As to the real and prosaic features of the country, Nejd is a plateau of which Jebel Toweyk is the centre and backbone. Its general height above the sea is about 4,000 feet, but there are more lofty ledges and peaks, some as high as 5,500 feet. These highlands are for the most clothed with fine pasture; trees are common, solitary or in little groups; and the entire plateau is intersected by a maze of valleys cut out of the sandstone and limestone. In these countless hollows is concentrated the fertility and the population of Nejd. The soil of the valleys is light, mixed with marl sand and pebbles washed down from the cliffs. Water is found everywhere in wells at a depth of not much over fifteen feet and often less; in Kasim it has a brackish taste, and the soil is salty, but in other parts of Nejd there are traces of iron in it. The climate of all Nejd, according to Palgrave, is perhaps one of the healthiest in the world. The air is dry, clear and free from all the malarial poison of the coast; the summers are warm but not sultry, and the winter air is biting cold. The usual monotony of an Arabian landscape is not only enlivened by the presence of the date-palm near the villages, but by groups of Talh, Nebaa’ and Sidr, the Ithl and Ghada Euphorbia—all of them good-sized shrubs or trees.[46] Nejd is pasture land, so that its breed of sheep are known all over Arabia; their wool is remarkably fine, almost equal to Cashmire in softness and delicacy. Camels abound; according to Palgrave, Nejd is “a wilderness of camels.” The color is generally brownish white or grey; black camels are found westward and southward in the inhospitable Harra-country toward Mecca. Oxen and cows are not uncommon. Game is plenty, both feathered and quadruped. Partridges, quail, a kind of bustard; gazelle, hares, jerboa, wild-goat, wild-boars, porcupine, antelope, and a kind of wild-ox (wathyhi) with beautiful horns. Snakes are not common, but lizards, centipedes and scorpions abound. The ostrich is also found in western Nejd as well as in Wady Dauasir. The Bedouin hunt them to sell the skins to the Damascus feather merchants who come down with the Haj every year to Mecca; forty reals (dollars) was the price paid in Doughty’s time for a single skin—a small fortune to the poor nomad. Mounted on their dromedaries they watch for the bird and then waylay it, matchlock ready to hand. The Arabs esteem the breast of the ostrich good food; the fat is a sovereign remedy with them and half a _finjan_ (the measure of an Arab coffee-cup), is worth half a Turkish mejidie. The ostrich is no longer as common in Arabia as formerly, and in many parts of the peninsula the bird is unknown even by name.