After making ninety-nine miles from Medina, they reached the village of El Suwayrkiyah, which is included within the Meccan territory. The town, consisting of about one hundred houses, is built at the base and on the sides of a basaltic mass which rises abruptly from the hard clayey plain. The summit is converted into a rude fortalice by a bulwark of uncut stone, piled up so as to make a parapet. The lower part of the town is protected by a mud wall, with the usual semicircular towers. Inside there is a bazaar, well supplied with meat (principally mutton) by the neighboring Bedouins, and wheat, barley, and dates are grown near the town. There is little to describe in the narrow streets and the mud houses, which are essentially Arab. The fields around are divided into little square plots by earthen ridges and stone walls; some of the palms are fine grown trees, and the wells appeared numerous. The water is near the surface and plentiful, but it has a brackish taste, highly disagreeable after a few days’ use, and the effects are the reverse of chalybeate. Seventeen miles beyond El Suwayrkiyah is the small village of Sufayuah, beyond which the country becomes again very wild and barren. Burton thus describes the scenery the day after leaving Sufayuah: “This day’s march was peculiarly Arabia. It was a desert peopled only with echoes—a place of death for what little there is to die in it—a wilderness where, to use my companion’s phrase, there is nothing but He (Allah). Nature, scalped, flayed, discovered her anatomy to the gazer’s eye. The horizon was a sea of mirage; gigantic sand-columns whirled over the plain; and on both sides of our road were huge piles of bare rock standing detached upon the surface of sand and clay. Here they appeared in oval lumps, heaped up with a semblance of symmetry; there a single bowlder stood, with its narrow foundation based upon a pedestal of low, dome-shaped rock. All are of a pink coarse-grained granite, which flakes off in large crusts under the influence of the atmosphere.”