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Updated: June 5, 2025
My husband tried to ascend the highest peak in the island Driate it is called by the Bedouin but when he had gone as far as possible the peak soared above him about 400 feet sheer and impracticable, quite bare of vegetation. An Alpine Club would find plenty of amusement in Sokotra.
First we were told we should, if we attempted to go by sailing-boat, have to coast to Ras Fartak, on the Arabian coast, and let the monsoon blow us to Sokotra, and this seemed impracticable. Finally we arranged with a British India steamer, the Canara, that it should 'deviate' and deposit us there for a consideration. The ss.
He visited it in the sixth century, and accounted for the Greek-speaking population he met with by saying that they had been placed there by the Ptolemies. El Masoudi considered the Greek a purer race in Sokotra than elsewhere. As far back as the tenth century Sokotra was a noted haunt of pirates from Katch and Gujerat Bawarij, from a kind of ship called barja.
The eastern end of Sokotra is similar in character to the western, being a low continuation of the spurs of Haghier, intersected with valleys, and with a plateau stretching right away to Ras Momi about 1,500 feet above the sea-level.
Scattered over Sokotra there are numerous villages, each being a little cluster of from five to ten round or oblong houses and round cattle-pens.
The cows in Sokotra are far more numerous than one would expect, and there is excellent pasturage for them; they are a very pretty little breed, smaller than our Alderney, without the hump, and with the long dewlap; they are fat and plump, and excellent milkers.
The glory of Mount Haghier is undoubtedly its dragon's-blood tree (Dracænia cinnabari), found scattered at an elevation of about 1,000 feet and upwards over the greater part of Sokotra. Certainly it is the quaintest tree imaginable, from 20 feet to 30 feet high, exactly like a green umbrella which is just in the process of being blown inside out, I thought. One of our party thought them like huge green toadstools, another like trees made for a child's Noah's Ark. The gum was called kinn
Money is scarce in the island, and so are jealousies, and probably the Bedouin of Sokotra will remain in their bucolic innocence to the end of time, if no root of bitterness in the shape of modern civilisation is planted amongst them.
At last we saw a steamer, presumably from Aden, and getting north of her and steering west we at length had Africa on our port side again, and reached Aden by the following sunrise, though it took us till two o'clock to get into port. In the same year, 1897, soon after our return thither from Sokotra, we left Aden to explore the Yafei and Fadhli countries.
Sokotra has followed the fortunes of Arabia; throughout, the same political and religious influences which have been at work in Arabia have been felt here. Sokotra, like Arabia, has gone through its several stages of Pagan, Christian, and Mohammedan beliefs.
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