringes half a yard long, wore one as a permanent
petticoat and the other as a girdle by day and when cold as a shawl,
often put on in a very uncomfortable way--thrown on in front and left
hanging open behind--forming no protection to the back of the lungs.

The poor little baby, aged fifteen months, of the Wazir
Salim-bin-Abdullah was brought shrieking in agony, gnawing hard at its
emaciated little arms, and all covered with sores. Our hearts were wrung
at this wretched sight and we longed to help; we even thought of giving
it part of a drop of chlorodyne much diluted, but, fortunately for us,
dared not do so, for my husband said to them, 'I do not think the child
will live long.' It mercifully was released in a few hours. Then an old
man came who 'had a flame in his inside.' My husband examined him and
decided that he had an abscess, and, to please him, gave him a
dessertspoonful of borax and honey, which he swept up with his finger,
and I suppose it did relieve him, for after some minutes he said: 'The
fire is gone out.'

It grieved us sorely when poor souls came to us so hopefully and so
confident of help, with a withered arm or an empty eye-socket. Some with
less serious complaints than these last we recommended to go to Aden
hospital, a building of which we never thought at that time we should be
inmates ourselves. We found the ladies, to whom a plentiful supply of
violent pills had been administered, were better, but the sultan, who had
an attack of indigestion, had to be taken in hand at once by us doctors.
His wife required a tonic, so we got out some citrate of iron and
quinine, a bright, shiny, greenish-yellow, flaky thing, which Imam Sharif
assured us would be more beneficial and better liked if shown and admired
as gold; so after some conversation about pious frauds, I packed the
medicine up neatly and wrote in ornamental letters 'Golden Health Giver,'
and this name being explained and translated gave great satisfaction. We
were glad to be able to give the kind sultan a new bottle of
quinine--more acceptable than gold.

While we were away Mahmoud had found two little hedgehogs. One was dead
and stuffed; the other we kept alive for some time and it always liked to
creep into my clothes and go to sleep--I suppose because I never teased
it. In the little book of directions for zoological collectors we saw,
that 'little is known of the reproduction of lizards, so special
attention is to be paid,' &c. Mahmoud had brought me two little fragile
eggs to keep, about half an inch long, and I had put them in a match-box
with tow and packed them in my trunk, and on my return to Al Koton I
found two little lizards about 11/4 inch long, one alive and the other
dead. Both had to be pickled, as we did not understand how to bring so
small a lizard up by hand. They proved to be new to science, as was also
a large lizard we had found near Haura, whose peculiarity is that he has
no holes along his legs to breathe by, like other lizards. His name is
_Aporosceles Bentii_. The first lizard's egg I had I was determined
should not slip through my fingers; but alack! and well-a-day! my fingers
slipped through it.

In the meantime we were terrible bones of contention, and had the Wadi
Hadhramout all by the ears. We were very anxious indeed as to whether we
could proceed any farther or should have to go back, and whether we could
do either safely. We wanted to go right along the Wadi Hadhramout and to
see Bir Borhut or Barahout, a _solfatare_ as far as we could make out,
but Masoudi in the tenth century speaks of it as the greatest volcano in
the world, and says that it casts up immense masses of fire and that its
thundering noise can be heard miles away. On the heights near is much
brimstone, which the Bedouin find useful for gunpowder. They consider
this place is the mouth of hell and that the souls of Kafirs go there. In
Iceland there is similar accommodation for those souls. Von Wrede thinks
it was the Fons Stygis of Ptolemy, but M. de Goeje thinks that Ptolemy
alluded to some place farther west and south of Mareb. Certainly the
position given by Ptolemy does not coincide with that of Bir Borhut.

From 'Arabian Society in the Middle Ages,' by S. Lane-Poole, I take the
following notices of this place:--

El Kaswini says of Bir Borhut: 'It is a well near Hadhramout and the
Prophet (God bless and save him) said "In it are the souls of infidels
and hypocrites." It is an Addite well in a dry desert and a gloomy
valley, and it is related of Ali (may God be well pleased with him) that
he said, "The most hateful of districts to God (whose name be exalted)
is the valley of Barahout, in which is a well whose waters are black and
foetid, where the souls of infidels make their abode."'

El Asmai has narrated of a man of Hadhramout that he said: 'We find near
Barahout an extremely disgusting and foetid smell, and then news is
brought to us of the death of a great man of the chiefs of the infidels.'

Ajaib el Makhloukat also relates that a man who passed a night in the
valley of Barahout said: 'I heard all night (exclamatives) of "O Roumeh!
O Roumeh!" and I mentioned this to a learned man and he told me that it
was the name of the angel commissioned to keep guard over the souls of
the infidels.'

