The taste of the leaves is slightly bitter and astringent, very like that of the peach leaf. It has stimulative properties, produces wakefulness, and in large quantities hallucination; it is said to preserve the teeth, and some use it as an aphrodisac. All Arabs claim that it gives wonderful power of endurance, and that with their kaat and tobacco they can do without food on long journeys. Every one, young and old, Arab, Jew or Turk, uses it, and many use it in incredible quantities. One soldier told me that he spent a rupee (33 cents) a day for his kaat, and the Cadi of Taiz pays twenty dollars a day for this luxury,—his household, however, is as large as the koran and divorce can make it. The Ottoman government receives twenty-five per cent customs on the market price of the plant in addition to the land tax on kaat culture. The total revenue from this source is considerable as can be judged from the fact that at Taiz, a town of perhaps five thousand population, all the other taxes are farmed for ten thousand dollars per annum, while the daily sale of kaat amounts to over three hundred dollars! The kaat market is open from early morning, when the fresh bundles came on donkeys and camels, but the busiest time is in the afternoon; for the proper thing is to eat kaat just before sunset, and to invite guests to chew leaves an hour or two before dinner. The sellers sit in the open air, and are mostly women. In their rather picturesque costumes, unveiled, they sit the long day, with a basket of the green luxury before them; sprinkling their ware from time to time to keep it moist; untying a score of bundles to satisfy some proud epicure who tastes before he takes; haggling over the price of a damaged bundle with some soldier; and again swearing, as only Arabs can, to the genuineness of the kind in question—for kaat has six distinct flavors and varieties, each with a special name, and alas for the slave who was sent for one and returns with another. Sometimes there is close dealing, or on a rainy day “a corner” in the market, or some wicked urchin runs off with a stolen bundle, and at such times all the women talk at once, and their uproar is only rivalled in Yemen by the Jews’ synagogue service. The kaat market at 4 P. M. is indeed a picture, full of color and pose and motion worthy the brush of an artist; its like can only be seen in the villages of lower Yemen, and among the many surprises to the traveller in this Switzerland of Arabia nothing is at first sight stranger and more ludicrous than to see sober Arabs sit down in groups at the close of day and, as Nebuchadnezzar of old, “eat grass like oxen.”