The peninsula of El Katar, about 100 miles long and fifty broad, is unattractive in every way and barren enough to be called a desert. Palgrave’s pen-picture cannot be improved upon: “To have an idea of Katar my readers must figure to themselves miles on miles of low barren hills, bleak and sun-scorched, with hardly a single tree to vary the dry monotonous outline; below these a muddy beach extends for a quarter of a mile seaward in slimy quicksands, bordered by a rim of sludge and seaweed. If we look landwards beyond the hills we see what by extreme courtesy may be called pasture land, dreary downs with twenty pebbles for every blade of grass; and over this melancholy ground scene, but few and far between, little clusters of wretched, most wretched earth cottages and palm-leaf huts, narrow, ugly and low; these are the villages, or ‘towns’ (for so the inhabitants style them) of Katar. Yet poor and naked as is the land it has evidently something still poorer and nakeder behind it, something in short even more devoid of resources than the coast itself, and the inhabitants of which seek here by violence what they cannot find at home. For the villages of Katar are each and all carefully walled in, while the downs beyond are lined with towers and here and there a castle, huge and square with its little windows and narrow portals.” [Illustration: NEIBUHR’S MAP OF THE PERSIAN GULF.] The population of Katar is not large; its principal town is Bedaa’. All the inhabitants live from the sea by pearl-diving and fishing, and in the season send out two hundred boats. The whole peninsula with its wild Bedouin population is claimed by Turkey and is the dread of the miserable soldiers who are sent there to preserve peace and draw precarious pay while they shake with malaria and grow homesick for Bagdad. The Arabs are always at feud with the government and it is very unsafe outside the walls after sunset. The usual route from Bahrein to the interior of Hassa is to cross over by boat to Ojeir on the mainland, and thence to travel by caravan to Hofhoof. In October, 1893, I took this route, returning from the capital to Katif and thence back to Menamah. Embarking at sunset we landed at Ojeir before dawn the next day and I found my way to a Turkish custom-house officer to whom I had a friendly letter from a Bahrein merchant. Ojeir, although it has neither a bazaar nor any settled population, has a mud-fort, a dwarf flagstaff and an imposing custom-house. The harbor although not deep is protected against north and south winds and is therefore a good landing-place for the immense quantity of rice and piece-goods shipped from Bahrein into the interior. A caravan of from two to three hundred camels leaves Ojeir every week. For although the Jebel Shammar country is probably supplied overland from Busrah and Bagdad, the whole of Southern Nejd receives piece-goods, coffee, rice, sugar and Birmingham wares by way of Bahrein and Ojeir.