AMONG THE FADHLI
We were up and off before the sun rose, our party being increased by
Sultan Salem, brother to the Fadhli sultan. He was twenty, and though not
dark in colour, has woolly hair. He and the soldiers and the wazir,
Abdullah bin Abdurrahman, rode at some distance to our left, between us
and the dangerous Yafei towers. The Goddam or Kadam range, which
separates the Wadi Yeramis from the Abyan, is a mass of arid peaks, none
reaching to more than 2,000 feet. A road leads from Al Ma'a across the
mountains to the sea at Asala.
We reached Karyat el Maksuf about ten, the valleys getting narrower and
more woody and grassy as we approached. There is an ancient fort on a
hill 650 feet above the valley, and about 1,300 above the sea, with a
glorious view over the Goddam range to the sea. There is another ruin of
a round fort on the left of the valley. We went on a mile to a delightful
place, where there were trees, water, and reeds, and beautiful views
through shady glades to the mountain peaks, and many cattle. We wished to
remain there, but were told it was better to get on to Naab, as there was
a little danger. We quite understood that danger was a bogey to prevent
us keeping them from a town, and we pointed out that the Yafei were not
likely to come down a light-coloured mountainside with only a few
tamarisks into a valley half a mile wide; so my husband firmly said we
would stay on the clean sand. Here we saw many baboons. The first ruin is
probably Persian or later Arabian. The second one, which is a mile
further up the Wadi Yeramis than the first, is evidently Himyaritic, and
protected the first town after Banna on the way to the Hadhramout. It is
circular, crowning a hill 300 feet high, and enclosing a space of 50
yards in diameter. On the north-east side it is protected by five square
towers, and has one gate to the south. It was the acropolis of a large
town, lying in all directions, but chiefly to the north-east. It has
evidently been a place of considerable strength, as the Wadi Yeramis is
only half a mile wide here. There is a regular stream of water in a
narrow channel, and the whole valley is green and fertile.
[Illustration: OLD NA'AB
(_By Theodore Bent_)]
Before we entered this narrow part of the valley, it was curious to see
below the peaked mountains a flat-topped effusion of basalt, called
_borum_, advanced forward.
We made a very early start next morning, and gradually got into a thick
low wood, but where the Wadi Yeramis widened out there were only
tamarisks. Our ascent was rapid, and after about an hour we turned due
east, this part being very bare-looking, though there were a good many
horrid acacias and also euphorbias with rounded trunks. We soon burst
upon a lovely plain all mapped out in fields and abrs. It is six miles to
Naab, and we took three hours. We passed through full two miles of this
fertility, with three or four villages--Souat, Nogat, Arrawa, and Old
Naab, with mosque, minar, and a fine old house all tumbling into ruins.
Wadi Yeramis is much opened out here, and the lower part is bounded by
the basalt in walls about 200 feet high, sometimes with mounds within
them again, and hillocks of the same formation as the high mountains.
This cultivated paradise is the property of Sultan Ahmet bin Salem,
brother to Sultan Saleh of the coast, and may be said to be the pick of
his whole dominions.
Arrawa, or New Naab, has twenty-four shops, and the sultan gets half a
real (or Maria Theresa dollar) on all merchandise-camels going up to the
Beled Yafei. There were many bales of merchandise in a sort of
Custom-house when we arrived at this great centre of inland traffic. We
encamped on the opposite side of the wadi from the town of Arrawa, which
is perched on a raised plateau of earth banks. When we halted, and had
climbed up, there was a line of people waiting to salute us. We and
Sultan Salem walked in front, our eleven men with guns walked behind,
singing a _merghazi_, or salutation song, of which I have a copy. We
halted again, and they fired ten salutes; then we advanced again, Sultan
Salem leading, when twenty of the local sultan's soldiers came forward
and kissed his hand and shook ours. Then there was a refreshment of five
or six cups of coffee and ginger, very weak, on the floor in a tower.
There was milk in the first cups, but it became exhausted. We never saw
the sultan all the time we were there, for they said he had a wound in
his leg.
The earthen cliffs are about 30 feet high, and we had to go a very
roundabout way to get up them by very narrow gullies. My husband went up
a hill, Yerad, just behind Naab, with an old Arab fort on it above the
Yeramis, which ends here; then begins Wadi Reban, with a clear course
north-east for three miles, then north, and then a long stretch east
again. There was a lovely view over the Yafei mountains on the north and
Goddam range on the south. A Bedou, Abdallah, who went with him told him
all the names. Though he could understand when the Bedouin talked to him,
he could not understand two talking together. Abdallah said he had been a
soldier in the sultan's service, but when my husband asked how long he
answered, 'Four, five, six years. I have never had it written down.' The
Bedou gave my husband some food called _kharou_, roast millet seeds put
in a mug with boiled milk, not at all bad.
