To commence with the Teháma, as being the seaboard. It consists, as already stated, of plains varying from thirty to a hundred miles in breadth, and separating the highlands from the sea, both on the west and south. These, for the sake of distinction, I shall call respectively the western and southern Teháma. The former contains some five cities of importance, situated either on the coast of the Red Sea or in that district which divides it from the mountains. Almost in the Asir country lies Lohaya, a small town on the coast, to which I shall refer more particularly in a chapter on the Yemen rebellion. Proceeding south, the next coast town of importance is Hodaidah, to-day the capital of that portion of the Yemen, and still farther south Mokha. As it was my lot to spend a week in the fever-stricken town of Hodaidah, I shall reserve anything I have to say about it for another opportunity; but as it was my ill fortune to see Mokha only from the sea and not to land there, and as I shall therefore not have to narrate any personal experiences in reference to it, I shall add some description of the place and its history at this juncture. There is certainly no name of any city in the Yemen as familiar to Englishmen as that of Mokha, with the exception of Aden. This it owes to its having for a long time enjoyed almost the sole reputation of the export city of the coffee-berry. However, it is not generally known that no coffee grows at all in the immediate vicinity of Mokha, and that all that was shipped from there was previously carried to the city by caravans from the mountains, often over very great distances. Almost as suddenly as Mokha rose to fame has it fallen again. Before the arrival in the Red Sea of the English and Portuguese traders it scarcely existed at all, the outlets for the trade of this portion of the Yemen being Okelis and Muza. It was not, in fact, until the fifteenth century A.D. that Mokha became a place of resort for ships, and it owes its origin more to the discovery of coffee than to any advantages or attractions of its own. In the early part of the seventeenth century the English and Dutch founded trading “factories” there, and from that time for a period of some two hundred years its fame and wealth were renowned. Van den Broeck describes the place as it existed at the time of his visit in 1616, and notes that to such an extent has its trade recently augmented that goods from Hungary and Venice were found in the market, which had been carried by caravans the whole length of Arabia, to be exchanged for the produce of the far east.[2] He further describes the town as a most flourishing community, containing within its walls numbers of numerous nationalities who had flocked there on hearing of its fame and renown.