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The road to Shukra most frequented is the Tarik el Arkob; eastward goes the road to the Hadhramout, over the plain. Northward is the mountainous country of the Aòdeli tribe, where they told us 'it is sometimes so cold that the rain is hard and quite white, and the water like stone. The plain is ten or fifteen miles long, by about four or five miles at its broadest.
It was from Al Agran or Algran that we obtained a stone with a spout to it, with rather a long Sabæan inscription on it, a dedication to the god Sayan, known to have been worshipped in the Hadhramout. We were given coffee in a very dirty room, which we were all the time longing to tear down that we might dig under it.
From personal observation it would appear that the ancients held communication with the Hadhramout almost entirely by the land caravan-route, as there is absolutely no trace of great antiquity to be found along the coast-line, whereas the Wadi Hadhramout itself and its collateral branches are very rich in remains of the ancient Himyaritic civilisation.
In ancient times this was one of the chief sources of the time-honoured frankincense trade, which still maintains itself here even more than in the Hadhramout. It is carried on by the Bedouin of the Gara tribe, who bring down the odoriferous gum from the mountains on camels. About 9,000 cwt. of it is exported to Bombay annually.
In the end they began quarrelling with each other and made peace with us, and next we set off to a place farther north than they had before intended, where there was good water in a small amphitheatre of mountains. We went up a lovely gorge with ferns, trees, and a running stream, as different as possible to the aridity of the Hadhramout.
They have hardly any guns amongst them, and what they have are only of the long matchlock class; in fact, they do not seem to covet the possession of firearms, as our friends in the Hadhramout did the year before. Every man clutched the sword and ghatrif in one hand very tightly as there was nothing to prevent their slipping, being both pointed.
Our scheme was that we should go from Sheher to Inat in the Hadhramout valley, down to Bir Borhut and Kabr Houd, and thence eastward to Wadi Mosila, back to Sheher by the coast, and then try to go westward or, as to us appeared preferable, to go up by the Wadi Mosila to Wadi Hadhramout, and then to try to get to the west without returning to Sheher.
It appears to me highly probable that the systematic destruction of the frankincense and myrrh trees through countless generations has done much to alter the character of this Akaba, and has contributed to the gradual silting up of the Hadhramout and its collateral valleys, to which fact I shall again have occasion to refer.
It had not been our intention to visit the Wadi Al Aisa, but to approach the Hadhramout by another valley called Doan, parallel and further west, but our camel-men would not take us that way, and purposely got up a scare that the men of Khoreba at the head of Wadi Doan were going to attack us, and would refuse to let us pass.
It is the universal female dress in the Hadhramout, and looks as if the fashion had not changed since the days when Hazarmaveth the Patriarch settled in this valley and gave it his name. The tall tapering straw hat worn by these women when in the fields contributes with the mask to make the Hadhrami females as externally repulsive as the most jealous of husbands could desire.
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