“We journeyed on all day, meeting no Bedouins and few travellers. At evening we encamped in a shallow valley, near a cluster of brimming wells, some sweet, some brackish, where the traces of half-obliterated watercourses and the vestiges of crumbling house-walls indicated the former existence of a village, now also deserted. We passed a comfortable night under the shelter of palms and high brushwood, mixed with gigantic aloes and yuccas, and rose next morning early to our way. Our direction lay northeast. In the afternoon we caught our first glimpse of Djebel Mushahhar, a pyramidical peak some seven hundred feet high and about ten miles south of Kateef. But the sea, though I looked toward it and for it with an eagerness somewhat resembling that of the Ten Thousand on their approach to the Euxine, remained shut out from view by a further continuation of the heights. “Next day we rose at dawn, and crossed the hills of Kateef by a long winding path, till after some hours of labyrinthine track we came in sight of the dark plantation-line that girdles Kateef itself landward. The sea lies immediately beyond; this we knew, but we could not obtain a glimpse of its waters through the verdant curtain stretched between. “About midday we descended the last slope, a steep sandstone cliff, which looks as though it had been the sea-limit of a former period. We now stood on the coast itself. Its level is as nearly as possible that of the Gulf beyond; a few feet of a higher tide than usual would cover it up to the cliffs. Hence it is a decidedly unhealthy land, though fertile and even populous; but the inhabitants are mostly weak in frame and sallow in complexion. The atmosphere was thick and oppressive, the heat intense, and the vegetation hung rich and heavy around; my companions talked about suffocation, and I remembered once more the Indian coast. Another hour of afternoon march brought us to Kateef itself, at its western portal; a high stone arch of elegant form, and flanked by walls and towers, but all dismantled and ruinous. Close by the two burial-grounds, one for the people of the land, the other for the Nedjean rulers and colony—divided even after death by mutual hatred and anathema. Folly, if you will, but folly not peculiar to the East. “The town itself is crowded, damp, and dirty, and has altogether a gloomy, what for want of a better epithet I would call a _mouldy_, look; much business was going on in the market and streets, but the ill-favored and very un-Arab look of the shopkeepers and workmen confirms what history tells of the Persian colonization of this city. Indeed, the inhabitants of the entire district, but more especially of the capital, are a mongrel race, in which Persian blood predominates, mixed with that of Bassora, Bagdad, and the ’Irak.