Bir Borhut is not far from Kabr Houd, which is said by some to be even
longer and wider than Kabr Saleh. The route lies through the territory of
the Kattiri, and the Yafei are quite ignorant of it; it would be quite
unsafe for them to go to the sea along the valley, and they always use
the road over the tableland. The Kattiri tyrannise over the sultan of
Siwoun and are enemies to the sultan of Shibahm; beyond them are the
Minhali, who are also enemies; then the Amri and the Tamimi, who are
friendly, and then come the Mahri. The sultan told us that not even he
could prevent us going along the _kafila_ path, but we should not be
admitted into any villages and should probably be denied water. One
source of enmity between the Kattiri and the Yafei is, I believe, a debt
which the Kattiri owe and will not pay. The sultan of Siwoun borrowed
three lacs of rupees from the grandfather of the present sultan of
Makalla; he would not repay them, so after much squabbling the case was
referred to the English at Aden, who, after duly considering the papers,
gave Makalla and Sheher (bombarding them first) to the Yafei.

In answer to the seven letters there was nothing from the sultan of
Siwoun, and the sultan of Terim sent a verbal answer--'Do as you please,'
taking no responsibility--to which Sultan Salah replied, 'I have sent you
a letter, send me a letter.' The sheikh of the Kattiri tribe came to Al
Koton and said he would take us, but on January 23 we heard that the
sultan of Siwoun had made a proclamation in the mosque there, forbidding
the people to admit the unbelievers to the town. Though we could easily
go by the _kafila_ road, leaving the town of Siwoun two miles on one
side, the sultan deemed it wiser for us not to attempt it, as brawls
might arise, the two tribes being at war; so we then decided to mount on
to the akaba, pass the inhospitable Siwoun and Terim, and reach the
friendly Tamimi tribe. The Kattiri _kabila_, or tribe, really came to
Siwoun to be ready for us, but the seyyids had collected a large sum of
money and bribed the sultan to send them away.

We were hoping to get off to Shibahm, but as the sultan was neither well
nor in a very good humour, we had to resign ourselves to settling down in
Al Koton in all patience. He said he must accompany us, as he could not
depend on his wazirs for they were too stupid.

My husband and I were always occupied. He used to sketch in
water-colours, and I had plenty of work developing photographs in a
delightful little dark room, where I lived and enjoyed as many skins of
water as I could use, till I had to stop and pack my celluloid negatives
like artificial flowers, for they curled up and the films contracted and
split, from the alkaline water. I had to put glycerine on them when I
reached Aden. Our botanist nearly died of dulness and impatience; Mahmoud
was quite contented to sit quite still, and I do not think the Indian
servants minded much. Poor Imam Sharif used to gaze up at half a dozen
stars from a yard, but he dared not venture on the roof to see more.

We took a stroll with the sultan one day, no crowd being allowed, and
remarked how many things were grown for spices, those spices which were
becoming rather wearisome to us. There was _zamouta_, an umbelliferous
plant, the seed of which is used in coffee, and _habat-assoba_ for
putting in bread; coriander, chili, fennel, and _helf_, a plant very like
tall cress, which is used in cookery and also raw, and which we liked as
a salad; also _attar_, a purple creeping bean, very pretty and good to
eat. There was also another low-growing bean, _brinjol_ (egg plant),
cucumber, water-melon, henna, and indigo. The sultan has besides a
private inclosure where he has some lime-trees, not our kind of lime-tree
of course, but the one which bears fruit; and I must not forget cotton,
from which the place originally took its name, as it is abundant in a
wild state.

At last another polite letter came from the Kattiri, and a letter from
the sultan of Terim. 'I have both your letters _and you can do as you
like_, my answer is the same.' This did away with all hope of progress in
that direction.

Our spirits, however, were much cheered by hearing that the sultan had
received a letter from a seyyid at Meshed (probably the nice one who had
been in India and had leprosy in his legs), telling him how very badly
the sultan of Hagarein had behaved about us. As this was spontaneous, we
hoped that the negotiation our sultan was going to undertake about our
making excavations at Meshed, Raidoun, or Kubar al Moluk (for some part
of the ruins is called Tombs of the Kings), would turn out successfully.
The sultan of Hagarein was summoned to Al Koton, but we were away before
he came. I believe in the end he was turned out of his place, former
misdeeds counting against him.


CHAPTER XII

THE CITY OF SHIBAHM


On January 25 we started for Shibahm, carpets having been sent forward
the day before. The sultan was to follow us in a day or two, when some
sheikhs had been to see him. We started at 8.30 and were at Shibahm in
four hours. We had eleven camels only, three horses, and the donkey. We
travelled, as soon as we left Al Koton, through sand nearly all the way.
We passed the tall white dome of Sheikh Aboubekr-bin-Hassan's tomb, near
which the ruling family are buried if the seyyids permit. They are
all-powerful, and the sultan can do nothing in this respect without
them--not even be buried in his own family tomb. There is a well beside
the tomb, or rather the kind of building from which water is obtained in
the open valleys. This consists of a small white building 8 or 9 feet
square, with a dome resting on an open pattern composed of a herring-bone
course of bricks; a little wooden ladle, 4 or 5 inches wide, stands in
one of the little openings to dip out the water, which would otherwise
evaporate. They drink out of the ladle, and fill the water-skins and the
drinking trough for animals, which stands always near. They would never
let us drink from the ladles.

