There are two villages near the head of the Wadi Howeri, where there is actually a ghail—that rare phenomenon in Arabia, a rill or running stream. Here the Bedou inhabitants cultivate the date palm, and have green patches of lucerne and grain, very refreshing to the eye.
We had come up one of the narrowest of gorges, but with hundreds of palm-trees around Al Ghail, the first of the two villages, which is in the end of the Wadi Howeri. It is an uninteresting collection of stone huts, with many pretty little fields, and maidenhair fern overhanging the wayside. There are little enclosures with walls round them, and small stones in them, on which they dry the dates before sending them to Aden. The rocky river-bed itself is waterless, the ghail being used up in irrigation.
At Al Bat'ha, which is just above the tableland, we actually encamped under a spreading tree, a wild, unedible fig called luthba by the Arabs, a nickname given to all worthless, idle individuals in these parts. Bedou women crowded around us, closely veiled in indigo-dyed masks, with narrow slits for their eyes, carrying their babies with them in rude cradles resembling hencoops, with a cluster of charms hung from the top, which has the twofold advantage of amusing the baby and keeping off the evil eye. After much persuasion we induced one of the good ladies to sit for her photograph, or rather to sit still while something was being done which she did not in the least understand.
There is very good water at Al Bat'ha, and so much of the kind of herbs that camels like that we delayed our departure till eight, shivering by a fire and longing as ardently for the arrival of the sun as we should for his departure. The road had been so steep and stony that the camel-riders had all been on foot for two days. I am sure that, except near a spring, no one dropped from the skies would dream he was in Arabia the Happy. It is hard to think that 'the Stony' and 'the Desert' must be worse.
CHAPTER VIII
THE AKABA
Having left these villages behind us, we climbed rapidly higher and higher, until at an elevation of over 4,000 feet we found ourselves at last on a broad, level table-land, stretching as far as the eye could reach in every direction. This is no doubt the 'Maratha Mountains' of Ptolemy, the Mons Excelsus of Pliny,[8] which shuts off the Hadhramout, where once flourished the frankincense and the myrrh.
Words cannot express the desolate aspect of this vast table-land, Akaba or the 'going-up,' as the Arabs call it. It is perfectly level, and strewn with black lumps of basalt, looking as though a gigantic coal-scuttle had been upset. Occasionally there rises up above the plain a flat-topped mound or ridge, some 80 feet high, the last remnant of a higher level which is now disappearing. There is no sign of habitation. Only here and there are a few tanks, dug to collect the rain-water, if any falls. These are protected or indicated by a pair of walls built opposite one another, and banked up on the outer side with earth and stones, like shooting butts. The Akaba is exclusively Bedou property, and wherever a little herbage is to be found, there the nomads drive their flocks and young camels.
Of the frankincense which once flourished over all this vast area, we saw only one specimen on the highland itself, though it is still found in the more sheltered gullies; and farther east, in the Mahri country, there is, I understand, a considerable quantity left. We were often given lumps of gum arabic, and myrrh is still found plentifully; it is tapped for its odoriferous sap. It is a curious fact that the Somali come from Africa to collect it, going from tribe to tribe of the Bedouin, and buying the right to collect these two species, sometimes paying as much as fifty dollars. They go round and cut the trees, and after eight days return to collect the exuded sap.
In ancient times none but slaves collected frankincense and myrrh. This fact, taken probably with the meaning of the name Hadhramout (the later form of the ancient name Hazarmaveth), gave rise to the quaint Greek legend 'that the fumes of the frankincense-trees were deadly, and the place where they grew was called the valley or enclosure of death.'
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.
Though we were always looking about for monuments of antiquity, the most ancient and lasting memorial of far past ages lay beneath our feet in that little narrow path winding over Akaba and Wadi, and polished by the soft feet of millions of camels that had slowly passed over it for thousands and thousands of years.
We found the air of the table-land fresh and invigorating after the excessive heat of the valleys below. For three days we travelled northwards across the plateau. Our first stage was Haibel Gabrein. This is, as it were, the culminating point of the whole district; it is 4,150 feet above the sea. From it the table-land slopes gently down to the northward towards the main valley of the Hadhramout, and eastwards towards the Wadi Adim. After two days more travelling we approached the heads of the many valleys which run into the Hadhramout; the Wadis Doan, Rakhi, Al Aisa, Al Ain, Bin Ali, and Adim all start from this elevated plateau and run nearly parallel. The curious feature of most of these valleys is the rapid descent into them; they look as if they had been taken out of the high plateau like slices out of a cake. They do not appear to have been formed by a fall of water from this plateau; in fact, it is impossible that a sufficient force of water could ever have existed on this flat surface to form this elaborate valley system. In the valleys themselves there is very little slope, for we found that, with the exception of the Wadi Adim, all the valley heads we visited were nearly of uniform height with the main valley, and had a wall of rock approaching 1,000 feet in height, eaten away as it were out of the plateau. We were, therefore, led to suppose that these valleys had originally been formed by the action of the sea, and that the Hadhramout had once been a large bay or arm of the sea, which, as the waters of the ocean receded, leaving successive marks of many strands on the limestone and sandstone rocks which enclosed them, formed an outlet for the scanty water-supply of the Southern Arabian highlands. These valleys have, in the course of ages, been silted up by sand to a considerable height, below which water is always found, and the only means of obtaining water in the Hadhramout for drinking purposes, as well as for cultivation, is by sinking wells. The water of the main valley is strongly impregnated with salt, but is much sweeter at the sides of the valley than in the centre. No doubt this is caused by the weight of the alkaline deposits washed down from the salt hills at Shabwa, at the head of the main valley.
The steep, reddish sandstone cliffs which form the walls of these valleys are themselves almost always divided into three distinct stories or stratifications, which can be distinctly seen on the photographs. The upper one is very abrupt, the second slightly projecting and more broken, and the third formed by deposit from above. The descent into the valley is extremely difficult at all points. Paths down which camels can just make their way have been constructed by the Bedouin, by making use of the stratified formation and the gentler slopes; but only in the case of the Wadi Adim, of all the valleys we visited, is there anything approaching a gradual descent.
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. The aspect of this plateau forcibly recalled to our minds that portion of Abyssinia which we visited in 1892–93; there is the same arid coast-line between the sea and the mountains, and the same rapid ascent to a similar absolutely level plateau, and the same draining northwards to a large river-bed in the case of Abyssinia, into the valleys of the Mareb and other tributaries of the Nile, and in the case of this Arabian plateau into the Hadhramout. Only Abyssinia has a more copious rainfall, which makes its plateau more productive.
It had not been our intention to visit the Wadi Al Aisa, but to approach the Hadhramout by