Then God drove the cloud until it stood over the land of ‘Ád, and there issued from it a roaring wind that consumed the whole people except a few who had taken the prophet's warning to heart and had renounced idolatry. From these, in course of time, a new people arose, who are called 'the second ‘Ád.' They had their settlements in Yemen, in the region of Saba. The building of the great Dyke of Ma’rib is commonly attributed to their king, Luqmán b. ‘Ád, about whom many fables are told. He was surnamed 'The Man of the Vultures' (_Dhu ’l-Nusúr_), because it had been granted to him that he should live as long as seven vultures, one after the other. [Sidenote: Legend of Thamúd.] In North Arabia, between the Ḥijáz and Syria, dwelt the kindred race of Thamúd, described in the Koran (vii, 72) as inhabiting houses which they cut for themselves in the rocks. Evidently Muḥammad did not know the true nature of the hewn chambers which are still to be seen at Ḥijr (Madá’in Ṣáliḥ), a week's journey northward from Medína, and which are proved by the Nabaṭæan inscriptions engraved on them to have been sepulchral monuments.[22] Thamúd sinned in the same way as ‘Ád, and suffered a like fate. They scouted the prophet Ṣáliḥ, refusing to believe in him unless he should work a miracle. Ṣáliḥ then caused a she-camel big with young to come forth from a rock, and bade them do her no hurt, but one of the miscreants, Qudár the Red (al-Aḥmar), hamstrung and killed her. "Whereupon a great earthquake overtook them with a noise of thunder, and in the morning they lay dead in their houses, flat upon their breasts."[23] The author of this catastrophe became a byword: Arabs say, "More unlucky than the hamstringer of the she-camel," or "than Aḥmar of Thamúd." It should be pointed out that, unlike the ‘Ádites, of whom we find no trace in historical times, the Thamúdites are mentioned as still existing by Diodorus Siculus and Ptolemy; and they survived down to the fifth century A.D. in the corps of _equites Thamudeni_ attached to the army of the Byzantine emperors. [Sidenote: ‘Amálíq.] [Sidenote: Ṭasm and Jadís.] Besides ‘Ád and Thamúd, the list of primitive races includes the ‘Amálíq (Amalekites)--a purely fictitious term under which the Moslem antiquaries lumped together several peoples of an age long past,_e.g._, the Canaanites and the Philistines. We hear of Amalekite settlements in the Tiháma (Netherland) of Mecca and in other parts of the peninsula. Finally, mention should be made of Ṭasm and Jadís, sister tribes of which nothing is recorded except the fact of their destruction and the events that brought it about. The legendary narrative in which these are embodied has some archæological interest as showing the existence in early Arabian society of a barbarous feudal custom, 'le droit du seigneur,' but it is time to pass on to the main subject of this chapter. [Sidenote: History of the Yoqṭánids.]