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Our object had been to go across from Dhofar by land to the Hadhramout, across the Mahri country. Wali Suleiman had done all in his power to help us, but without much success, as the Gara were more or less at war with the Mahri, who are a dangerous warlike tribe.
The Bedou is decidedly a handsome individual, lithe of limb like his goats, and with a café-au-lait-coloured skin; he has a sharp profile, excellent teeth; he often wears a stubbly black beard and has beautifully pencilled eyebrows, and, though differing entirely in language, in physique and type he closely resembles the Bedouin found in the Mahri and Gara mountains.
When we were there he had twelve, all manacled, and reposing on grass mats at night. These were wicked Bedouin from the mountains, prisoners taken in a recent war he had had with the Mahri tribe, the casus belli being a find of ambergris which the Mahri had appropriated, though it had been washed up on the Dhofar coast.
Sultan Salem of Sokotra, the nephew of old Sultan Ali of Kishin, the monarch of the Mahri tribe, whom we had visited two years before on the south coast of Arabia, governed the island as his uncle's deputy.
'My age, said Ammar, 'mine well' with evident annoyance and great hesitation 'I'm thirty-five not old not old at all. He is really quite fifty. On such occasions there had to be a tremendous conversation with the bystanders. I will not say more of the language than that instead of our little word I the Sokoteri is hemukomòn and the Mahri evomúhshom.
When we first left Al Hafa, a message had been sent to the Mahri chiefs to come and arrange about our journey, but on our return we found that only two had come. They said if we would give them 200 reals, i.e. about 12l., they would let us go through their country, but they made no allusion to the request that they would arrange with the Minhali, Amri, Kattiri, and Tamimi.
Of course it is naturally strongly impregnated with words from both these tongues; but the fundamental words of the language are distinct, and in a trilingual parallel list of close on 300 words, which my husband took down in the presence of Mahri, Sokoteri and Arabic speaking people on the island, we found distinctly more in the language derived from an Arab than from a Mahri source.
Of the frankincense which once flourished over all this vast area, we saw only one specimen on the highland itself, though it is still found in the more sheltered gullies; and farther east, in the Mahri country, there is, I understand, a considerable quantity left. We were often given lumps of gum arabic, and myrrh is still found plentifully; it is tapped for its odoriferous sap.
The village of Kishin, the Mahri capital, consists of a few scattered houses and some Bedou huts of matting and poles placed in a dreary sandy waste, very different from the fertile plain of Dhofar, and more like the surroundings of Sheher. When my husband asked for the sultan's assistance to go into the Hadhramout, he said: 'No one ever goes that way, it is full of robbers.
Airy as our 'cabin' was, bilge-water was our torment. We had started on January 23, the weather being cool and overcast, about 11 o'clock, and reached the village of Rakhiout in thirty hours only forty miles. We called there to do a civility to the wali, and leave two soldiers there. This is the end of Omani influence, and there is a small fort as a protection against the Mahri.
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