As we neared Shibahm we passed through a good deal of ground that had
once been irrigated, but it had had its ups and downs, and was now
abandoned. First there had been plenty of soil and the palm-trees were
planted in it. Then the wind had denuded the roots, some of which had
been banked up and walled in with stones; others were standing on bare
roots, but at this time the sand was burying the whole place. There were
high drifts against many of the walls and among the trees.

Shibahm is twelve miles distant from Al Koton, and is one of the
principal towns in the Hadhramout valley. It is built on rising ground in
the middle of the narrowest part of the valley, so that no one can pass
between it and the cliffs of the valley out of gunshot of the walls. This
rising ground has doubtless been produced by many successions of towns
built of sun-dried bricks, for it is the best strategical point in the
neighbourhood.

Early Arab writers tell us that the Himyaritic population of this
district came here when they abandoned Shabwa, early in the Christian
era. We succeeded, however, in finding evident traces of an occupation of
earlier date than this, both in a seal, which is described further on,
and in an inscription in which the name Shibahm occurs, and which
certainly dates from the third century b.c. Even if Shibahm were not the
site of the original capital it must always, centuries before our era,
have been a place of considerable importance as the centre of the
frankincense trade, for here must have been made up the caravans which
brought the spices westward by the great frankincense road across Arabia.
The caravans take twenty-five days on the journey to Saihut, and five to
Makalla; they go also to Nejd, but we could not find out how long they
take.

Shibahm is now the property of the sultan of Makalla, but was
administered by his cousin Salah, who received 40,000 rupees a year for
the purpose. It is now three hundred years since these Yafei left their
old home and came to settle in the Hadhramout. They were then a wild
predatory race, plundering caravans; now they have become peaceable and
rich. They still remain close friends with the Yafei farther west, but
are quite independent of them. It is the maintenance of a residence for
the Nizam of Hyderabad, and their constant communication with India, that
has doubtless made all the difference between the Yafei tribe and others.
Building seems to have been their mania. The sultan of Shibahm has
numbers of houses at Al Koton and Shibahm, and he was intending to spend
20,000 rupees in rebuilding his father's house, for the castle at Al
Koton is not his own but Government property, and the strip of land
across the valley, part of it sandy, goes with it. He was buying up land
for himself in the Wadi Al Ain and elsewhere. He told us his father left
eleven million rupees to divide among his numerous progeny.

Relationships in that family must be a trifle confused. Manassar of
Makalla had married two sisters (both now dead) of his cousin Salah.
Salah had married two of Manassar's sisters. A daughter of Salah's
married Manassar, and another of them was married to one of Manassar's
sons, and Manassar's brother Hussein of Sheher married, or was married
to, a third daughter of Salah. Apparently the same complications existed
in the generation before this, but into them it is impossible to go. As
in India, the favourite marriage that a man can make is to marry his
'uncle's daughter.' Possibly the fact that property goes from brother to
brother till a whole generation is dead, instead of from father to son,
has something to do with this arrangement.

The town of Shibahm offers a curious appearance as one approaches; above
its mud brick walls, with bastions and watch towers, appear the tall
houses of the wealthy, whitewashed only at the top, which make it look
like a large round cake with sugar on it. Outside the walls several
industries are carried on, the chief of which is the manufacture of
indigo dye. The small leaves are dried in the sun and powdered, and then
put into huge jars and filled with water. Next morning these are stirred
with long poles, producing a dark-blue frothy mixture; this is left to
settle, and then the indigo is taken from the bottom and spread out on
cloths to drain; the substance thus procured is taken home and mixed with
dates and saltpetre. Four pounds of this indigo to a gallon of water
makes the requisite and universally used dye for garments, the better
class of which are calendered by beating them with wooden hammers on
stones. This noise was a great mystery to us till we traced our way to it
and found out what it was. They used also to beat the dried leaf of a
kind of acacia called _kharrad_, and, when pounded, make of it a paste
which has a beautiful pea-green appearance; it is used for giving a
polish to leather.

[Illustration: A SABAEAN ALTAR]

Another industry carried on outside Shibahm is rope-making out of the
fibres of the fan palm (_saap_) which grows wild in the narrower valleys;
the leaves are first left to soak in water, and then beaten till the
fibres separate. Yet another is that of making lime for whitewash
kilns--it is curious to watch the Bedouin beating the lime thus produced
with long sticks, singing quaint little ditties as they thump, in
pleasant harmony to the beating of their sticks.

