This was all that there was to be seen in Bajil, so I retraced my steps to the _café_, where I found our mules being loaded preparatory to a start. A number of Turkish officers from Sanaa had arrived during my absence, and we instantly struck up an acquaintance, as we were proceeding over the same road to Hodaidah. They had been invalided from the steamy Teháma, and had been in hospital at Sanaa. Their recovery told a tale of the magnificent climate of that place, for they assured me that they had left Hodaidah a couple of months before almost dead of fever. At four o’clock we made a start, our two little caravans uniting. The road continues over the desert, which is here dotted with mimosa-bushes and tufts of long grass. It was the delight of the Turkish officers to throw matches into the latter, and as night came on we left a track behind us of fiery stars and heaps of black ashes. There was no danger of the fire taking too large dimensions, as the tufts of grass were sufficiently far removed from one another to prevent the flames spreading. It was the last of our desert marches. A glorious night, the sky a blaze of myriads of stars, the desert like a silver sea. Quietly and quickly our little mules glided on. Every now and again a caravan of slouching camels would pass by us with a dozen or so wild Bedouins in charge, on the heads of whose spears the moonlight played and flashed, but they soon vanished into the night. One could scarcely believe that this cool plain, fragrant with the sweet scent of mimosa, its fragrance increased by the heavy dew, was in the daytime a howling desert, where the sun scorched everything to death save the thorny bushes and the coarse grass tufts, and the camels and their Bedouin drivers; but even they scarcely ever travel by day. Wonderful as were the sights and the grandeur of the mountains of the Yemen, I think these night-rides over the desert have fixed themselves more upon my memory. Tired as we often were, one could not but wonder at the glories of the starlit heavens, and revel in the fragrance of falling dew and mimosa. [Illustration: GATE OF A WALLED VILLAGE IN THE YEMEN.] Before midnight we reached a _café_, merely a few little huts in the desert, but welcome nevertheless, and with shouts and cries we woke the owner, who lit a lamp and showed us into his best accommodation, a roof of grass supported on long canes. However, one could need no more; for it kept off the chill of the dew, and allowed the breeze, which every now and again stirred, to cool the hot night air.