The path leads one along the east side of the valley, at a great height above the river, often, like that we had traversed the night before, only a footway cut in the edge of the precipices. Here for the first time we came across the coffee-plant, growing amidst tumbling waterfalls on terraces built up against the steep mountain-side. Everywhere was water, here in artificial channels, there in tiny streamlets. Wild flowers abounded, and in places the walls of rock were green and white with jasmine. A thousand feet below us were the villages, on to the roofs of the houses of which we looked from above. It seemed but a step from us to them. At one spot my men pointed out where a short time before a camel and its load had fallen from an overhanging rock. It never touched the precipice, they said, until it fell upon a ledge they pointed out to me hundreds of feet below, and thence it bounded into the valley. Rich in the extreme is this part of the country, owing to its everlasting supply of water, and many are the tales the Arabs of the plains tell of it. Beled el-Hawad they call it, of which Howra is the chief village,—a place like a feudal castle built on a pile of rocks. After a time the road turns to the right, and, following the course of a small stream, ascends a valley. To the left of this valley, on the very summit of a high mountain, is the village of Ofar, to reach which necessitates a climb of a thousand feet or more from the road. At several places one passes drinking-fountains, erected, like the great tanks we were afterwards to meet with in the plateau, for the refreshment of man and beast. They are simple affairs, but excellently built. In form they are usually square, and domed, some six feet each way perhaps. A trough on the outside supplies the water for the animals, while a hole in the wall, large enough for one to insert one’s head through, is for human beings. Within the water rises to the level of this hole, being carried off by an overflow pipe into the trough below, so that the clear liquid just reaches the level of one’s lips, while the roof above keeps it fresh and cool. These fountains, common all over the Yemen, have been usually erected by private philanthropists for the benefit of their fellow-men. Unlike the custom in England, no flowery inscription tells the world the name or the generosity of the builder—they are the memorials of anonymous benefactors. Here, too, we came into contact for the first time with the mountain camel—a very different beast from that of the Teháma and desert, being a rough-haired, heavily-boned creature, usually black in colour and the picture of ugliness. Those of Lahej and the surrounding country, renowned throughout Arabia, are light in colour and remarkably finely built, and often exceedingly pretty. To those who think that the camel is essentially a creature of the desert, and incapable of traversing with ease stony or rocky country, the fact that we were passing caravans of