“For, after about three hours of night travelling, or rather wading, among the sand-waves, till men and beasts alike were ready to sink for weariness, a sharp altercation arose between Aboo-’Eysa and El-Ghannam, each proposing a different direction of march. We all halted a moment, and raised our eyes, heavy with drowsiness and fatigue, as if to see which of the contending parties was in the right. It will be long before I forget the impression of that moment. Above us was the deep black sky, spangled with huge stars of a brilliancy denied to all but an Arab gaze, while what is elsewhere a ray of the third magnitude becomes here of the first amid the pure vacuum of a mistless, vaporless air; around us loomed high ridges, shutting us in before and behind with their white, ghost-like outlines; below our feet the lifeless sand, and everywhere a silence that seemed to belong to some strange and dreamy world where man might not venture. “When not far from the midmost of the Dahna, we fell in with a few Bedouins, belonging to the Aal-Morrah clan, sole tenants of this desert. They were leading their goats to little spots of scattered herbage and shrubs which here and there fix a precarious existence in the hollows of the sands. “Theirs is the great desert from Nedjed to Hadramaut. Not that they actually cover this immense space, a good fourth of the peninsula, but that they have the free and undisputed range of the oases which it occasionally offers, where herbs, shrubs, and dwarf-palms cluster round some well of scant and briny water. These oases are sufficiently numerous to preserve a stray Bedouin or two from perishing, though not enough so to become landmarks for any regular route across the central Dahna, from the main body of which runs out the long and broad arm which we were now traversing. “Another night’s bivouac, and then again over the white down-sloping plain. “It was now three days and a half since our last supply of water, and Aboo-’Eysa was anxious to reach the journey’s end without delay. As darkness closed around we reached the farthermost heights of the coast-range of Hasa. Hence we overlooked the plains of Hasa, but could distinguish nothing through the deceptive rays of the rising moon; we seemed to gaze into a vast milky ocean. After an hour’s halt for supper we wandered on, now up, now down, over pass and crag, till a long, corkscrew descent down the precipitous sea-side of the mountain, for a thousand feet or near it, placed us fairly upon the low level of Hasa, and within the warm, damp air of the sea-coast.