But of all the sights offered by the city of Sanaa, the population presents the most interesting. Everywhere some strange figure meets the eye: here it is some wild tribesman with bronzed skin and raven-black locks, girded with his loin-cloth of dark blue cotton; there some merchant from the Hejaz, slow and stately, with strange glassy eyes that speak of _hashish_, robed in striped silks, and whose turban, so white it is, literally seems to sparkle in the sunlight. Again it is some ill-fed, ill-clothed Turkish soldier, with only one boot perhaps, and that scarcely more than a shadow of its former self, with face unshaven and sunk with illness; and as one is still watching him, there rattles past a shabby victoria, in which is seated some fat Pasha or Bey, with hideous black-cloth clothes richly sewn in gold lace; and one knows that as often as not his clothes, his carriage, and his horses are bought with the money that ought to feed the soldiers, for but a small proportion of the pay of the troops ever reaches them. Then, again, a woman passes, wrapt head to foot in coloured garments, the veil of coloured stuff just transparent enough to allow her to grope her way, for so do the women of Sanaa hide their charms; and here, there, and everywhere are the “gamins,” the same all over the world, though their blood and their language be different,—little monkeys all, and in Sanaa rebels to the very heart. Of all the cities of the Yemen, there is none that can boast the antiquity of Sanaa. Tradition says that it was founded by Ad, the ancestor of the tribe of Adites, who were destroyed by a miraculous hot blast of wind for refusing to listen to the voice of the Prophet Hud. A second tribe, that of Thamud, met with a like fate for disregarding the Prophet Salih; only in their case it was a terrible voice that called to them from the skies that caused their deaths.[43] There is only one drawback to this tale—namely, that long after the destruction of the Adites we find them attacked and conquered by a descendant of Yarub, brother of Hadramaut, and son of Kahtan. He was apparently more successful than the miraculous hot wind, for they were evidently entirely wiped out on this occasion, and we find no more mention of them in history. But there is another interest belonging to the Adites—namely, that they were of the autochthonous stock of the Yemen, and therefore probably one of the original Semitic people who afterwards spread over Arabia and founded the Arab races, and who have, with the propagation of Islam, wandered far into Asia and Africa. The original name of Sanaa was Azal, Uzul, or Uwal, the latter of which means “primacy” in the Arab tongue. The authorities appear to differ as to which was really the first name, and it seems not improbable that Azal or Uzul was the original title, which, being incomprehensible to the later races, they changed to the Arabic Uwal—a word that described not only the antiquity of the