The Sultan Salem bin Saleh's old abandoned castle had some nice
decoration about it. They left it because there were so many jinni
(_i.e._ ghosts) in it. Our informant had not seen them, but only heard of
them.
March the 12th my husband went up what he thought was the highest
mountain of the Goddam range, Minzoko, just behind Naab, and made it
2,000 feet, but considered when he got to the top that its neighbour
Haidenaab was 300 or 400 feet higher. The Tarik Minzoko goes between
them.
The sultan sent to our camp some bowls of food, soup, and a fowl cut up
and cooked in gravy, very rich with oil and onions. It would have been
good but for the stuffy, bitter taste of myrrh, which they like so much
to put in their food. He also sent us red cakes of millet bread.
A poet of Naab made a _merghazi_ on us during our stay, about our
treatment by the Yafei sultan: how he had demanded money of us and how he
had bidden us return to Aden. This was thought so excellent by everybody
that my husband was forced to take a copy of it from dictation and Sultan
Salem took a copy back to Shukra.
Our party was now increased by another 'prince,' Sultan Haidar, son of
the sultan of Naab, a person delightful to contemplate. He was got up in
Bedou style; his hair, fluffy and long, was tied back by a fillet and
stuck out in a bush behind. He had a curious countenance and very weak
eyes. He was wrapped in a couple of large blue cotton cloths with very
long fringes, half a yard at least. The cotton is plastered with indigo,
even beyond the dye, and when calendered, as the clothes are when new,
gleam purple and red. The richer you are the bluer you are, and Sultan
Haidar was very blue indeed. The curious thing about these blue people is
that, as the prominent parts of the face and body are the darkest, there
is an odd inside-out effect.
While in Naab we had our usual number of patients, but the one we were
most interested in was a woman who had a dreadfully sore foot. The foot
was very much swollen, and there was a sore on her instep and ankle in
which one could nearly put one's fist. This had never been washed, though
it had been going on for some years, and it had a dressing composed of
half a pound or so of dates stuffed into it. The poor creature lay on a
sort of bedstead or _charpai_ in a tidy little house consisting of one
room and lighted only by the door.
My husband set off at once half a mile back to camp to fetch the
necessary relief and I waited, sitting on a cloak that someone rolled up
on the floor, for there was not even a carpet to sit on. I was afraid of
various insects, but I could not rudely stand, and I should have had to
stand a good time as my husband had a mile to walk.
When he returned he syringed the sore with Condy's fluid and I cleaned it
with bits of wadding, and the woman with her nails in a way that made me
shudder, but she did not seem to hurt herself. Then we put on zinc
ointment. She drew her bedding from under her foot so that the water
streamed through the bed to the floor, which was earthen and below the
level of the door. There was a big puddle, of course, and I feared they
would have mud to contend with, but a woman soon came with a basketful of
dry sand, and by constantly brushing it up when wet into a palm-leaf
dustpan quickly cleaned up all the mess.
We went daily to attend to this foot and at last, if not much better, it
was improved by becoming thoroughly clean, foot, leg and all, and its
poor owner was cheered and looked much brighter herself.
We left her all the zinc ointment we had remaining to use first; a
milk-tinful of ointment, composed by me from pure lanoline, vaseline, and
zinc powder, to go on with, and some grease-proof paper to spread it on,
a lot of tabloids of permanganate of potash and directions to pour it
from a water vessel, very clean.
Before the family would undertake to receive these final instructions we
had to wait while some elderly persons were fetched, reputed wiseacres
evidently, and it was like teaching a class. The poor things, with such
earnest faces, were determined to make very sure they all thoroughly
understood what to do. An old man took each thing and handed it to the
husband, telling him how to use it, and we all consulted as to the best
niches in the roof in which to stow the things safely. They, at least,
longed for us to stay, and we felt sorry to go. One feels so helpless
face to face with such misery. I do hope she got well.
The first day we visited this house a great crowd came after us, but they
were turned out with sticks and fastened out in a very ingenious way.
Most of the houses are surrounded by a fence of prickly brushwood, in
which is an entrance 3 or 4 feet wide. Outside this stands, on its head,
with its root in the air, a bush. The root has a rope of twisted
palm-leaf attached to it. You enter and pull the rope. The bush stands on
its side then and blocks up the entrance; the rope is secured inside to a
bar which is fixed across the threshold and no one can pass this strange
and thorny gate. The bush is, of course, wider than the gateway.
Certainly Arabians are not all that one expect. I never can believe that
Mohammedans in general can consider dogs so very unclean, when they have
so many about them, and one tribe in the Soudan is called Kilab (dogs).
