So we spread our carpet, and Abdurrahman and Saïd, and the Turkish and Arab soldiers who formed my guard, sat down together over a charcoal brasier, in which bubbled one of the common narrow-necked earthenware pots in which they brew their drink of coffee-husks, and smoked our hookah in peace, sharing alike in its cracked amber mouthpiece. We were all tired, and talked but little; but Saïd now and again would burst into song, and very well he sang, too, the plaintive melodies of the country. Presently our host returned with a scarecrow of a fowl and some leathery bread, which was all the good fellow was able to raise, and it was not long before a rather too savoury dish of rancid butter and chicken-bones—for there was little else—had usurped the place of our coffee-pot on the brasier. What jokes we made about that poor chicken! After all, we agreed, it could not be anything but thin after having lived through the late rebellion. However, we ate it all right. The view as we left Sôk el-Khamis the next morning was almost as lovely as that of the day before. As the night-mists rose at sunrise, range after range of mountains loomed up before us, peak above peak, until in the far west one great mass overtopped all the rest. The road descends steeply, winding the while, in parts showing signs of the repairs of the Turkish engineers, in others merely a foothold on the mountain-side. Numbers of blue rock-pigeons fluttered hither and thither in the morning sunlight; but lovely as they were, I was enticed to shoot a few, for, after all, one fowl is not sufficient food for eight persons, and there seemed every likelihood of our faring as ill at our next halting-place as we had done the night before. At one spot we passed one of the most lovely scenes I had as yet seen in the Yemen. Half-way down a steep slope, wooded with forest-trees, was a tomb and fountain, the clear cold water tumbling into a deep tank. Away behind a peak of the mountain rose bare and rocky into the blue sky, its lower slopes covered with trees, its summit crowned with the ruins of a village which the Turkish artillerymen had destroyed, leaving little but the walls to tell of its existence. The domed mosque, a tiny place, glistening white against the foliage, and the sound of the running water, added a charm to a scene of perfect peace and loveliness.