I can quite imagine that to the jealous Turk the unexpected arrival of an Englishman was by no means a pleasant surprise. Up to this time all truth concerning the rebellion had been withheld, and the sole matter that the press had been able to obtain was from official sources at Constantinople. Therefore any chance of the truth leaking out, and the general public being made aware how very nearly the Osmanli Government had lost the southernmost of its Arabian possessions, would prove far from acceptable to the authorities. On this account Ahmed Feizi’s bearing toward myself is explicable, nor do I complain very much of it. Not so, however, with the action of H.M. late Secretary of Foreign Affairs, who laid all the blame of my imprisonment upon myself, and entirely ignored the fact that my passport,—demanding that I should be allowed to pass without let or hindrance, and that I should be afforded every assistance and protection of which I might stand in need in the Ottoman Empire, and which had been vizéd by the Turkish Consul-General in London,—bore his own signature, which, if it were not lithographed, might have been worth the sum paid for the document that bore it, as an autograph, but was certainly entirely useless for the purpose for which it was supposed to be affixed. Although I made my journey through the Yemen with the knowledge and consent of the late Sir William White, then H.M. Ambassador at Constantinople, I was informed, in one of those elegant despatches of the Foreign Office, that I had entered the Yemen on entirely my own responsibility, and must bear the results of my actions myself! and that if the Turkish Government saw right to put me in prison and give me such bad water to drink that fever was the result, they really could not hold any one responsible for it beyond my own person. My question as to whether the wording of my passport was of any value, or merely a form that meant nothing, they entirely ignored, and to this day I have been unable to obtain a reply. Suffice it to say that with all its seals and titles and stamps, a British passport does not seem to be of much value in the Ottoman Empire; nor when it is absolutely disregarded is any one blamed by the Foreign Office except the unoffending bearer, who may have been so dazzled by its splendour as to believe that it might be of service to him. However, what with making treaties and doing their duty in society, it can be easily understood that the time of the officials is too much occupied to attend to such an unimportant question as the imprisonment of an Englishman, even though by such an occurrence every word and sentence of a paper to which H.M. Secretary of State appends his signature is disregarded and abused. CHAPTER VIII. SANAA, THE CAPITAL OF THE YEMEN.