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Updated: June 26, 2025
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.
The closest intimacy exists between a Bedou and his goats and his cows; the animals understand and obey certain calls with absolute accuracy, and you generally see a Sokotran shepherdess walking before her flock, and not after it. The owners stroke and caress their little cows until they are as tame as dogs.
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. Müller, in Vienna, to decipher, we departed. We were told that the Wadi Ser goes four hours from that stone to the great desert.
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.
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.
The Bedou does very little in the way of cultivation, but when grass is scarce, and consequently milk, he turns his attention to the sowing of jowari in little round fields dotted about the valleys, with a wall round to keep the goats off.
My husband went up a hill, Yerad, just behind Naab, with an old Arab fort on it above the Yeramis, which ends here; then begins Wadi Reban, with a clear course north-east for three miles, then north, and then a long stretch east again. There was a lovely view over the Yafei mountains on the north and Goddam range on the south. A Bedou, Abdallah, who went with him told him all the names.
Cutters and jolly-boats have taken their names from 'kattira' and 'jahlibot. Merbat, which is sixty-four miles from Maskat, is the first point of the Dhofar district after the long stretch of desert has been passed. It is a wretched little spot consisting of some fifty houses and a few Bedou huts, with about two hundred inhabitants.
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.
Our party was now increased by another 'prince, Sultan Haidar, son of the sultan of Naab, a person delightful to contemplate. He was got up in Bedou style; his hair, fluffy and long, was tied back by a fillet and stuck out in a bush behind. He had a curious countenance and very weak eyes. He was wrapped in a couple of large blue cotton cloths with very long fringes, half a yard at least.
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