As we steam towards it, Aden appears as a rugged mass of dark 48 rock, ending in sharp edges and peaks. Along its base runs a narrow strip of level ground, and a row of mean-looking houses faces the bay and shows white against a dark and bare background. There are no trees or vegetation to relieve the gloomy monotony. Here we are at anchor, well out, off Steamer Point, as much 49 of the inner bay is shallow. At once we are surrounded by 50 small boats manned by dark-skinned Somalis from Africa, and bringing a mixed crowd of all races eager to sell us tourists’ souvenirs, skins, horns and feathers, also the product of Africa. Here too are more coaling barges as at Port Said. We land and find that the near view is hardly more attractive than the distant; but this is only an outlying suburb of the real Aden. Let us hire a carriage, as it is far too hot and dusty to walk. Our driver is a Somali, and the animal in the shafts a decayed-looking pony; while the vehicle itself threatens every moment to collapse and leave us in the sandy road. We make 51 our way along the Akaba and through the narrow and rocky 52 Main Pass to the old city. We have passed in our drive through the wall of an old crater and the town lies at the bottom, surrounded on all sides by the broken rim whose jagged edges we noticed from the sea. Here is a general view of Aden from 53 the heights above. The whole peninsula is merely the fragment of an extinct volcano. In the white town, with its straight streets, we meet Arabs, Somalis, Indians, Negroes, Greeks, Jews and British soldiers; their presence here, on a barren rock between the desert and the sea, can be understood only in the light of the past history of Aden. Here, from the remotest antiquity, was without doubt a great port of exchange for the products of India, Arabia, Africa and the Mediterranean, by way of Egypt and the Nile. In the Middle Ages, when first we hear of it from travellers, Aden was still a strong and important city. The Portuguese, after their discovery of the Cape route to India, saw that the possession of Aden would complete their control of the Indian Ocean; but they failed in their efforts to capture it by open attack. The Turks held it for a time as part of the Yemen, the neighbouring southwest corner of Arabia; then it fell under the rule of various local chiefs or Sultans. So we found it in 1838, when we proposed to buy it from the reigning Sultan. The negotiations failed through treachery and outrages on the part of the natives; so in the following year an expedition from India took forcible possession. As a result of this, Aden is still technically a part of the Presidency of Bombay.