Nothing becomes Makná better than the view on leaving it. A varied and attractive picture this, with the turquoise-blue of the deep water, the purple and leek-green tints of the shoaly and sandy little port, and the tawny shore dotted by six distinct palm-tufts. They are outliers of the main line, yon flood of verdure, climbing up and streaming down from the high, dry, and barren banks of arenaceous drift, heaped up and filmed over by the wind, and, lastly, surging through its narrow "Gate," with the clifflets of conglomerate forming the old coast. Add the bluff headland of the Ras el-Tárah to the north of the harbour, and behind it the Rughámat Makná, the greenish-yellow, flat-backed "horse" of Madyan, which, shimmering in the sunset with a pearly lustre, forms the best of landmarks. Finish to the south of the Wady with the quaint chopping outlines of the Jebel el-Fahísát, resembling from afar a huge alligator lying on the water; with the similar but lower forms to the north of the valley, both reflected in the Jibál el-Hamrá (the Red Hills), whose curtains of green-black trap are broken by sheets of dull dead-white plaster. Cap the whole with the mighty double quoin of gypseous Jebel el-Kharaj, buttressing the eastern flank of its valley, and with the low, dark metal-revetted hills of the Kalb el-Nakhlah, a copy of the Fahísát. Throw in the background, slowly rising as you recede from the shore, a curtain of plutonic peaks and buttresses, cones, quoins, cupolas, parrot-beaks; with every trick of shape, from the lumpy Zahd to the buttressed and pinnacled 'Urnub; with every shade of mountain-tint between lapis-lazuli and plum-purple. Dome the whole with that marvellous transparent sky, the ocean of the air, that spreads loveliness over the rugged cheek of the Desert; and you have a picture which, though distinctly Arabian, you can hardly expect to see in Arabia.