We entered the town by some very sloping steps, which led through the
gateway, passing some wells and the indigo dyers outside; also some
horrible pools where they had put the little fish that the camels eat, to
drain the oil from them. We entered a sort of square, having the castle
on the right-hand side and a ruined mosque in front of us. This huge
castle was built by the grandfather of the Sultan Manassar, sultan of
Makalla, but, owing to some difference about his wives, he left the two
topmost stories unfinished. No one lives in it, so we had the whole of
this immense pile of buildings to ourselves. It belongs to Manassar. It
is larger than Al Koton by far, and that is also exceeded in size by
Haura. It is a most imposing structure and much more florid than the
others. The gateway is a masterpiece of carving in intricate patterns. On
entering this you turn sharp to the right up a shallow staircase,
protected from without, but exposed to fire from the inmates of the
castle. The pillars in the lofty rooms are beautifully carved. All the
windows are filled with pretty fretwork; bolts, doors, and window frames
are also carved. The huge doors are carved on one side only, the outer
one, and inside they are rough and ill-grained and splashed with
whitewash. There are pretty dado patterns round the walls; and the
staircase, as in the other castles, has numerous doors for defence,
usually put in the middle of the flights. Shooting-holes are in every
direction. We established ourselves in a room about 30 feet by 25 feet,
and used to go up and dine in one of the unfinished rooms at the top
where there was a little bit of roof and where the cooking was done. We
generally thought it wise to dine in our grill-room, in order to have our
food hot. We all greatly enjoyed the works of our own cooks, provisions
being supplied to us.

We overlooked a huge puddle into which the surrounding houses drain, and
it is a proof of the scarcity of water in this part of Arabia, that they
carefully carry this filthy fluid away in skins to make bricks with, even
scraping up the remaining drops in the pool with their hands. In fact, it
scarcely ever rains in the Hadhramout.

From the roof of our lofty castle we had an excellent view straight down
the broad Hadhramout valley, dotted with towns, villages, palm groves,
and cultivation for fully thirty miles, embracing the two towns of Siwoun
and Terim, ruled over by the two brother sultans of the Kattiri tribe.
Close to Shibahm several collateral valleys from north and south fall
into the Hadhramout, and a glance at the map made by our chartographer,
Imam Sharif, Khan Bahadur, will at once show the importance of this
situation.

Shibahm is the frontier town of the Yafei tribe, the Kattiri occupying
the valley about two miles to the east, and these two tribes are
constantly at war. Sultan Salah's big standard was in one of our
dwelling-rooms ready to be unfurled at a moment's notice. He has cannons
on his walls pointed in the direction of his enemy--old cannons belonging
to the East India Company, the youngest of which bore the date of 1832.
From the soldiers we obtained a specimen of the great conch shells that
they use as trumpets in battle, and which are hung to the girdle of the
watchmen, who are always on the look-out to prevent a surprise.

The Kattiri are not allowed to stay in the town at night, for we heard
that seven months before some of them were detected in an attempt to blow
up the palace with gunpowder. There was a fight also, about a quarter of
a mile outside the town, in which five Kattiri and seven Yafei were
killed. There are three or four armed soldiers to protect Shibahm, the
sultan has erected bastions and forts all about it, and the walls are
patrolled every night.

There are many ruined houses in the plain, relics of the great war forty
years ago, when the Kattiri advanced as far as Al Koton and did great
damage. The sultan of Siwoun was invited, with seven sheikhs, to the
palace of Shibahm on friendly terms and there murdered in cold blood,
while forty of his followers were killed outside.

The inhabitants of Shibahm were not at all friendly disposed to us. On
the day of our arrival my husband ventured with two of the sultan's
soldiers into the bazaar, and through the narrow streets; but only this
once, for the people crowded round him, yelled at him, and insulted him,
trying their best to trip him up and impede his progress; he was nearly
suffocated by the clouds of filthy dust that the mob kicked up, and
altogether they made his investigations so exceedingly disagreeable that
he became seriously alarmed for his safety, and never tried to penetrate
into the heart of Shibahm again. On the whole I should accredit Shibahm
with a population of certainly not less than six thousand souls: there
are thirteen mosques in it, and fully six hundred houses, tall and gaunt,
to which an average population of ten souls is but a moderate estimate.
The slave population of Shibahm is considerable; many slaves have houses
there, and wives and families of their own. The sultan's soldiers are
nearly all slaves or of slave origin, and one of them, Muoffok, whose
grandfather was a Swahili slave, and who had been one of our escort from
Makalla, took us to his house, where his wife, seated unveiled in her
coffee corner, dispensed refreshments to quite a large party there
assembled, whilst Muoffok discoursed sweet music to us on a mandoline,
and a flute made out of the two bones of an eagle placed side by side.

Taisir and Aboud were also abiding in Shibahm. Taisir when he met us, on
the minute asked for bakhshish, saying he had been ill when we parted and
had had none though we had sent it to him. Oh! there was such kissing of
hands! so we thought it politic to love our enemy and gave him a present.
The Wazir Salim-bin-Ali had travelled with us to take care of us in the
absence of his master.

