“After this, the sultan, whom we managed to understand, expressed his pleasure at our having escaped with our lives from the tribes inhabiting the locality where we landed and through which we had passed, and wished me to give him a written acknowledgment of our having left his place in safety, so that if anything befell us between there and Aden, he would have this paper to show the English government. Moreover, as he lived a mile from the sea, and possessed boats, he offered to send a boat’s crew of ten men to the steamer at once, to give the shadow, if not the reality of his protection, and also offered us a boat to Aden. As I was suspicious, I declined giving him the document he wanted until we were in the boat, but he pressed very much for it, so at last I gave it him, but started immediately, so that we might get clear of his people if he meant treachery. Arriving at the beach, the boat getting ready to take us to Aden was such a small, leaky, crazy thing, and the sea was running so high outside and the surf breaking so heavily on the beach, that I demurred going in it. Fancy spending two days and a night in an open boat of that description. For my own part I would ten times sooner get shot at on land with a chance of escape than be upset at sea, and finish my career with a stomach full of salt water. So we started away again with the camels, getting water at a well close by to take with us, which we carried in skins tied to their sides. Most of these people had never seen a white man before. We saw some women at this well, not bad looking; one of them had a baby, which she carried in a sort of triangular flat wicker basket under her arm. She was quite afraid of me when I went near to look at it. Pushing on until long after sunset, and striking inland for a few miles from the coast, we came at last to a camp of Bedouins in a district of bare sand (with a little low bush interspersed), drifted into mounds like snow driven by the wind. There were also, here and there, the dry beds of rivulets, which in the wet season take the water of the hills to the sea. Here we rested for the night, and a lovely night it was, magnificently starlight and the atmosphere beautifully clear. Lying down, in less than a minute I was oblivious to everything here below. I left one of the darkies to keep watch, but starting up in a short time, I found the revolvers I had laid at my head gone and the nigger fast asleep. Presently our Arab guide, seeing me moving, came back with them from an adjoining camp-fire of Bedouins, where he had been exhibiting them and his knowledge of firearms at the same time, and what was better still, brought with him some goats’ milk and dates. Next morning the camels were lost, and we did not start until 7 o’clock. The intermediate time we occupied in rifle and pistol practice with the Arabs who came flocking around us at daybreak.