The dress is certainly wide, for the two pieces of which it is composed, exactly like the Greek peplos, when the arms are extended, stretch from finger-tip to finger-tip, so when this dress is caught into the loose girdle far below the waist, it hangs out under the arms and gives a very round-backed look, as is the case with the peplos. There are a great many Arabs at Sief, a most unhealthy, diseased-looking lot. They are of the yellow kind of Arab, with Jewish-looking faces. Saleh retired into Sief on our arrival, and we saw him no more till we started next day. He was a very useless interpreter. He used to like to live in the villages, saying he could not bear to live in the camp of such unbelievers as we were, and used to bring his friends to our kitchen and show them some little tins of Lazenby's potted meat, adorned with a picture of a sheep, a cow, and a pig, as a proof that we lived on pork, whereas we had none with us. He always tried to persuade the people that he was far superior to any of us, and when places had to be made amongst the baggage on the camels for my husband and the servants to ride, he used to have his camel prepared and ride on, leaving some of the servants with no seat kept on the camels for them. My husband cured him of this, for one morning, seeing Saleh's bedding nicely arranged, he jumped on to the camel himself and rode off, leaving Saleh an object of great derision. Once we got down into the valley we had to ride very close together for safety, and I found it most tiresome making my horse, Basha, keep pace with the camels. The people at Sief were so disagreeable that I told Saleh to remind them that, if our Queen wanted their country, she would have had it long before we were born, and that they were very foolish to fear so small an unarmed party, who had only come to pass the winter in a country warmer than their own; at the same time, unless we had been quite confident that our safety was well secured from behind, such a party, with a woman among them, would never have come. We set off early next morning for Hagarein. We passed after one hour Kaidoun, with its own private little valley to the west, a tributary of the main one, which in this part is called Wadi Kasr. There is the grave of a celebrated saint, and a very pious seyyid, called Al Habid Taha Ali al Hadad, abides near it. He never goes out of his house, but is so much revered that many thousands of dollars are sent him from India and other parts, and when his son visited Aden he was received with great honour by the merchants there. Then we passed several other villages, including Allahaddi and Namerr. It was at the _ziaret_ or pilgrimage to the grave in Kaidoun that Herr von Wrede, who was disguised, was discovered to be a Christian and forced to turn back.