Being so near the land, we suffered severely from the hot, suffocating air of this inhospitable region. Clothes were a burden, sleep fled from us, and the slightest exertion was painful. The whole aspect of the land was most dreary and most desolate. Mountains and plains of sand, only, were presented to our view, looking “like drifted gold in summer’s cloudless beam.” Not a tree, nor a shrub, nor scarcely a blade of grass, to relieve the eye of the extreme aridity of this vast wilderness. Here and there, at great intervals, were a few miserable huts, in a gully, formed by the washing away of the sand; and the great comfort derived from the “shadow of a high rock in a hot and dreary land,” would have been felt here as an inestimable blessing. Now and then, a naked and poverty-stricken fisherman was seen stealing along the shore, propelling, with his double-bladed paddle, a frail catamaran, made of two or three sticks of wood, sitting to his waist in water, having a rush sack to put his fish in, and liable to be made the prey of the voracious blue shark, which abounds in these waters. He was in search of what could not be found on the land, to wit, something edible; something to nourish his own frail body, or satisfy the cravings of a famishing wife, and a brood of naked, starving, helpless children. We were a few days in accomplishing the short distance of two hundred and forty miles, from the cape to Metté, and then shaped our course for cape Aden in Arabia Felix, which we descried the following morning, presenting a bold, broken outline. We continued coasting along the shore till the twenty-ninth, when we spoke an East India company’s cruiser, the Nautilus, the same brig which the Peacock captured at the termination of the late war with Great Britain. She had under convoy four brigs from Mocha, bound to Surat. They were very much crowded with _good_ mussulmans, from Mecca, who had been on a pilgrimage to the holy city, and were purified of all their sins, past, present, and to come, by the waters of the miraculous well of Zemzen, &c., and were now sure of admission into the sensual paradise of the prophet. The triple and quadruple mountains of Yemen were distinctly visible, and the sandy coast was interrupted at intervals by high land, till we made the broken hill which forms the celebrated cape of Death, or cape of Tears, Babel Mandeb, better known to the world as Babel Mandel. The passage between this headland and the island of Perim, and Babel Mandeb, is less than a mile and a half wide according to the chart of Sir Home Popham. It is called by modern navigators the lesser Bab, or Gate. [Sidenote: ARRIVAL AT MOCHA.]