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They reached Moilah again on February 13th. The second journey, which took them due East as far as the arid Hisma, lasted from February 17th to March 8th. Burton considered the third journey the most important, but as they found nothing of any consequence it is difficult to understand why.
The surface is still Hisma ground, red sand with blocks of ruddy grit, washed down from the plateau on the left; and, according to Furayj, it forms the south-western limit of the Harrah. The valley is honeycombed into man-traps by rats and lizards, causing many a tumble, and notably developing the mulish instinct.
The head still shows the castellations of the Hisma. Both look white by the side of the dark red and green rocks; and we shall presently find that they mark the granite region lying south and seaward of the great trap formations. We were not sorry to see it again our eyes were weary of the gloomy plutonic curtains on either side.
They are now almost obliterated by being turned into sheep-folds; the roofs have fallen in, and only one preserves the traces of two loculi. The arrangements touching fuel and water in this great metal-working establishment are on a large scale. They are built of fire-brick, and of the Hisma stone, which faces itself into a natural latex.
The material is various boulders of granite and syenite; squares of trap and porphyry; the red sandstones of the Hisma; the basalts of the Harrah; and the rock found in situ, a brown and crumbling grit, modern, and still in process of agglutination.
The party consisted of twenty marines under an officer, besides our escort of ten negro "Remingtons:" the land was open, and with these thirty I would willingly have met three hundred Bedawin. Our repulse from the Hisma had rankled in our memories, and we only wanted an opportunity of showing fight.
In front stood a marvellous background of domes and arches, cones and ninepins, all decayed Hisma, blurred and broken by the morning mist, which could hardly be called a fog; and forming a perspective of a dozen distances.
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