One old lady, with an affection of the skin, would only have the 'bibi' as her doctor, so she came to me with a good many men to show her off, but would have nothing to do with my husband. I said the first treatment must consist in a thorough washing all over with warm water and soap: but behold! I heard there was no soap in the island, so halves and quarters of cakes of Pears' soap as well as whole ones, were distributed as a precious ointment.
They have no soap, no oil, no idea of washing or cleansing a wound, and cauterisation with a hot iron appears to be their panacea for every ailment.
A favourite remedy with them here, as in Arabia, is to stop up the nostrils with plugs fastened to a string round the neck to prevent certain noxious scents penetrating into it; but, as far as we could see, they make no use whatsoever of the many medicinal herbs which grow so abundantly on the island.
The women of Kalenzia use turmeric largely for dyeing their faces and their bodies yellow, a custom very prevalent on the south coast of Arabia; they wear long robes, sometimes dyed with indigo, sometimes of a bright scarlet hue. The pattern of their dress is the same as that worn in the Hadhramout, i.e. composed of two pieces of cotton cloth wide enough to reach the finger-tips and with a seam down each side. The front piece is longer than in the Hadhramout, coming down to within a foot of the ground, but the train is also very much longer, and must lie more than a yard and a half on the ground. These ladies get good neither from the length nor the breadth of their dresses, for as the train evidently incommodes them, they twist the dress so tightly round their bodies that the left side seam comes straight or rather lop-sidedly behind and one corner of the train is thrown over the left shoulder all in a wisp. There is nothing to keep it up, so down it comes continually, and is always being caught up again. I never saw a train down, except once for my edification.
Their hair is cut in a straight fringe across the forehead and is in little plaits hanging behind. They wear a loose veil of a gauzy nature, with which they conceal half their faces at times. Silver rings and bracelets of a very poor character, and glass bangles, complete their toilet, and the commoner class and Bedou women weave a strong cloth in narrow strips of goat-hair, which they wrap in an inelegant fashion round their hips to keep them warm, sometimes as their only garment. They do not cover their faces. From one end of Sokotra to the other we never found anything the least characteristic or attractive amongst the possessions of the islanders, nothing but poor examples of what one finds everywhere on the south coast of Arabia and east of Africa.
Many weddings were going on during our residence at Kalenzia, and at them we witnessed a ceremony which we had not seen before. On the morning of the festive day the Sokotrans, negro slaves being apparently excluded, assembled in a room and seated themselves round it. Three men played tambourines or tom-toms of skin called teheranes, and to this music they chanted passages out of the Koran, led by the 'mollah'; this formed a sort of religious preliminary to a marriage festival; and in the evening, of course, the dancing and singing took place to the dismal tune of the same tom-toms, detrimental, very, to our earlier slumbers. The teherane would seem to be the favourite and only Sokotran instrument of music—if we except flutes made of the leg-bones of birds common on the opposite coast, and probably introduced thence—and finds favour alike with Arab, Bedou, and Negro.
The people here did not torment us by staring at and crowding round us. They came only on business, to be doctored, to sell something, or to bring milk wherewith to purchase from us lumps of sugar.
The houses are pleasantly shaded amongst the palm groves, and have nice little gardens attached to them in which gourds, melons, and tobacco grow; and in the middle of the paths between them one is liable to stumble over turtlebacks, used as hencoops for some wretched specimens of the domestic fowl which exist here, and which lay eggs about the size of a plover's.
Though a poor-looking place it looks neat with its little sand-strewn streets.
It contains a single wretched little mosque, in character like those found in third-rate villages in Arabia; Kadhoup or Kadhohp possesses another, and Tamarida no less than two; and these represent the sum total of the present religious edifices in Sokotra, for the Bedouin in their mountain villages do not care for religious observances and own no mosques.