CHAPTER XXIX
KALENZIA
As we had been unable to penetrate into the Mahri country, though we had attempted it from three sides, we determined to visit the offshoot of the Mahri who dwell on the island of Sokotra.
Cast away in the Indian Ocean, like a fragment rejected in the construction of Africa, very mountainous and fertile, yet practically harbourless, the island of Sokotra is, perhaps, as little known as any inhabited island on the globe.
Most people have a glimpse of it on their way to India and Australia, but this glimpse has apparently aroused the desire of very few to visit it, for the Europeans who have penetrated into it could be almost counted on the fingers of one hand. During recent years two botanical expeditions have visited it, one under Professor Balfour, and one under Dr. Schweinfurth, and the results added marvellously to the knowledge of quaint and hitherto unknown plants.
We passed two months traversing it from end to end, with the object of trying to unravel some of its ancient history so shrouded in mystery, and learn something about its present inhabitants.
Mariette Bey, the eminent Egyptologist, identifies Sokotra with To Nuter, a place to be bracketed with the land of Punt in the pictorial decorations of the temple of Deir el Bahri, as resorted to by the ancients for spices, frankincense, and myrrh; and he is probably correct, for it is pretty certain that no one given spot in reach of the ancients could produce at one and the same time so many of the coveted products of that day—the ruby-coloured dragon's blood (Draco Kinnabari of Pliny), three distinct species of frankincense, several kinds of myrrh, besides many other valuable gum-producing trees, and aloes of super-excellent quality.
It is referred to by the author of the 'Periplus' as containing a very mixed and Greek-speaking population drawn together for trading purposes, trafficking with Arabia and India. Abu'lfida, Africanus, and other writers, Arabic and otherwise, mention Christianity as prevailing here, and Theodoret, writing in the beginning of the fifth century, speaks of the great missionary Theophilus as coming from the island of Diu to teach Christianity in India.
Cosmas Indicopleustes calls the island Dioscorides. He visited it in the sixth century, and accounted for the Greek-speaking population he met with by saying that they had been placed there by the Ptolemies. El Masoudi considered the Greek a purer race in Sokotra than elsewhere.
As far back as the tenth century Sokotra was a noted haunt of pirates from Katch and Gujerat Bawarij, from a kind of ship called barja.[13]