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With their long beak-like spouts and concentric circles with patterns on them, these coffee-pots are a distinct feature. In the bazaars of Manamah and Moharek coffee-vendors sit at every corner with some huge pots of a similar shape simmering on the embers; in the lid are introduced stones to make a noise and attract the attention of the passers-by.
The Rufa'a are much older than Moharek, or Manamah; they are fortified with castellated walls of mud brick. Many of the El Khalifa family reside here in comfortable houses. South-western Rufa'a is quite a big place, and as our arrival became known all the village turned out to see us.
Very curious boats ply in the waters between Manamah and Moharek; the huge ungainly baggalas can only sail in the deeper channels.
Then it was that we took the islands under our protection. In 1875 the Turks caused trouble, and the occupation of Bahrein formed part of their great scheme of conquest in Arabia. We went to see him at Moharek, where he holds his court in the winter-time. We crossed over in a small baggala, and had to be poled for a great distance with our keel perpetually grating on the bottom.
Moharek is aristocratic, being the seat of government; Manamah is essentially commercial, and between them in the sea is a huge dismantled Portuguese fort, now used as Sheikh Esau's stables. The town of Moharek gets its water supply from a curious source, springing up from under the sea.
Bahrein is really the name of the largest of the islands, which is twenty-seven miles long by ten wide. The second in point of size is Moharek, which lies north of Bahrein, and is separated from it by a strait of horse-shoe form, five miles in length, and in a few places as much as a mile wide, but for the greater part half a mile.
His suit was not acceptable, so he made war on the islands and captured all the wells which supplied the towns on the bigger island; but the guardian deity of the Bahreini caused this spring to break out in the sea just before Moharek, and the invader was thus in time repulsed.
There are about fifty villages scattered over the islands, recognisable from a distance by their patch of cultivation and groups of date-palms. Except at Manamah and Moharek they have little or nothing to do with the pearl fisheries, but are an exceedingly industrious race of peasants who cultivate the soil by means of irrigation from the numerous wells with which the island is blessed.
There are many thousands of these tumuli extending over an area of desert for many miles. There are isolated groups of mounds in other parts of the islands, and a few solitary ones are to be found on the adjacent islets, on Moharek, Arad, and Sitrah.
The rest of the group are mere rocks: Sitrah, four miles long, with a village on it of the same name; Nebi Saleh, Sayeh, Khaseifa, and, to the east of Moharek, Arad, with a palm-grove and a large double Portuguese fort, an island or a peninsula according to the state of the tide.
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