Once the Arabs had a good laugh at the expense of three members of our
party. One morning our botanist went forth in quest of plants and found a
castor-oil tree, the berries of which pleased him exceedingly. Unwilling
to keep so rare a treat for himself, he brought home some branches of the
tree, and placed the delicacy before two of our servants, Matthaios and,
I am glad to say, Saleh, who also partook heartily. Terrible was the
anguish of the two victims, which was increased by the Arabs, veritable
descendants of Job's comforters, who told them they were sure to die, as
camels did which ate these berries. The botanist did not succumb as soon
as the others, who, not believing he had eaten any berries himself, vowed
vengeance on his head if they should recover, and demanded that, to prove
his innocence, he should eat twelve berries in their presence. To our
great relief the botanist was at last seized with sickness, and thereby
proved his guiltlessness of a practical joke; three more miserable men I
never saw for the space of several hours. However, they were better,
though prostrate, next day, and for some time to come the popular joke
was to imitate the noises and contortions of the sufferers during their
anguish.

In consequence of the enmity manifested towards us we were even debarred
from walking in that interesting though smelly part, just outside the
town under the walls with the well, the brick-works, the indigo, the
oil-making, the many lime-kilns, the armourers, and all the industrious
people of the town.

We used to take the air on the roof in the evening; there were no
mosquitos, but we were never so persecuted with flies. Fortunately our
castle was near the wall, for to dwell in the narrow, tortuous, dirty
streets must be fearful--most likely the dust does much to neutralise the
evils of the defective drainage. The houses are very high and narrow and
built of mud brick (_kutcha_), which is constantly though slowly
powdering away. There are many houses in ruins.

We had two or three days of slight cold. The temperature was 62 deg. (F.) in
the shade, and it was so cloudy that we expected rain, but none came.

Saleh managed to get ten rupees from my husband, who refused any more,
though he brought a piece of cloth which he said he wished to buy from
the sultan. The money was only wanted for gambling. He went to Imam
Sharif and said, 'How is this that Mr. Bent, who at first was like my
brother, now is quite changed?' Imam Sharif said, 'If he was kind to you
when you were a stranger, and now that he knows you is different, there
must be some reason for it.' 'What have I done?' 'You know best,' said
Imam Sharif, 'and I advise you to beg pardon.' Saleh exclaimed, 'And you,
who are a Moslem, take part against me with these Christians!' This is
the keynote of his conduct to us.

We rode two hours one day, without Saleh, to a place called Kamour, on
the southern side of the valley, where there is an inscribed stone at the
mouth of a narrow slit or gorge leading to the akaba. The words thereon
were painted light red, dark red, yellow, and black, and scratched. The
decipherable words 'morning light' and 'offerings' point to this having
been a sacred stone when sun worship was prevalent. The letters are well
shaped, some letters being strange to us. The writing is _boustrephedon_,
which means that it runs backward and forward like an unbroken serpent,
each line being read in an opposite direction to that preceding or
following it. There is no difficulty in seeing this at a glance, as the
shapes of the letters are reversed; for instance, if this occurred in
English the two loops of a B would be on the left, if the writing were to
be read in that direction, [Symbol: reverse B]. The Greek name comes from
this style of writing being originally likened to cattle wandering about.
This at once relegates it, according to the best authorities, to at least
the third century before Christ, and we were forcibly reminded of the
large stone in the ruins of Zimbabwe and its similar orientation.

We heard of a cave with an inscription in it in the Kattiri country,
about six miles off, almost in sight. We longed 'to dance on Tom
Tiddler's ground' and make a dash for it, but the forfeits we might incur
deterred us, being our lives. The wazir said he would try to arrange for
this, but that, even if the seyyids consented, we must take forty
soldiers, well armed, pay them as well as _siyar_ to the Kattiri, pay the
expenses of the _siyara_, and take as short a time about the business as
possible.

On the 27th we heard that some of the tribe of Al Jabber, descended from
Mohammed's great friend of that name, had passed Shibahm for Al Koton to
fetch us, but there was no news of the Minhali or of the Tamimi.

It was said that the Jabberi could not take us over their highland, past
the Kattiri and into the Tamimi country, without consulting the Kattiri,
who sometimes help them in their wars. It must be remembered that the
Kattiri Bedouin were for us (no doubt in view of the payment of _siyar_),
while the seyyids and Arabs of that tribe at Siwoun, and their friends at
Terim, were against us.

I need not say we were weary of this indecision, so we sent a letter to
the sultan of Shibahm by a messenger saying, 'We have been here three
days; what are we to do next?' and planned that Imam Sharif should ride
over next day, as he could communicate 'mouth to mouth' with the sultan
in Hindustani.

We had one consolation in our imprisonment, for the seal of Yarsahal,
which has been mentioned before, was brought to us. The stone is in brown
and white stripes, and the setting is very pretty. It had been in the
bezel of a revolving ring. We began bargaining for it at once, my husband
offering ten rupees for the stone and ten for the golden setting, but the
seyyid who brought it said it was the property of a man in Siwoun, who
wished to keep it for his children, and he must take it back to him. My
husband said 'he should like to look at it very quietly by himself and
think over the stone,' and therefore asked the seyyid to remain outside
the door for a few minutes. I quickly utilised this quiet time to make
an impression with sealing-wax, in case we never saw the seal again. In
two hours the seyyid appeared again, and said he had had a letter from
Siwoun (twenty-four miles off), saying the (imaginary) owner would not
part with it under thirty rupees, but he very soon took twenty and
laughed most heartily when I said if I had known how near Siwoun was I
would have gone myself.

