Every November a fair or gala is held up here by the side of the lakes, to which all the Bedouin of the Gara tribe come and make merry, and the fair of Derbat is considered by them the great festival of the year. A round rock was shown us on which the chief magician sits to exorcise the jinni of the lakes, and around him the people dance. There is doubtless some religious purport connected with all this, but, as I have said before, it is extremely difficult to get anything out of the Bedouin about their religious opinions; like the Bedouin of the Hadhramout, they do not observe the prayers and ablutions inculcated by the Mohammedan creed, and the Arabs speak of them as heathen, but beyond this we could not find out much. Their language, too, is different from anything we had heard before. They can understand and converse in Arabic after a fashion, but when speaking amongst themselves none of our party, Arab or European, could make out anything they said, and from such simple words as we were able to learn—such, for example, as ouft for wadi, a valley, shur instead of yom for day, and kho instead of nahr for a river—we were led to believe that they speak an entirely different language, and not a dialect as in the Hadhramout.
As we passed through the hay, the Gara had gathered up a lot of it in sacks, which they put under the camels' loads by day and used as beds by night, and between times applied to quite a different purpose. One of these sacks was used as a combined dish and strainer when they boiled their rice. The rice was turned out of the pot, and as soon as the cook had scraped it all out with his hands they sat round, and fed themselves with handfuls of it.
After another day, spent over sketching, photography, and measurements, we felt we had thoroughly explored the neighbourhood of the abyss, so we started back to Al Hafa to prepare for our departure from Dhofar.
It took us three days to get there. We stayed a night on the way on some high ground above one of the swamps, and on the second day stopped to visit Hamran, or Hameroun, where the wali had built a small fort and a farm, which supplied him when at Rizat with butter, vegetables and fruit. He also grew tobacco there.
We found ourselves once more in our old quarters in the castle, where many fleas had been born in our absence, while the flies and mosquitoes were not diminished. The wali had more prisoners. We again visited Robat and the other ruins.
The interests which centred in this small district—the ancient sites, the abyss, and, above all, the surprising fertility of the valleys and mountains, the delicious health-giving air, and the immunity from actual danger which we had enjoyed—combined in making us feel that our sojourn in Dhofar had been one of the most enjoyable and productive of any expedition we had hitherto undertaken, and that we had discovered a real Paradise in the wilderness, which will be a rich prize for the civilised nation which is enterprising enough to appropriate it.
