The wali of Takha received us well, and placed his house at our disposal, but it was so dirty we elected to pitch our tents, and encamped some little distance from the village. On the following morning the wali sent us with a guide to inspect some ruins round the neighbouring headland which forms one end of the bay, of which Ras Risout is the other. The rock of which it is composed is white in all the sheltered parts and where the path is polished, and nearly black in the exposed parts. When we reached the other side of this promontory, to our amazement we saw before us a long sheet of water, stretching nearly two miles inland, broken by many little creeks, and in some parts fully half a mile wide. This sheet of water, which is called Kho Rouri, had been silted up at its mouth by a sandbank, over which the sea could only make its way at high tide, and the same belt of sand separated from it a fortified rock, Khatiya by name, which must formerly have been an island protecting the double entrance to what once must have been an excellent harbour, and which could be again restored to its former condition by an outlay of very little capital and labour. We were the more amazed at coming across this sheet of water, as it is not marked in the Admiralty chart. Surely there can be no doubt that this is the harbour which was anciently used by the merchants who came to this coast for frankincense. It would be absolutely secure at all seasons of the year, and it is just twenty parasangs from the ruins of the ancient capital--exactly where it ought to be, in fact--and probably the Arabs called it Merbat, a name which has been retained in the modern village on the sheltering headland, where we landed when we first reached Dhofar. As for the name Moscha--given in the 'Periplus'--it is like Mocha, a name given to several bays on the Arabian coast, and I think we discovered why Ptolemy called it Abyssapolis, as I will presently explain. We ascended the rock at the entrance, took a photograph of the sheet of water, and felt that we had at last succeeded in reconstructing the geography of this interesting bit of country.