This seal is of particular interest, for on it were the words 'Yarsahal,
the Elder of Shibahm'; and in an inscription published by M. Halevy, we
have the two Yarsahals and various members of this family described as
vassals of the King of the Gebaniti. Now Pliny says that the capital of
the country was Thumna; this is quite correct and was confirmed by the
seal, for Thumna was the capital of the Gebaniti, who were a Himyaritic
tribe, west of the Hadhramout. It is therefore an additional confirmation
of the accuracy of the ancient geographers concerning this district.

In old days Shabwat, as it is called in inscriptions, or Sabbatha, Shaba,
and Sabota, as it is written in the ancient authors, was the capital of
the country. Hamdani tells us in his 'Geography of the Arabian Peninsula'
that there were salt works at Shabwa, and 'that the inhabitants, owing to
the wars between Himyar and Medhig, left Shabwa, came down into the
Hadhramout and called the place Shibahm, which was originally called
Shibat.' Times are much changed since Shabwa was a great town, for from
all accounts it is now quite deserted save for the Bedouin, and is six
days from good water; the water there is salt and bitter, like quinine,
the sultan said. The Bedouin work the salt and bring it on camels, as is
mentioned by Makrisi. The effect of salt is traceable in the water of all
the wells in the main valley. We would gladly have gone into Shabwa, but
it was obviously impossible.

There was a great deal of gun-firing when the Jabberi went by with the
sheikh of the Kattiri, and our next interest was a letter from Al Koton,
saying 'that the Tamimi, who had sworn on their heads and their eyes to
do so, had never appeared, and that the Jabberi wanted 110 dollars,
exclusive of camel hire, to go with us, the camels only to go a short
distance, and then we must change. What did we wish to do?'

Of course we could not start without providing camels for our onward way,
so this answer was sent back: 'We have not come to fight; we do not much
care when we go, and we await the advice of the sultan when he comes
to-morrow.'

Saleh was quite delighted, but we thought any direction would be good for
our map and we still had hopes of digging near Meshed, though we began to
have fears that a repulse eastward would strengthen the hands of our
enemies westward.

On January the 29th a letter was brought to us by the wazir and the
governor of the town, attended by Saleh, more pleased than ever. They
said the letter had arrived last night and it was to say that the
sultan's pain had increased, so he could not come to-day, and adding what
we already knew as to the three neighbouring tribes.

We had a council of three, and feeling that the journey to Bir Borhut was
out of the question, we determined to beat what we hoped would be a
masterly retreat, so the wazir and the governor were summoned and the
following answer was sent:

'We cannot understand the letters of the sultan, having no means of
communicating with him privately. Therefore we will return to Al Koton
to-morrow, and see him face to face.'

The servants were all quite delighted at this, for Saleh told them the
letter was to say we and the soldiers were all going to be murdered.

We had stayed five days in Shibahm, and on the first three had taken
sundry walks in the neighbourhood, but during the last two we never
ventured out, as the inhabitants manifested so unfriendly a disposition
towards us. After the Friday's prayer in the mosque, a fanatical mollah,
Al Habib Yaher-bin-Abdullah Soumait, alluded to our unwelcome presence,
and offered up the following prayer three times: 'O God! this is contrary
to our religion; remove them away!' and two days afterwards his prayer
was answered. This very gentleman had not long before been imprisoned for
praying to be delivered from the liberal-minded Sultan Salah, but the
people had clamoured so much that he was released.

As we halted at the well outside the town, whilst the various members of
our caravan collected, we overheard a woman chide a man for drawing too
much water from the well, to which he replied, 'We have to wash our town
from the infidel this day.' Needless to say we gladly shook the dust of
Shibahm off our feet, and returned to the flesh-pots of Al Koton with
considerable satisfaction. Of a truth, religion and fanaticism are
together so deeply engrained in the Hadhrami, that anything like friendly
intercourse with the people is at present next to impossible.

Religion is the moving spirit of the place; without religion the whole
Hadhramout would have been abandoned long ago as useless, but the
inhabitants look upon it as the most sacred spot on earth, Mohammed
having been born in Arabia, and hence their objection to its being
visited by unbelievers. The Shafi sect prevails to the exclusion of all
others. The men go in crowds to India, Batavia, and elsewhere, sometimes
remaining absent twenty years from their wives and families, and indeed
we were told of one case in which a husband had been away for forty
years. They return at last to spend their gains and die in their native
sanctity.

We reached Al Koton on January 30, and found our friend the sultan very
well indeed. We had begun to suspect we were being deceived as to his
illness, for when the wazir and Saleh, who seemed in league together,
heard the seyyid son-in-law, who came straight from Al Koton soon after
the letter, telling us that the sultan was much better, they looked
disconcerted, whispered together, and the wazir said, 'You should not
talk of what you know nothing about.'

