There is no water, the Arabs say, more poisonous than this stream of Lahej, and we had been carefully warned against drinking it; but in spite of this my servants regaled themselves plenteously from its feverish stream. There is no fallacy greater than to suppose the average Arab can go long without water. In cases of hereditary necessity perhaps they do, but in all my experience of foreign lands I have seen no thirstier race than the Arabs. They are for ever drinking. All my journey through the Yemen, my men were constantly alighting from their animals to drink. In the mountains, where the water as a rule was good, this led to no bad results; but their constant habit of drinking from slimy pools and nasty streams brought on attacks of fever in the cases of both Saïd and Abdurrahman. No more unpleasant position can be imagined than that of a traveller with two fever-stricken servants, both shouting that they were going to die, and refusing to take quinine because it tasted so nasty. The drinking of this water of Lahej brought on fever in both these men. I provided them with unlimited coffee, which, with boiling the water, does away with a great part of the risk; but, rather than have the trouble of making it, they preferred to drink the poisonous liquid. However, they suffered for their perversity. It was dawn when we started again, pale-grey dawn, which struck cold and chilly. An hour or two of desert, unbroken in its monotony; but away ahead of us we could see the outpost fort of the Sultan of the Houshabi tribe, whose territory we were soon to enter, and a few miles nearer, half hidden in thick thorn-trees, the frontier castle of the Sultan of Lahej.