After the rains fall, a prodigious quantity of grass immediately springs up; and the goats give the inhabitants milk, which in winter is the principal part of their subsistence, for they neither plow nor sow. All their employment is to work the vessels which trade to the different parts of the coast. One half of the inhabitants is constantly on the Arabian side, and by their labour is enabled to furnish with [206]dora, and other provisions, the other half who stay at home; and when their time is expired, they are relieved by the other half, and supplied with necessaries in their turn. But the sustenance of the poorer sort is entirely shell and other fish. Their wives and daughters are very bold, and expert fisher-women. Several of them, entirely naked, swam off to our vessel before we came to an anchor, begging handfuls of wheat, rice, or dora. They are very importunate and sturdy beggars, and not easily put off with denials. These miserable people, who live in the villages not frequented by barks from Arabia, are sometimes a whole year without tasting bread. Yet such is the attachment to the place of their nativity, they prefer living in this bare, barren, parched spot, almost in want of necessaries of every kind, especially of these essential ones, bread and water, to those pleasant and plentiful countries on both sides of them. This preference we must not call strange, for it is universal: A strong attachment to our native country, whatever is its condition, has been impressed by Providence, for wise ends, in the breasts of all nations; from Lapland to the Line, you find it written precisely in the same character. There are twelve villages, or towns, in Dahalac, little different in size from Dobelew; each has a plantation of doom-trees round it, which furnish the only manufacture in the island. The leaves of this tree, when dried, are of a glossy white, which might very easily be mistaken for sattin; of these they make baskets of surprising beauty and neatness, staining part of the leaves with red or black, and working them into figures very artificially. I have known some of these, resembling straw-baskets, continue full of water for twenty-four hours, without one drop coming through. They sell these at Loheia and Jidda, the largest of them for four commesh, or sixpence. This is the employment, or rather amusement of the men who stay at home; for they work but very moderately at it, and all of them indeed take special care, not to prejudice their health by any kind of fatigue from industry.