The tableland of Mis'hal is approached by three akabas: (1) Sauda, to 2,000 feet; (2) Beva, to 2,500 feet; (3) Hadda, to 2,750 feet. The Nakai tribe live here, and are on friendly terms with their neighbours the Fadhli--a sufficiently rare circumstance in this country. The Nakai chief can put four hundred men in the field to help the Fadhli. The Markashi were at war with them; they live in the Goddam range, and had been giving the sultan trouble lately. The road to Shukra most frequented is the Tarik el Arkob; eastward goes the road to the Hadhramout, over the plain. Northward is the mountainous country of the Aodeli tribe, where they told us 'it is sometimes so cold that the rain is hard and quite white, and the water like stone.' The plain is ten or fifteen miles long, by about four or five miles at its broadest. If irrigated it would yield enormously. The well is of great depth, but the water very bad. My husband ascended a mountain about 3,000 feet high, but only 400 feet above the plain, with a most remarkable view of the Aodeli mountains, about twenty miles away, towering up to a great height--far higher than the Yafei range, which Mr. Tate gives as 7,000 feet: these are probably 10,000 feet. The range must run for thirty or forty miles from east to west, with few breaks and no peaks. We were not well the last day at Mis'hal. The Aodeli women paint red lines under their eyes and down their noses and round their foreheads with a kind of earth-dye which they call _hisn_. Sometimes there is a round spot on the forehead and red triangles on the cheeks. One woman had her face literally dyed scarlet all over. She had a heavy necklace of beads and carried the sheep-skin coat, that she could not wear in the hot plain, rolled up and laid on her head. It is curious how dissatisfied dark people seem to be with the colour of their skins, so often trying to lighten it; the fairness of the English is in some places attributed to the soap they use.