We were most anxious to learn all that had gone on in our absence, and
what arrangements had been made. It seemed to be considered a mistake our
ever having gone to Shibahm, but I do not think it was. Had we not gone
we should never have seen that fine and interesting town, and assuredly
not have obtained King Yarsahal's seal.

The sultan told us there had been a great uproar about us, and all the
Yafei tribe were now considered Kafirs. The Kattiri absolutely refused
the Jabberi leave to conduct us, and the Nahadi, through whose lands we
had passed from Hagarein, said that if they had known how the Kattiri
would treat us, they would have treated us just the same. It would be
madness to go to Shabwa, as we should, even if we could get there, be
only further hemmed in; the Wadi bin Ali was closed to us, the Nahadi
were between us and Meshed; nevertheless, the sultan had actually sent a
man to ask if we could dig there a few days, he camping with us. Our very
faint hope of this was only founded on the fact that the seyyids of
Meshed are at enmity with those of Siwoun.

On February 1, the Tamimi sent to say they had really started to fetch
us, but the Kattiri told them they would declare war on them unless they
retired.

The following evening we were thrown into some excitement by the arrival
of the sultan in our room with seven letters, the general tenor of which
was that eight of the Tamimi had come, with the _siyara_ of four Amri
only, and no _siyara_ of Kattiri, as far as Siwoun, and asked to be
passed on, but that the Kattiri refused them safe conduct; they asked the
sultan of Shibahm to go to Shibahm and arrange for them to reach us. They
proposed that we should, without touching Shibahm, turn into the very
next wadi and go up on to the akaba; the men who went with us were to
stay with us all the way to the coast. The sultan promised to keep
hostages till his returning soldiers told of our safety. We had another
council with Imam Sharif. We counted up our dollars, for we had to live
on our money-bags till we reached the sea, and determined to reach Bir
Borhut if we could, saying nothing to the servants to upset their minds
till all was settled.

The sultan went away to Shibahm the next day, and, as usual, the women
became very noisy, and during his absence we were close prisoners, on
account of our fear of being mobbed. The Indian party were generally
looked upon as Jews.

In the evening the sultan came back, telling us that the Tamimi wished to
bring 400 soldiers unpaid (?) and to take us through their country, but
the Kattiri were too strong for them. They said, 'One man came disguised
to see us (Herr von Wrede), one man came undisguised (Herr Hirsch), and
now a party has come. Next time it will be a larger one still, and then
it will be all over with the sacred valley of the Hadhramout.' Saleh,
meanwhile, was doing all he could to annoy us. When we were talking over
our difficulties with Imam Sharif, he strutted in with a bill for the
camels. My husband said:

'It is already paid.'

'I shall see about others then,' Saleh said.

'They are ordered already.'

'Your groom, Iselem, will not go with you,' said Saleh.

So I told him, 'He won't get the chance; we would not have him if we were
paid, and though we have paid him beforehand, we willingly lose our
money.'

'I must, then, speak to the sultan about him, for you.'

I said, 'The sultan has decided what he will do with him, and I don't
think he will like it.'

'Haidar Aboul will not go with you.'

This made us very angry, as we had seen that Saleh had been tampering
with him, lending him his donkey and his sandals when he walked, and
whispering with him. He tried to separate everyone from us. Haidar had
promised to go with us all the way, and later Imam Sharif brought him to
me when I was at home alone, and made him repeat his promise, and
assurance that he had never told Saleh he would not go.

Saleh also wanted money, but was refused; he got 100 rupees a month, and
200 were prepaid at Aden. He gambled, and my husband wished to keep the
contents of our money-bags for our own use. We calculated that at the
cheapest, for soldiers and _siyara_ and camels, Bir Borhut would cost
130_l._ Saleh had put all the servants in a most terrible fright, and a
soldier had told them that if we went beyond Shibahm we should all be
killed, and that we should find no water by the way. So we had to explain
to them the plan of going by Wadi bin Ali, and to comfort them as well as
we could. These people never seem to think that we value our own lives as
much as they do theirs.

Meshed was also closed against us. The sultan of Siwoun and the seyyids
had sworn on the Koran not to let us proceed on our journey; the Kattiri
had also sworn and sent messages to the Tamimi of Bir Borhut, the Jabberi
of Wadi bin Ali, and the Nahadi, and they were all against us.

We had another day of anxiety and uncertainty as to when we should really
start, as the camels were not collected till late. We watched eagerly
from our tower, counting them as they arrived by twos and threes.

We were rather in despair as as we sat dining in a yard, for at this time
we were started with our own cookery, and dined near the kitchen, which
Matthaios had been able to make in an arched recess of the inclosure,
where there were high hills of date-stones, kept to be ground to paste
for cattle-food.

He could not be allowed to defile a Mohammedan kitchen.

