“When adieus, lookings back, wavings of the hand, and all the customary signs of farewell and good omen were over between our Ha’yel friends and ourselves, we pursued our road by the plain which I have already described as having been the frequent scene of our morning walks; but instead of following the southwesterly path toward Kefar, whose groves and roof-tops now rose in a blended mass before us, we turned eastward, and rounded, though at some distance, the outer wall of Ha’yel for nearly half an hour, till we struck off by a southeasterly track across stony ground, diversified here and there by wells, each with a cluster of gardens and a few houses in its neighborhood. At last we reached a narrow winding pass among the cliffs of Djebel ’Aja’, whose mid-loop encircles Ha’yel on all sides, and here turned our heads to take a last far-off view of what had been our home, or the agreeable semblance of a home, for several weeks. “Our only companions as yet were Mubarek and Dahesh. We had outstripped the rest, whose baggage and equipments had required a more tedious arrangement than our own. Before long they came up—a motley crew. Ten or thereabouts of the Kaseem, some from Bereydah itself, others from neighboring towns; two individuals, who gave themselves out, but with more asseveration than truth, to be natives of Mecca itself; three Bedouins, two of whom belonged to the Shomer clan, the third an ’Anezah of the north; next a runaway negro, conducting four horses, destined to pass the whole breadth of Arabia, and to be shipped off at Koweyt, on the Persian Gulf, for Indian sale; two merchants, one from Zulphah, in the province of Sedeyr, the other from Zobeyr, near Bussora; lastly, two women, wives of I know not exactly whom in the caravan, with some small children; all this making up, ourselves included, a band of twenty-seven or twenty-eight persons, the most mounted on camels, a few on horseback, and accompanied by a few beasts of burden alongside—such was our Canterbury pilgrims’ group. “Thus assembled, on we went together, now amid granite rocks, now crossing grassy valleys, till near sunset we stopped under a high cliff, at the extreme southerly verge of Djebel ’Aja’, or, in modern parlance, of Djebel Shomer. The mountain here extended far away to right and left, but in front a wide plain of full twenty miles across opened out before us, till bounded southward by the long bluish chain of Djebel Solma, whose line runs parallel to the heights we were now to leave, and belongs to the same formation and rocky mass denominated in a comprehensive way the mountains of Ta’i or Shomer.