The 15th, we sailed with little wind, coasting along the shore, sometimes at two miles distance, and often less. The mountains now seemed high. I sounded several times, and found no ground at thirty fathoms, within a mile of the shore. We passed several ports or harbours; first Mersa Amec, where there is good anchorage in eleven fathom of water, a mile and a half from the shore; at eight o’clock, Nohoude, with an island of the same name; at ten, a harbour and village called Dahaban. As the sky was quite overcast, I could get no observation, though I watched very attentively. Dahaban is a large village, where there is both water and provision, but I did not see its harbour. It bore E. N. E. of us about three miles distant. At three quarters past eleven we came up to a high rock, called _Kotumbal_, and I lay to, for observation. It is of a dark-brown, approaching to red; is about two miles from the Arabian shore, and produces nothing. I found its latitude to be 17° 57´ north. A small rock stands up at one end of the base of the mountain. We came to an anchor in the port of Sibt, where I went ashore under pretence of seeking provisions, but in reality to see the country, and observe what sort of people the inhabitants were. The mountains from Kotumbal ran in an even chain along the coast, at no great distance, but of such a height, that as yet we had seen nothing like them. Sibt is too mean, and too small to be called a village, even in Arabia. It consists of about fifteen or twenty miserable huts, built of straw; around it there is a plantation of doom-trees, of the leaves of which they make mats and sails, which is the whole manufacture of the place. Our Rais made many purchases here. The _Cotrushi_, the inhabitants of this village, seem to be as brutish a people as any in the world. They are perfectly lean, but muscular, and apparently strong; they wear all their own hair, which they divide upon the crown of their head. It is black and bushy, and, although sufficiently long, seems to partake of the woolly quality of the Negro. Their head is bound round with a cord or fillet of the doom leaf, like the ancient diadem. The women are generally ill-favoured, and go naked like the men. Those that are married have, for the most part, a rag about their middle, some of them not that. Girls of all ages go quite naked, but seem not to be conscious of any impropriety in their appearance. Their lips, eye-brows, and foreheads above the eye-brow, are all marked with stibium, or antimony, the common ornament of savages throughout the world. They seemed to be perfectly on an equality with the men, walked, sat, and smoked with them, contrary to the practice of all women among the Turks and Arabs.