Munkat is a walled village containing a considerable number of houses, one of which, a kind of fort, is curiously perched on an enormous boulder, and a pretty white mosque, surrounded by tanks of good water. Built into the wall of the mosque are stones inscribed in Himyaric characters, and some also in Kufic. Copies of the former were, I believe, taken some years ago by Dr Glaser. In another part of the village is a white marble column, some eight or ten feet in height, of Himyaric origin, which is said by the villagers to have appeared suddenly at this spot. The ignorance of the natives in this part of the country is astonishing; for out of many stones they showed me, some were in Arabic and some in the Himyaric character, but the inhabitants were uncertain as to which was which. They seemed, however, to reverence these remains to some extent, as they had carefully built them into the walls. At one spot, over a doorway and in a prominent position, they had carefully placed a marble stone containing the first chapter of the Koran—“Bismillah Alrahman Alrahim,” &c.—upside down. When I told them of their mistake, it was quite sad to hear their excuses. “We are only poor people,” they said, “and we are terribly taxed. We have to till the soil to feed ourselves and the Osmanli Pashas, and there is no time to learn to read or write.” In many parts of the country to such an extent do they have “to feed the Osmanli Pashas,” that they scarcely get ought to eat themselves. It is the old tale of cruelty and oppression, of extortion and corruption. The regard shown by the poor villagers of Munkat for these inscribed stones is not by any means uncommon, a great reverence for writing being innate in all Arab peoples. I once had an Arab servant, himself perfectly illiterate, who treasured a torn manuscript copy of the ‘Arabian Nights.’ Its contents he did not know, nor had he ever taken the trouble to find out: that it was a _book_ was sufficient for him, and he carried it about as a sort of talisman. In spite of its good luck, it did not keep him out of prison, when one day he helped himself to things that weren’t his. One of the most beautiful sights to be seen upon the plateau of the Yemen are the lizards—little creatures of gorgeous metallic blue, now pale turquoise, now transparent sapphire, as the sunlight dances on their backs. In no other part of the world have I come across such gorgeously coloured reptiles, although I have seen the same lizard, but less brilliant in hue, in the mountains of the Zarahoun, to the north of the road between Fez and Mequinez, in Morocco. An hour or two more of winding path and we were in sight of Yerim, one of the principal towns of the Yemen, which but a short time before had been taken by the Arabs in the rebellion, and retaken by the very Ismail Pasha whose camp we had seen at Kátaba. CHAPTER VI. YERIM TO DHAMAR.