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Updated: June 21, 2025
'Before I went to India I was a rascal (harami) like these men here, he constantly asseverated, and his love for things Indian and English is unbounded. 'If only the Indian Government would send me a Mohammedan doctor here, I would pay his expenses, and his influence, both political and social, would be most beneficial to this country. It is certainly a great thing for England to have so firm a friend in the centre of the narrow habitable district between Aden and Maskat, which ought by rights to be ours, not that it is a very profitable country to possess, but in the hands of another power it might unpleasantly affect our road to India, and in complying with this simple request of Sultan Sal
The views over Maskat and the sea are charming, but one view to the south will be for ever impressed on my mind as one of the most striking panoramas I have ever seen.
The promontories to the open sea are very fine: beetling cliffs of black, red, and green volcanic rocks, and here and there stand up rocky islets, the home of the cormorant and the bittern. There are not very many graves in this weird spot, and most of them are occupied by men from the gunboats which have been stationed at Maskat.
Beder is famous in Arabian history for the battle fought here by Mohammed, in the second year of the Hedjra, with a superior force of the Koreysh Arabs, who had come in aid of a rich caravan expected from Syria, which Mohammed intended to waylay on this spot. Although very ill, I walked out with the Maskat hadjys, to inspect the field of battle, to which we were guided by a man from Beder.
That employed at Hadeyda and Mokha comes partly from Yemen, and partly from the African coast. Many ships are purchased at Bombay and Maskat; but those built at Suez are most common in the sea north of Yemen.
They had heard how a Sokotran man had turned a woman of Maskat into a seal and forced her to swim over to Sokotra in that shape. We were told that this story is perfectly true! This evil reputation of the islanders is very persistent.
All these boxes, therefore, had to return to Maskat, and when paying off the interpreter, Hassan, a most respectable person with large, round, gold spectacles, my husband asked him to be kind enough to take his money in these boxes and change at Maskat. No, he would only have good silver dollars; and sadly he rued his want of good-nature.
The first time was in 1889 on our way to Persia, and the second in 1895 when we were starting for Dhofar, on the journey which I shall describe later. On each occasion we had to reach it by way of India, for like all the rest of the Persian Gulf Maskat is really an outlying portion of our Indian Empire.
Oman first came into immediate contact with Europeans in the year 1506, when Albuquerque appeared in Maskat harbour bent on his conquest of the Persian Gulf, and with the object, not even yet accomplished, of making a route to India by way of the Euphrates valley. From Albuquerque's 'Commentaries' we get a graphic description of the condition of the country when he reached it.
Of all places in the world Maskat has the reputation of being the hottest, facing, as it does, the Indian Ocean, and protected from every cooling breeze by rugged volcanic hills, without a blade of cultivation upon them, and which reflect and intensify the scorching rays of the burning sun. Aden is said to have but a piece of brown paper between it and the infernal fires.
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