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A convenient old woman was found who professed to bring this news, a dodge subsequently resorted to by another Bedou tribe which wanted to govern our progress. The report brought to us, as from the old woman, was to this effect: A large body of sheikhs and seyyids having started from Khoreba to meet and repel us, Mokaik's father had left home to help us.
These people never seem to think that we value our own lives as much as they do theirs. Meshed was also closed against us. The sultan of Siwoun and the seyyids had sworn on the Koran not to let us proceed on our journey; the Kattiri had also sworn and sent messages to the Tamimi of Bir Borhut, the Jabberi of Wadi bin Ali, and the Nahadi, and they were all against us.
When a Bedou has committed a murder, he runs to the houses of the seyyids, where there is sanctuary, and gets absolution on paying four or five hundred dollars, according to the rank of the murdered man. Thus travelling is difficult unless you have paid siyar, and a relation of the siyara is kept in prison at Sheher.
The Bedouin reside amongst them, and they are constantly at war with one another, and the complex system of tribal union is exceedingly difficult to grasp. Thirdly, we have the Seyyids and Sherifs, a sort of aristocratic hierarchy, who trace their descent from the daughter and son of the Prophet.
Our very faint hope of this was only founded on the fact that the seyyids of Meshed are at enmity with those of Siwoun. On February 1, the Tamimi sent to say they had really started to fetch us, but the Kattiri told them they would declare war on them unless they retired.
We longed 'to dance on Tom Tiddler's ground' and make a dash for it, but the forfeits we might incur deterred us, being our lives. The wazir said he would try to arrange for this, but that, even if the seyyids consented, we must take forty soldiers, well armed, pay them as well as siyar to the Kattiri, pay the expenses of the siyara, and take as short a time about the business as possible.
When the two lines met they shook hands and kissed, the sultans and seyyids being kissed on the forehead and the upper part of the leg. When they returned to us all our party joined hands to go to our camp, now ready, a good distance off, all keeping step in a kind of stilted, prancing way, singing.
Seyyids and Sherifs are to be found in all the large towns and considerable villages, and even the Arab sultans show them a marked respect and kiss their hands when they enter a room. They have a distinct jurisdiction of their own, and most disputed points of property, water rights, and so on, are referred to their decision.
We passed the tall white dome of Sheikh Aboubekr-bin-Hassan's tomb, near which the ruling family are buried if the seyyids permit. They are all-powerful, and the sultan can do nothing in this respect without them not even be buried in his own family tomb. There is a well beside the tomb, or rather the kind of building from which water is obtained in the open valleys.
Then again, he would continually lament over the fanaticism and folly of his fellow-countrymen, more especially the priestly element, who systematically oppose all his attempts at introducing improvements from civilised countries into the Hadhramout. The seyyids and the mollahs dislike him; the former, who trace their descent from the daughter of Mohammed, forming a sort of hierarchical nobility in this district; and on several occasions he has been publicly cursed in the mosques as an unbeliever and friend of the infidel. But Sultan Sal
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