He had the exclusive charge of me and my camel, which he led straight through everything, regardless of the fact that I was on several occasions nearly knocked off by the branches of trees; and if my seat was uncomfortable, which it often was, as well as precarious—for we all sat on luggage indifferently tied on—we had the greatest work to make Sheikh Sehel stop to rectify the discomfort, for he was the sheikh of all the Garas, as he constantly repeated, and his dignity was not to be trifled with.
The seventeen sheikhs got half a dollar a day each for food, their slaves a quarter.
Our expedition nearly came to an untimely end a very few days after our start, owing, as my husband himself confessed, to a little indiscretion on his part; but as the event serves to illustrate the condition of the men we were with, I must not fail to recount it. During our day's march we met with a large company of the Al Khathan family pasturing their flocks and herds in a pleasant valley. Great greetings took place, and our men carried off two goats for an evening feast. When night approached they lit a fire of wood, and piled stones on the embers so as to form a heated surface. On this they placed the meat, cut in strips with their swords, the entrails, the heads, and every part of the animal, until their kitchen looked like a ghastly sacrifice to appease the anger of some deity. I must confess that the smell thereof was exceeding savoury, and the picture presented by these hungry savages, gathered round the lurid light of their kitchen, was weird in the extreme. Daggers were used for knives, two fingers for forks, and we stood at a respectful distance and watched them gorge; and so excited did they become as they consumed the flesh, that one could almost have supposed them to be under the influence of strong drink. Several friends joined them from the neighbouring hills, and far into the night they carried on their wild orgy, singing, shouting, and periodically letting off the guns which the soldiers sent by Wali Suleiman brought with them.
We retired in due course to our tent and our beds, but not to sleep, for in addition to their discordant songs, in rushing to and fro they would catch in our tent-guys, and give us sudden shocks, which rendered sleep impossible. Exasperated at this beyond all bearing, my husband at length rushed out and caught a Bedou in the very act of tumbling over a guy. Needless to say a well-placed kick sent him quickly about his business, and after this silence was established and we got some repose.
Next morning, however, when we were prepared to start, we found our Bedouin all seated in a silent, solemn phalanx, refusing to move. 'What is the matter?' my husband asked, 'why are we not ready to start?' and from amongst them arose a stern, freezing reply. 'You must return to Al Hafa. We can travel no more with you, as Theodore has kicked Sheikh Sehel,' for by this time they had become acquainted with our Christian names, and never used any other appellative.
We felt that the aspect of affairs was serious, and that in the night season he had been guilty of an indiscretion which might imperil both our safety and the farther progress of our journey. So we affected to take the matter as a joke, laughed heartily, patted Sheikh Sehel on the back, said that we did not know who it was, and my husband entered into a solemn compact that if they would not catch in our guys again, he would never kick his majesty any more. It was surprising to see how soon the glum faces relaxed, and how soon all ill-feeling was forgotten. In a very few minutes life and bustle, chattering and good humour reigned in our camp, and we were excellent friends again.
It was on the third day after leaving Al Hafa that we passed through one of the districts where frankincense is still collected, in a narrow valley running down from the mountains into the plain of Dhofar. The valley was covered for miles with this shrub, the trunk of which, when punctured, emits the odoriferous gum. We did not see any very large trees, such as we did in Sokotra. The Bedouin choose the hot season, when the gum flows most freely, to do this puncturing. During the rains of July and August, and during the cool season, the trees are left alone. The first step is to make an incision in the trunk, then they strip off a narrow bit of bark below the hole, so as to make a receptacle in which the milky juice, the spuma pinguis of Pliny, can lodge and harden. Then the incision is deepened, and after seven days they return to collect what are, by that time, quite big tears of frankincense, larger than an egg.
The shrub itself is a picturesque one, with a leaf not unlike an ash, only stiffer; it has a tiny green flower, not red like the Sokotra flowers, and a scaly bark. In all there are three districts in the Gara mountains where the tree still grows; anciently, no doubt, it was found in much larger quantities, but the demand for frankincense is now so very limited that they take no care whatever of the trees. They only tap the most promising ones, and those that grow farther west in the Mahri country, as they produce an inferior quality, are not now tapped at all.
The best is obtained at spots called Hoye and Haski, about four days' journey inland from Merbat, where the Gara mountains slope down into the Nejd desert. The second in quality comes from near Cape Risout, and also a little farther west, at a place called Chisen, near Rakhiout, frankincense of a marketable quality is obtained, but that farther west in the Mahri country is not collected now, being much inferior. The best quality they call leban lakt, and the second quality leban resimi, and about 9,000 cwt. are exported yearly and sent to Bombay. It is only collected in the hot weather, before the rains begin and when the gum flows freely, in the months of March, April, and May, for during the rains the tracks on the Gara mountains are impassable. The trees belong to the various families of the Gara tribe; each tree is marked and known to its owner, and the product is sold wholesale to Banyan merchants, who come to Dhofar just before the monsoons to take it away.
One must imagine that when this industry was at its height, in the days when frankincense was valued not only for temple ritual but for domestic use, the trade in these mountains must have been very active, and the cunning old Sabæan merchants, who liked to keep the monopoly of this drug, told wonderful stories of the phœnix which guarded the trees, of the insalubrity of the climate and of the deadly vapours which came from them when punctured for the gum. Needless to say, these were all false commercial inventions, which apparently succeeded admirably, for the old classical authors were exceedingly vague as to the localities whence frankincense came. Merchants came in their ships to the port of Moscha, which we shall presently visit, to get cargoes of the drug, but they probably knew as little as we did of the interior of the hills behind, and one of the reasons why Aelius Gallus was sent to Arabia by Augustus on his unsuccessful campaign was 'to discover where Arabian gold and frankincense came from.'
