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Updated: June 3, 2025
This is the landward face of the Ghauts, over which we were to pass before sighting the sea. Masses of cold grey cloud rolled from the table-formed summit, we were presently shrouded in mist, and as we advanced, rain began to fall. The light of day vanishing, we again descended into a Fiumara with a tortuous and rocky bed, the main drain of the landward mountain side.
Towards evening, our party closed up in fear, thinking that they saw spears glancing through the trees: I treated their alarm lightly, but the next day proved that it was not wholly imaginary. At sunset we met a shepherd who swore upon the stone to bring us milk in exchange for tobacco, and presently, after a five miles' march, we halted in a deserted kraal on the left bank of a Fiumara.
We began the day by ascending a steep goat-track: it led to a sandy Fiumara, overgrown with Jujubes and other thorns, abounding in water, and showing in the rocky sides, caverns fit for a race of Troglodytes.
In the rains this country is a grassy belt, running from west to east, along a deep and narrow watercourse, called Rhat Tug, or the Fiumara of Rhat, which flows eastward towards the ocean.
The morning cold greatly increased, and we did not start till 8 A.M. After half an hour's march up the bed of a fiumara, leading apparently to a cul de sac of lofty rocks in the hills, we quitted it for a rude zig-zag winding along its left side, amongst bushes, thorn trees, and huge rocks.
The two Stolivos beneath the lofty Vrmac, and Perzagno may be seen on the opposite shore. A late Renaissance church has a rather pretty rose-window with radiating shafts recalling the Romanesque. The torrent Skurda, or Fiumara, separates the mountains Pestingrad and Mrajanik from the lofty Lovćen, which towers above Cattaro to the height of 5,770 ft.
The ruins lie upon a fork where two gorges, running to the east and the north-east, both fall into the broad Wady el-Khaur, and the latter feeds the great Wady el-Miyah, the "Fiumara of the Waters," of which more presently.
Late in the morning of Saturday, the 9th December, I set out, accompanied by Rirash and the End of Time, to visit some ruins a little way distant from the direct road. After an hour's ride we turned away from the Abbaso Fiumara and entered a basin among the hills distant about sixteen miles from the Holy Tree. This is the site of Darbiyah Kola, Kola's Fort, so called from its Galla queen.
Here the huge Fiumara, sweeping grandly from north-east to south-west, forms a charming narrow and a river-like run about a mile and a half long phenomenal again in sun-scorched Arabia. The water, collecting under the masses of trap which wall in the left bank, flows down for some distance in threads, a ciel ouvert, and finally combines in a single large blue-green pool on the right side.
The roads of this region, and indeed of all Midian, are those of Iceland without her bogs and snows: for riding considerations we may divide them into four kinds: Wady the Fiumara or Nullah; called by travellers "winter-brook" and "dry river-bed."
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