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Riding down the Wady Damah to the southwest, Lieutenant Amir came upon a spring in a stone-revetted well near the left bank: this Ayn el-Bada' is not to be confounded with the Badi' water, or with the Bada plain, both of which we shall presently visit. A strew of broken quartz around it showed the atelier, and specimens of scattered fragments, glass and pottery, were gathered.
We halted, after some sixteen to seventeen miles, at the water El-Ziyayb, slightly brackish but relished by our animals; and resumed our way in the cool sea-breeze at one p.m., passing the Jebel Tulayh on the north bank. The track then left the Damah and turned up a short broad bed to the north-west.
Nothing could be more ridiculous when the sketch-maps came to be compared. This was owing to the route following the three sides of a long parallelogram; whilst the fourth is based upon the Wady Damah, causing considerable complication. We quitted the great valley at six a.m. As we rose the Nullah surface was pied with white flowers, the early growth which here takes the place of primroses.
The Tuwayl el-Suk is nothing but an open and windy flat, where the Hajj-caravan used to camp an adjoining ridge, the Hamra el-Tuwayl, shows spalled quartz, Wasm and memorial stones. The principal formation here is the mauve-purple conglomerate before described. After riding nine miles we came unexpectedly upon a large and curious ruin, backed by the broad Wady Damah gleaming white in the sun.
At noon we resumed a hot ride down the ugly, rocky watercourse, both of whose banks showed long lines of ruins. Presently, crossing a divide marked by two stone-heaps, we fell into the broader but equally unpicturesque Wady Salma. Wady Salma is the smallest and the northernmost of the three basins which we have just visited; the central being the Damah, and the southern Wady Shaghab-Aslah-Aznab.
The track lay down the Wady Dahal and other influents of the great Wady Sa'luwwah, a main feeder of the Damah. We made a considerable detour between south-south-east and south-east to avoid the rocks and stones discharged by the valleys of the Shafah range on our left.
The site of Shuwak is a long island in the broad sandy Wady of the same name, which, as has been remarked, feeds the Damah. Its thalweg has shifted again and again: the main line now hugs the southern or left bank, under the slopes and folds of the Jebel el-Sani'; whilst a smaller branch, on the northern side, is subtended by the stony divide last crossed.
The next morning saw the Expedition afoot at six a.m., determined to make up for a half by the whole day's work so long intended. This line seems to drain inland; presently it bends round by the east and feeds the Wady Damah. Rain must lately have fallen, for the earth is "purfled flowers," pink, white, and yellow.
Heaps of rounded boulders, and the crumbling white-edged mounds which, in these regions, always denote old habitations, run down the right bank of the Wady el-Khandaki to its junction with the Damah. Half an hour more placed us at the great Wady, whose general direction is here west with a little southing, and which still merits its fame as an Arabian Arcadia.
After three miles we passed, on the left, ruins of long walls and Arab Wasm, with white memorial stones perched on black. In front rose the tall Jebel Tulayh, buttressing the right or northern bank of the Damah; and behind it, stained faint-blue by distance, floated in the flickering mirage the familiar forms of the Tihamah range, a ridge now broken into half a dozen blocks.
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