A word must be said here on the extraordinary quantity of Chinese and Japanese pottery to be found in the Yemen. There is scarcely a _café_ by the roadside where one will not find that the cups have come from the far East, and yet I found that but very little enters the country to-day. I believe the origin of the presence of this extraordinary amount of oriental pottery is to be traced to the last few centuries, when Aden was the great mart of exchange between the East and Europe. With great wealth in the cities of the Yemen, a very appreciable quantity of the goods brought to Aden would be taken into the interior, and the care with which pottery and antiquities are treasured by the natives of the country would explain their existing until to-day. There is little doubt that should the Yemen ever be opened up, and Europeans be able to travel with safety and comfort, that it will become a field for the curio-hunter such as has not been known since the days when the Egyptian antiquities began to be unearthed. Coins, gems, inscriptions, sculptures, old Persian and Arab antiquities, embroideries, arms, brass and copper work, manuscripts, carpets, oriental pottery and glass—the Yemen is full of them, and as yet her treasures are almost untouched. Although many of the streets of the town consist of narrow byways, turning and twisting in every direction between the high walls of the houses, there are parts that are by no means badly laid out, and one or two of the main streets are quite wide thoroughfares, in which the few carriages which Sanaa boasts are able to pass each other. The most important of these streets leads from the square into which the Government buildings look to the bazaars. It is only a few hundred yards in length, it is true, but still it is sufficiently wide, and the shops on either side sufficiently good, to compare favourably with many in European towns. The “square” itself is a large oblong open space, faced on the east by the old castle and the large much-bedomed Turkish mosque, and on the west by what were once the palaces of the Arab rulers, and to-day form barracks and Government offices. At one end of the square an enterprising Turk has built a large _café_, where the officers and the few Greek shopkeepers love to congregate, and from the large doors and windows of which float clouds of pale-blue tobacco-smoke, issuing in curling clouds from the _shishas_ of the smokers. It is from this point that the main street leads off to the bazaars, and in the few hundred yards of thoroughfare are to be seen the best shops, kept either by Turks or by Greeks, in which every imaginable article can be procured, from tins of sardines and inferior Turkish cigarettes to photograph-frames and musty chocolate creams. One or two have large glass windows in which the goods are exposed to view, but they have a dingy dusty appearance, and seem to tell that trade is not bright. There, too, is a small