Amongst this mass of verdure, for, far away below us, lay villages, their flat roofs upturned, as it were, to us, who were so high above them, looking like the squares on some fairy chess-board. Away down the valley a silvery thread of light told the presence of a river, fed by a hundred little streams, which, issuing from the rocky slopes, leaped and danced to join the larger stream below. Beyond, again, all was haze and mountain-peaks, faint as a cloud and inexpressibly lovely. Wild-flowers and ferns, especially maidenhair, grew in abundance round our little nook in the rocks, in which we were shaded from the sun’s rays by an overhanging crag. The whole scene was so framed by shrubs and creepers and flowers, a mass of blossom and green, that one lost the effect of distance; and, in the clear air, it seemed but a step from our resting-place to the bottom of the valley, and a step more to the far-away peaks. But it is not on account of its gorgeous scenery that Menakha has become an important place. Rather it is owing to its great strategical position; for it dominates the two parts of the highroad from Hodaidah to Sanaa, from each of which it is roughly equidistant. It is, no doubt, on this account, and to the practical advantages it offers, owing to its fine position for keeping up a line of communication between the capital and the coast, that a considerable number of troops are stationed and some forts erected there. It played by no means an unimportant part during the rebellion; and although this has been referred to elsewhere in a chapter dealing with that subject, it may be as well to mention the facts here. Menakha was one of the first Turkish strongholds to fall into the hands of the Arabs. The governor was taken prisoner; numbers of the troops were killed in the rebel rush; and what remained of its military population were sent to the leader of the rebellion at Sadah. It was not, in fact, until after the battle fought near Hojaila, on the road from Hodaidah, at a spot where the Teháma ends and the mountains commence, that Menakha was retaken. To Ahmed Feizi Pasha belongs the credit of the wonderful march from Hodaidah to Sanaa, in which the Turks dragged their guns by execrable roads over passes ten thousand feet in altitude; and it was upon this triumphal entry of the new Governor-General of the Yemen that the town once more came into the possession of the Turks, being deserted by the Arabs before the arrival of the Osmanli troops. Had the native horde only been better officered and possessed better arms; had they destroyed the road more successfully than they did, and stood firmly to their impregnable position at Menakha,—there is little doubt that the capital could not have held out, and that the Yemen to-day would have been in the hands of the Imam Ahmed ed-Din. At sunset, as had happened the evening before, the place became wrapt in cloud, and the temperature fell to such an extent