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We took five days in getting from Kalenzia to Tamarida, and found the water question on this route rather a serious one until we reached Mori and Kadhoup, where the streams from the high mountains began. Mori is a charming little spot by the sea, with a fine stream and a lagoon, and palms and bright yellow houses as a foreground to the dark-blue mountains.
They said they could only write with a pencil, but when that was got the captain said 500 must be paid: he did not want it himself, nor yet the sultan, but the sailors did; my husband then said he would complain to the Wali of Aden, and they all suddenly departed, and the captain, we heard, went to Kadhoup, where there was another boat, in order to prevent its owner spoiling the sultan's bargain.
It contains a single wretched little mosque, in character like those found in third-rate villages in Arabia; Kadhoup or Kadhohp possesses another, and Tamarida no less than two; and these represent the sum total of the present religious edifices in Sokotra, for the Bedouin in their mountain villages do not care for religious observances and own no mosques.
There are the foundations of some curious unfinished houses near Kadhoup, also assigned to the Portuguese; but there appears to me to be no reason whatsoever for ascribing these miserable remains to the builders of the fine forts at Maskat, the founders of Ormuz and Goa, and the lords of the East up to the seventeenth century.
They had formed a plan whereby their Kadhoup friends might come in for some of our rupees. We were not only to pay for camels, but also for a boat. Some, at least, of the camels were sure, they said, to fall into the sea from the cliffs, and our possessions, if not our lives themselves, might be lost.
We had wandered about a good deal backwards and forwards over stony wolds, and the men all disagreed as to the direction, and we had scrambled up a valley off our road to see some supposed inscriptions, a much more dangerous place than the Kadhoup road.
Kadhoup is another fishing village built by the edge of the sea, with a marshy waste of sand separating it from the hills; it possesses a considerable number of surf-boats and canoes, and catamarans, on which the fishermen ply their trade. Just outside the town women were busy baking large pots for the export of butter, placing large fires around them for this purpose.
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