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We were warned 'that our eyes should never be let to see Meshed again; we might camp before we got there, or after, as we wished, so were led by a roundabout way to Adab, and saw no more of the leprous seyyid who told such wondrous tales about the English king who once lived in Hagarein, and how the English, Turks, and Arabs were all descended from King Sam.
For the twenty-two camels we paid 175 dollars to Hagarein, a journey, we were told, of twenty days. It would have been useless to have had riding camels, as one could get no faster than the baggage and soldiers, and travelling so far daily, and up such rocks, one had to go at foot-pace.
We had been told that our journey to Hagarein would take twenty days, whereas it only took thirteen, and that we must take two camels for water, which had proved unnecessary; besides the camels had been much loaded with fish and other goods belonging to the Bedouin. My husband said he would pay for the twenty days and they would thus have thirty dollars as bakshish.
It was at the ziaret or pilgrimage to the grave in Kaidoun that Herr von Wrede, who was disguised, was discovered to be a Christian and forced to turn back. The town of Hagarein or Hajarein is the principal one in the collateral valleys, and is built on a lofty isolated rock in the middle of the Wadi Kasr, about twenty miles before it joins the main valley of the Hadhramout.
So much was said about the dangers of the onward road that Saleh was sent with the letters for Shibahm and Sheher and told to hold them tight, and say that if we could not deliver these in person we should return to the wali of Aden and say that the sultan of Hagarein would not let us go on. This frightened him, so he made a very dear bargain for fifteen camels, and we were to leave next day.
The sultan told us there had been a great uproar about us, and all the Yafei tribe were now considered Kafirs. The Kattiri absolutely refused the Jabberi leave to conduct us, and the Nahadi, through whose lands we had passed from Hagarein, said that if they had known how the Kattiri would treat us, they would have treated us just the same.
The narrow lanes are mere drains, and the whole place a hotbed of disease; the people looked very unhealthy: when cholera comes they die like flies. As a wind up to this last evening Mahmoud came into our room and soon began to say his prayers; we could not make out why, but it turned out he had no light in his room. Altogether we had not a reposeful time in Hagarein.
When we reached the foot of the hill on which Hagarein stands we dismounted; there was tremendous work to get out the sword of the oldest soldier; he had used it so much as a walking-stick that it was firmly fixed in the scabbard. The scabbards are generally covered with white calico.
We had purposely avoided passing too near this town, and afterwards learnt that it was owing to the influence of this very holy seyyid that our reception was so bad amongst the Nahad tribe. All about Hagarein are many traces of the olden days when the frankincense trade flourished, and when the town of Doan, which name is still retained in the Wadi Doan, was a great emporium for this trade.
Internally Hagarein is squalid and dirty in the extreme; each street is but a cesspool for the houses on either side of it, and the house allotted to us produced specimens of most smells and most insects.
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