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There is a good well, and there has been a village here 'from the first, as the Arabs say. There are many traces of antiquity; and numerous pieces of glass, good pottery, and bangles lie about. There are three ruined tombs and some smaller ones of mud bricks, and they make mud bricks there still. The villages of the Abyan are most poverty-stricken places.
Fortunately the crossing of the low hot Abyan was short. I dreaded the journey, as I thought my bearers would not keep step, but they did wonderfully well, though of course they had no path to walk in, for two men and the bed were far too wide for any path there was.
He and the soldiers and the wazir, Abdullah bin Abdurrahman, rode at some distance to our left, between us and the dangerous Yafei towers. The Goddam or Kadam range, which separates the Wadi Yeramis from the Abyan, is a mass of arid peaks, none reaching to more than 2,000 feet. A road leads from Al Ma'a across the mountains to the sea at Asala.
This caravan road across the Abyan is very old; its monotony is inexpressible, for the nine hours to Bir Mighar. At the sixth hour the road to Hawash goes off to the left. As we approached the well of Mighar the signs of population increased, and a few scrubby acacias grow near. There are two wells a mile apart; the farther, where we encamped, was once protected by a fort, now in ruins.
This has been a very strong fortification, protecting and overlooking the whole of the Abyan from Jebel Goddam beyond Shukra to Jebel Shemshan at Aden. The Abyan is the low plain by the sea. The following day we started for Dirgheg. The country is all irrigated by water brought from Masana by a channel called Nazai. At the corner of the Wadi Hassan the abrs branch off in every direction.
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