Going from southeast Muscat down the coast toward Ras-el-Had we first pass the little village of Sudab and Bunder Jissa. The latter is of interest as the place the French were trying to acquire for a coaling-station from the Sultan of Muscat last year. It has a good anchorage, is only five miles from Muscat, and an island precipice, 140 feet high, guards the entrance. After this, Karyat, Taiwa, Kalhat and smaller villages passed, we reach Sur. This large, double town is situated on a khor or backwater, with two forts to the westward. The inhabitants, numbering perhaps 8,000, consist of two clans of the Bni Bu Ali and the Bni Janaba, often at feud with each other. The country inland is partly cultivated and date groves abound. Sur has always been a place of trade and enterprise and its buggalows visit India, Zanzibar and the Persian Gulf. The people are all bold sailors since many generations. But Sur also has the unenviable reputation of being even now the centre of illicit slave-trading. Beyond Sur is the headland of Jebel Saffan and Ras-el-Had, the easternmost point of Arabia, almost reaching the sixtieth degree of longitude. For a knowledge of the coast beyond Ras-el-Had we are indebted to the papers of Assistant Surgeon H.J. Carter in the journal of the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.[29] The two great Arab tribes that dwell on this coast are the Mahrah and the Gharah; the former really belong to Hadramaut, but the boundaries drawn on the maps are purely artificial and have no significance. Neither tribe is dependent on the Oman Sultan or acknowledges any allegiance to him. The Mahrah are descended from the ancient Himyarites and occupy a coast-line of nearly 140 miles from Saihut to Ras Morbat; their chief town is Damkut (Dunkot) on Kamar bay. In stature the Mahrahs are smaller than most Arabs, and by no means handsome; in their peculiar mode of Bedouin salutation they put their noses side by side and breathe softly! They subsist by fishing and are miserably poor; their plains, mountains and valleys, except close to Damkut, are sandy and barren. Religion they have scarcely any, and Carter says that they do not even know the Moslem prayers, and are utterly ignorant of the teachings of Mohammed. Their dialect is soft and sweet, and they themselves compare it to the language of the birds; it is evidently a corrupted form of the ancient Himyaric and therefore of great importance in the study of philology.[30]