After a very few minutes, however, my husband had an idea, which was to
go to Sheher somehow, and turn up inland from thence; there were plenty
of Tamimi there to help us, and we could thus get to the east side of the
Kattiri. Saleh was to know nothing till all was settled.

February 7 was a very weary day of waiting; for we had mended and cleaned
everything we possessed, and we packed and hoped the camels would come,
expecting to be off on the morrow, but it was not till evening that
people, I cannot remember of what tribe, came to bargain with us, and the
bargaining continued next morning; so we made all baggage ready to be
tied into bundles, for we had no doubt we should start on the 8th at
latest.

First they said we must go by the Wadi al Ain, their own home, and this
we knew was that they might blackmail us; but they told us it was from
want of water on the high ground, over which we must travel for six days,
and that we must take two camels for water. Then they said we should take
seventeen days in all, and were to pay for twenty at more than double the
usual fare. We should have to go back on our old road as far as Adab,
then three days in the Wadi al Ain region, the same road near Haibel
Gabrein, go on to Gaffit, and thence turn eastward to Sheher.

We were perfectly horrified at this plan; the price was great, and the
sultan seemed not to think it possible to go against the Bedouin; but far
worse in our eyes was the thought of our map, as we should see no new
country, instead of taking a turn or a climb that would have added miles
to it.

They left us, and we were sitting on our floor in the deepest depths of
dark despair, when news came that these camel-men, having made a fresh
plan for more extortions, _i.e._ that there was to be no limit to the
number of camels, save their will in loading them, the sultan, being
indignant, was thinking of sending for other men.

When we heard that we roused up and concocted a new plan, which was to
send for the sultan and ask him to get the Jabberi, and make them take us
by the Wadi bin Ali; so he came and agreed to this. We were not to go so
long over the highland, but to go up and down at least twice, which would
suit us and our map. The sultan told us we should find running water, and
that it was a shorter way to Sheher.

Besides this, there lurked in the background, not to be revealed till the
last moment, a design to get the Tamimi to come to a place in Wadi Adim
and take us to Bir Borhut, a name truly terrible to Matthaios and the
Indian servants.

We were in high spirits, and agreed that no matter what our fate might be
we were having a delightful evening. Truly I think the pleasures of hope
are not sufficiently appreciated, for even if your hopes are never
realised the hoping has been a great happiness. On the 8th those
extortionate men of Wadi al Ain sent to say they would take us by the
Wadi bin Ali, turning out of Wadi Hadhramout at Al Gran, crossing the
Wadis bin Ali and Adim, and reaching Sa'ah, where we could branch off for
Bir Borhut. This offer was declined, for we were watching and waiting for
the Jabberi; and at night we heard that the brave Jabberi were at
Shibahm, whereas our messenger had been sent to Wadi bin Ali. They said
they wondered at not hearing from us, as the sultan had engaged their
camels and promised to let them know when they would be wanted. It was a
great mystery to us why the Wadi al Ain people had ever been sent for.

The Jabberi thus defied the Kattiri: 'As sure as we come from Jabberi
fathers and Jabberi mothers, we will take these people safely to Bir
Borhut; and as sure as you come from Kattiri fathers and Kattiri mothers,
you may do your worst but still we will keep them safe'; to which the
Kattiri replied: 'We do not wish to make war on you, and we do not care
where you take them so long as it is not into our country.'

As soon as we had finished our breakfast next day, a message came to say
our horses were ready, and we were to go and drink coffee at a little
tower the sultan has in the plain. Most of the party walked. There were
only horses for five; a donkey carried a water-skin, and our donkey,
Mahsoud, carried halters for every animal. There were the two wazirs, the
son-in-law, the sultan of Haura, and a good many servants with carpets
for us to sit on, and a teapot. We sat there for about two hours doing
nothing but look at the green, an occupation for which this house is
expressly built. A gun announced the arrival of the men of Al Jabber, and
the sultan sent a man to kill a goat and receive them.

Our great joy at their coming was nothing compared to our extreme
satisfaction at parting with them later on.

I cannot say much for my skill as a physiognomist, for I have it recorded
that I liked the looks of our Mokadam (that is chief of our _kafila_, or
leader) Talib-bin-Abdullah, son of the Jabberi sheikh, and that I did not
care for the looks of our new groom, Salem. I was quite wrong in both
cases. There were also Saleh-bin-Yamani and another Jabberi. We were
certainly, this time, to start next day, but with another change in our
route, I believe on account of water. Instead of going by Al Gran, we
were to go by Wadi Manwab, retracing our steps as far as Furhud.

Very early in the morning Imam Sharif came to us and told us that the
Jabberi had not sufficient camels with them and that we must take camels
of Mandob the first day or two, and that others would meet us in the Wadi
bin Ali, so there was little hope of a move that day. The Jabberi
afterwards said the Mandob way was much the longest, so we changed again.

We delayed several days longer at Al Koton, hoping against hope that the
sultan of Terim would grant us permission to pass through his
territories, that we might prosecute our journey.