A volunteer escort of European artillerymen was yet to be obtained from the garrison of Aden; horses, too, were to be purchased, and sundry other indispensable preparations made for the coming journey into the interior of Africa. During a full week there seemed no termination to the influx of bags containing dates, rice, and juwarree, and scarcely a shorter period was occupied in the selection from the government treasury of many thousand star-dollars of the reign of Maria Theresa, displaying, each in its turn, all the multifarious marks and tokens most esteemed by the capricious savage. Neither was the bustle one whit diminished by the remote position of the town, which, unless through the kindness of friends, is only to be attained on the back of one of the many diminutive donkeys stationed along the beach for the convenience of the stranger. Encumbered with a straw-stuffed pack-saddle far exceeding its own dimensions, the wretched quadruped is zealously bastinadoed into a painful amble by the heavy club of some juvenile Israelite with flowing auburn ringlets, whose chubby freckled cheeks, influenced by the sultry sun no less than by the incessant manual labour employed, are wont to assume a strangely excited appearance ere the journey be at an end. Along the entire coast of Southern Arabia, there is not a more remarkable feature than the lofty promontory of Aden, which has been flung up from the bed of the ocean, and in its formation is altogether volcanic. The Arab historian [Masudi] of the tenth century, after speaking of the volcanoes of Sicily and in the kingdom of the Maha Raj, alludes to it as existing in the desert of Barhut, adjacent to the province of Nasafan and Hadramaut, in the country of Shaher. "Its sound, like the rumbling of thunder, might then be heard many miles, and from its entrails were vomited forth red-hot stones with a flood of liquid fire." The skeleton of the long-exhausted crater, once, in all probability, a nearly perfect circle, now exhibits a horse-shoe-shaped crescent, hemmed in by splintered crags, which, viewed from the turreted summit of Jebel Shemshan especially, whence the eye ranges over the entire peninsula, presents the wildest chaos of rock, ruin, and desolation.