We used to hear also that they all shaved their heads, leaving one lock
only for Mohammed to draw them up into Heaven. Instead of this they do
all kinds of things to their hair, and the only people I ever saw with
one lock were the Yourouks in Asia Minor, and I think it was only a
fashion.
Some people think that all the rude efforts of aborigines and
uncultivated tribes are inspired by truer wisdom than are the results of
science and civilisation, and amongst other things, turbans are pointed
out to us as an instance of the good sense of people in hot climates, who
know how necessary it is to protect their heads from the sun. If so, why
do some cover their heads with turbans and some not? and why do those who
wear turbans take them off to cool their heads in the sun, and some
accidentally leave a bit of head exposed when they put the turban on
without ever finding it out? Some never cover the middle of the head at
all, but only wind the turban round. My theory, which may be wrong, is
that it is really worn for ornament, as a diadem in the original sense of
the word, just tied round the head as a mark of dignity.
Once or twice, our camp being on the far side of the valley from the
town, we managed to give the slip to the spearman who otherwise would
have accompanied us, and sneaked up a very narrow little wadi, where we
found a good many flowers and enjoyed this very much.
Wild beasts live in holes in these hills, and on the extreme top of the
mountain my husband ascended, was found a big goat that had been killed
in the wadi the night before. A little hairy animal called _ouabri_ was
brought to our camp.
[Illustration: FADHLI AT SHARIAH, WADI REBAN, WITH CURIOUS SANDAL]
When we left Naab we turned into the Wadi Reban to Shariah--three hours
and ten minutes, seven geographical miles, four north-east and three
north--and ascended 350 feet. Wadi Reban is a quarter of a mile wide near
Naab, but after two miles opens out; and there are gardens, and now and
again running water appears, and plenty of trees. At the fourth mile,
near a fort, we turned sharply to the north, past Jebel Riah, where Wadi
Riah comes in, and then reached a wide open space, where Wadi Silib joins
in. Jebel Shaas was beyond us, very high, and Wadi Ghiuda to the
right. This large open space is girt with mountains 500 to 5,000 feet
high, and is a great junction for the waters from Wadis Reban, Silib, and
Ghiuda. It was once exceedingly populous; there are here no less than
four old villages called Shariah; two considerable towns were perched on
the rocks, forming gates to the Wadi Silib, and two others at a great
elevation on the opposite side. The cause of the decrease in population
in Arabia must be the constant inter-tribal warfare and the gradual
filling up of the valleys with sand. Great banks of sand 20 feet high
line the river-beds, and wash away with the heavy rains, which contribute
to the silting up. This country must have been very fertile to have
supported the population, for the four towns must have been large. The
stone buildings alone would make any one of the four larger than most
towns in Arabia to-day, and there must have been the usual hut
population. We had a very pleasant camp among trees, and had a steep
scramble to the ruins.
An enthusiastic geologist would have enjoyed our next day's journey
immensely; we went through such a strange weird volcanic valley--not a
wadi, but a sheb, narrower and shallower. The road is called Tarik Sauda.
The strata of the rocks are heaved up at a very steep angle, and we had
to ride along smooth rocks, sometimes without any trace of a road at all
among the stones; sometimes we had to make very great windings amongst
heaps and hillocks of all sorts of different-coloured earths. Hardly a
green thing was to be seen, and altogether the whole place looked dreary
and desolate; but we were much interested in this day's journey among the
great scarred and seamed volcanic mountains. We ascended 650 feet--very
difficult indeed, travelling about seven miles in four hours; the
steepest part is called Akaba Sauda. We reached the headwater of the Wadi
Ghiuda at the top of the akaba, 2,000 feet from sea level. Naab is 1,000
feet above sea level; thence to Shariah is 350; and thence to Ghiuda,
650. We passed Dogoter and M'Haider, mere names. We encamped on a waste
of stones; no tent-pegs could be used, and it was windy and cold.
There are gazelle in this part and we had some for dinner.
Now was our time to send by Musaben to the camp of the sultans three very
gay blankets for them and Abdullah-bin-Abdurrahman. The long name of the
wazir's father had constantly to be on our lips on account of his
dignity, for they are like the Russians in that respect--common people's
fathers are not mentioned. The name was marvellously shortened to
B'd'rahman. We were thought to be in danger that night, and did not make
a very early start, as we had to load up water; and we two climbed down
350 feet into the Wadi Ghiuda, that I might take photographs. It was so
pretty, with pools of water and creepers hanging on the trees.
The sultans, meanwhile, sat up in their beds of leaves wrapped in their
blankets. How absurd it seems that two princes and a prime minister
should have to sleep out because two English choose to travel in their
country! Not a word of thanks did we ever get for those blankets, but
they were evidently much appreciated, for their recipients sat on their
camels wrapped over head and ears in them in the blazing sun.