It is interesting to read in the 'Periplus' (p. 32) a description of this coast and of the high mountains behind, 'where men dwell in holes.' We often went to visit the troglodytes in their cave homes, where we found men, women, and children living with their flocks and herds in happy harmony. The floor of their caves is soft and springy, the result of the deposits of generations of cattle; in the dark recesses of the cave the kids are kept during their mother's absence at the pasture, and though these caves are slightly odoriferous, we found them cool and refreshing after the external heat. In some of them huts are erected for the families, and in one cave we found almost a village of huts; but in the smaller ones they have no covering, and when in the open the Gara cares for nothing but a tree to shelter him. All their farm implements are of the most primitive nature; the churn is just a skin hung on three sticks, which a woman shakes about until she obtains her butter. Ghi or rancid butter is one of the chief exports of Dhofar. They practise too, a pious fraud on their cows by stretching a calf-skin on a stick, and when the cow licks this she is satisfied and the milk comes freely. They have but few pots and pans, and these of the dirtiest description, so when we got milk from them we always sent our own utensils. In these valleys, by rocks near the streams and under trees, live, the Bedouin told us, those curious semi-divine spirits which they call _jinni_, the propitiating of which seems to be the chief form of religion amongst them. One morning, as we were riding up a narrow gorge beneath the shade of a beetling cliff, our guides suddenly set up a sing-song chant, which they continued for fully ten minutes. '_Aleik soubera, Aleik soubera_,' were the words which they constantly repeated, and which were addressed, they told us, to the jinni of the rocks, a supplication to allow us to pass in safety.