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Between Jedid and Ras Fartak the land is low and recedes, and as we sailed along we decided that it was the mouth of some big valley from the interior, and after careful cross-examination of the sultan of Kishin and our sailors we gathered that this was actually the mouth of the great Hadhramout valley, which does not take the extraordinary bend that is given in our maps, but runs in almost a straight line from west to east, and the bend represents an entirely distinct valley, the Wadi Mosila, which comes out at Saihut.
My husband extracted from him a letter to his brother of Saihut.
The old Sultan Salem is father to the sultan of Sokotra, which belongs to the Mahri tribe, and brother to the sultan of Saihut, another robber chief, who is equally averse to admitting Europeans to his dominions. The fact is that these tribes object to European inquiry, as they know they would no longer be able to exist in their present condition.
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.
We tried to get leave to go to Saihut in the Mahri country, but that was impossible, and at last it really was settled that we should go to Bir Borhut and Kabr Houd. We were highly delighted, and fear broke out badly again among the servants, who dreaded the very name of those places. They gladly took permission to remain behind.
He was exceedingly good to us, and as we wanted to go along the coast for about eighty miles, to get a sight of the mouth of the Hadhramout valley near Saihut, where it empties itself into the Indian Ocean, he arranged that the chief of the dreaded Hamoumi tribe should personally escort us, so that there might be no further doubt about our safety.
The plain is never more than nine miles wide, and at the eastern end, where the mountains were nearer to the sea, it is reduced to a very narrow strip, a grand exception to the long line of barren waste which forms the Arabian frontage to the Indian Ocean, and which gets narrower and narrower as the mountains approach the sea at Saihut.
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.
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