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Updated: June 26, 2025
The village of Kishin, the Mahri capital, consists of a few scattered houses and some Bedou huts of matting and poles placed in a dreary sandy waste, very different from the fertile plain of Dhofar, and more like the surroundings of Sheher. When my husband asked for the sultan's assistance to go into the Hadhramout, he said: 'No one ever goes that way, it is full of robbers.
Silver rings and bracelets of a very poor character, and glass bangles, complete their toilet, and the commoner class and Bedou women weave a strong cloth in narrow strips of goat-hair, which they wrap in an inelegant fashion round their hips to keep them warm, sometimes as their only garment. They do not cover their faces.
We had never put ourselves into the charge of such wild people as the Garas far wilder in every way than the Bedouin of the Hadhramout, inasmuch as they have far less contact with civilisation. The Bedou of Southern Arabia is, to my mind, distinctly of an aboriginal race.
I began to feel that I had no control over my legs and I hardly cared to change my position for going up or down hill, and once when my camel slipped down about 5 feet, I started to fall off headlong, but a Bedou caught me by my leg and held me on. If I had fallen, as the path was very narrow, the camel would surely have stepped on me. I should certainly have cracked my skull first.
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 to meet and repel us, Mokaik's father had left home to help us.
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.
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 Bedou is decidedly a handsome individual, lithe of limb like his goats, and with a café-au-lait-coloured skin; he has a sharp profile, excellent teeth; he often wears a stubbly black beard and has beautifully pencilled eyebrows, and, though differing entirely in language, in physique and type he closely resembles the Bedouin found in the Mahri and Gara mountains.
There was a Bedou family close by with goats; they sold us milk at an exorbitant price and asked so much for a kid that we stuck to our tinned meat. The Gara, in whose country we were now, are a wild pastoral tribe of the mountains, travelling over them hither and thither in search of food for their flocks.
Though he could understand when the Bedouin talked to him, he could not understand two talking together. Abdallah said he had been a soldier in the sultan's service, but when my husband asked how long he answered, 'Four, five, six years. I have never had it written down. The Bedou gave my husband some food called kharou, roast millet seeds put in a mug with boiled milk, not at all bad.
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