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It was not wholly uncivilized during my first visit, a quarter of a century ago, when I succeeded in buying opium for feeble patients. Distant six stations from Yamba', and ten from El-Medinah, it has been greatly altered and improved.
This main approach to the Arabian interior is not a fissure, like the vulgar Wadys, but rather an opening where the Ghats, or maritime chain, break to the north and south. Distant one long or two short marches from El-Wijh, its mouth is in north lat. 25 55'; and it is said to head fifteen days inland, in fact beyond El-Medinah, towards which it curves with a south-easterly bend.
It lies in north lat. 25 6', about the same parallel as El-Medinah; and in east long. As has been seen, the frontier is nearly fifty miles further north. He seems, finally, to have landed in order to inspect "a ruined town on the main," and to have missed it. According to Sprenger, the "White Village, or Castle," was not a Thamudite, but a Nabathaan port.
Northernmost, and prolonging the Libn, that miniature Sharr, is the regular wall of the Jebel el-Ward; then come the peaks and pinnacles of the Jibal el-Safhah; and lastly, the twin blocks El-Ral, between which passes the Egyptian Hajj when returning from El-Medinah. Faint resemblances of these features sprawl, like huge caterpillars, over the Hydrographic Chart, but all sprawl unnamed.
On the day after our return from El-Haura the venerable old man paid us a visit aboard Sinnar. He declares that he was a boy when the Wahhabi occupied Meccah and El-Medinah that is, in 1803-4. Yet he has wives and young children. His principal want is a pair of new eyes; and the train of thought is, "I can't see when older men than myself can."
The line is continued, after a considerable break, by the two blue and conical peaks in the Tihamat-Jahaniyyah, known as the Jebelayn el-Ral. They are divided and drained to the Wady Hamz by the broad Wady el-Sula'; and the latter is the short cut down which the Egyptian Hajj, returning northwards from El-Medinah, debouches upon the maritime plain of South Midian.
Those who wish to know what the rites of Mecca are, will find them graphically and minutely described in Captain Burton's Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca; that gallant officer was one of the three Europeans who, during the nineteenth century, assumed the disguise of pilgrims and took part in the observances.