Very early next morning we were on the move for our trip across the island. The journey would be too long for donkeys, they said, so Sheikh Khallet mounted us on three of his best camels, with lovely saddles of inlaid El Hasa work, with two pommels, one in front and one behind, like little pillars, capped and inlaid with silver. We--that is to say my husband and I and the bazaar-master--ambled along at a pretty smart pace across the desert in the direction of a fishing village called Asker, on the east coast of the island, near which were said to exist ancient remains; these, of course, turned out to be myths, but the village was all that could be desired in quaintness; the houses were all of bamboo, and the floors strewn over with little white helix shells; in one of them we were regaled with coffee, and found it delicious after our hot ride; then we strolled along the shore and marvelled at the bamboo skiffs, the curiously-fashioned oars and water casks, the stone anchors, and other primitive implements used by this seafaring race. The bazaar-master would not let us tarry as long as we could have wished, for he was anxious for us to arrive before the midday heat at a rocky cave in the 'mountain of mist,' in the centre of the island. We dismounted from our camels, and proceeded to examine Jebel Dukhan, an escarped mass of limestone rocks with rugged outline and deep caves. From the gentle elevation of the misty mountain one gets a very fair idea of the extent and character of Bahrein. The island has been likened to a sheet of silver in a sea of pearl, but it looked to us anything but silvery, and for all the world like one of the native sheets of bread--oval and tawny. It is said to be twenty-seven miles long and twelve wide at its broadest point. From the clearness of the atmosphere and the distinctness with which we saw the sea all around us, it could not have been much more. There are many tiny villages dotted about here and there, recognisable only by their nest of palm trees and their strips of verdure. In the dim distance, to our left, arose the mountains of Arabia; beyond, the flat coast-line of El Hasa, encircling that wild, mysterious land of Nejd, where the Wahabi dwell--a land forbidden to the infidel globe-trotter. Yet another sheikh of the El Khalifa family was introduced to us, by name Abdullah; he owns the land about here, and having been advised of our coming, had prepared a repast for us, much on the lines of the one we had had the evening before.