Camels in Dhofar are not very choice feeders, and have a predilection for bones, and if they saw a bone near the path they would make for it with an eager rush extremely disconcerting to the rider. Fish, too, is dried for them and given them as food (called kei by the Gara and ohma by the Arabs), as also is a cactus which grows in the mountains, which is cut into sections for them. They are fine sturdy animals, and can go up and down hill better than any camels I have ever seen. The fertile Gara range is a great breeding place for camels, but as there is no commerce or communication with the interior, the Bedouin do not make much use of them themselves, but sell them to their neighbours, who come here to purchase.
My husband, Imam Sherif and I had each a seat on a separate loaded camel, with our rezais or lahafs—thick cotton quilts—on the baggage; six of the servants rode in pairs while one walked, all taking turns. We went about eight miles westward the first day and considered it a wonderfully good journey. We stopped at the edge of the plain, about half a mile from the sea at Ras Risout, where some very dirty water was to be obtained under a rock.
We passed some ruins with columns four miles west of Al Hafa at Aukad.
The approach to the mountains is up narrow gulleys full of frankincense-trees.
We had a stormy and quarrelsome start next day, after a delay caused by my husband's camel sitting down constantly and unexpectedly, and a stoppage because two possible enemies being descried it was deemed needful to wait till all the camels came up that we might keep together. When they arrived we waited so long that we got up, told them that we did not want to be kept all day on the road, and began to mount our camels, saying we would return to the wali at Al Hafa. In the end they began quarrelling with each other and made peace with us, and next we set off to a place farther north than they had before intended, where there was good water in a small amphitheatre of mountains. We went up a lovely gorge with ferns, trees, and a running stream, as different as possible to the aridity of the Hadhramout.
January 1, 1895, began with a wild-goose chase after some ruins consisting of a circular wall of loose stones about a foot in height, very likely only a sheep pen.
The camels were much quieter and the Bedouin very friendly. We only travelled an hour and a half, having gone round some spurs and found ourselves in a round valley, back to back with that we had left, and about half a mile distant from our last camp. It was surrounded by some very high and some lower hills, and we were just under a beetling cliff with good water in a stream among bulrushes, reeds, and tropical vegetation.
There was a Bedou family close by with goats; they sold us milk at an exorbitant price and asked so much for a kid that we stuck to our tinned meat.
The Gara, in whose country we were now, are a wild pastoral tribe of the mountains, travelling over them hither and thither in search of food for their flocks. They are troglodytes of a genuine kind and know no home save their ancestral caves, with which this limestone range abounds; they only live in rude reed huts like ant hills, when they come down to the plain of Dhofar in the rainy season for pasturage. There is a curious story connected with the Gara tribe, which probably makes them unique in Arabia, and that is, that a few years ago they owned a white sheikh. About the beginning of this century an American ship was wrecked on this coast, and all the occupants were killed save the cabin boy, who was kept as a slave. As years went on his superior ability asserted itself, and gained for him in his later years the proud position of sheikh of all the Garas. He lived, married, and died amongst them, leaving, I believe, two daughters, who still live up in the mountains with their tribe. The life and adventures of this Yankee boy must have been as thrilling and interesting as any novelist could desire, and it is a great pity that the white sheikh could not have been personally interviewed before his death, which occurred over twenty years ago.
