After several days at Adahan we climbed down northward. Our journey was only three miles along a very narrow valley, but we made much more of it climbing after plants and shells. We stopped at the first little flat place that would hold our tents, a sort of small shelf more than knee-deep in that awful grass; and though we really enjoyed that camp for two days, pain was our portion all the time. The scenery was magnificent, and all the more striking that the mountains, having cast off their lichen covering, gleamed out in their glowing red. All round us there was such steepness that it was a work of great difficulty to set up my camera anywhere.
We had a very steep descent after that over sharp stones to the plain, my husband and I, as usual, when on foot, starting before the others, and though we were sorry when we finally quitted the mountains, we were glad enough to find ourselves on our camels again, to be carried to Suk, where we decided to stay, as we heard that the sultan's boat was there and the sultan himself was not so very far off. We wished to engage the ship for our return to Aden.
Before leaving the s.s. Canara my husband had begged the captain to take a letter to Bombay requesting that the B.I.S.N. Co. would send a steamer for us, and let us know about it by some dhow. A dhow had arrived from Bombay with no letter for us, but with news of the plague: so we became afraid that if the plague prevented the steamer from coming and we waited for it, we might have to stick on Sokotra during the whole of the south-west monsoon. My husband therefore began parleying about sailing-boats and had sent Ammar from Adahan, and the sultan had sent his captain up to meet us.
Dr. Schweinfurth sees in the present name of Sokotra a Hindoo origin, and the survival of the Hindoo name Diu Sukutura, which the Greeks, after their easy-going fashion, changed into Dioscorides. This is very ingenious and most likely correct. When the Portuguese reached the island in 1538, they found the Arab sheikh dwelling at the capital called Zoko, now in ruins, and still called Suk, a survival doubtless of the original name.
The old capital of Zoko is a delicious spot, and the ruins are buried in groves of palm-trees by the side of a large and deep lagoon of fresh water; this lagoon is only separated from the sea by a narrow belt of sand and shingle, and it seems to me highly probable that this was the ancient harbour where the boats in search of the precious products of the island found shelter. The southern coast of Arabia affords many instances of these silted harbours, and the northern coast of Sokotra is similar, many of the lagoons, or khors as they call them, being deep and running over a mile inland. The view at Suk over the wide lagoon fringed with palm groves, on to the jagged heights of Mount Haghier rising immediately behind, is, I think, to be placed amongst the most enchanting pictures I have ever seen.
Extensive excavation at Suk might probably bring to light some interesting relics of the earlier inhabitants of this island, but it would have to be deep, as later edifices have been erected here; and labour and tools would have to be brought from elsewhere.
The present capital is called Tamarida by Arabs and foreigners, and Hadibo by the natives, and its construction is quite of a modern date; the name is apparently a Latinised form of the Arabic tamar, or date fruit, which tree is largely cultivated there.
Much is said by old writers about the Greek colonists who came to Sokotra in ancient times, but I cannot help thinking that the Hellenic world never carried its enterprise much in this direction, for, if the Greeks did, they have left no trace whatsoever of their existence there.
I should think few places in the world have pursued the even tenor of their way over so many centuries as Sokotra has. Yakut, writing seven hundred years ago, speaks of the Arabs as ruling here; the author of the 'Periplus' more than one thousand years ago tells us the same thing; and now we have a representative of the same country and the same race governing the island still.
Sokotra has followed the fortunes of Arabia; throughout, the same political and religious influences which have been at work in Arabia have been felt here. Sokotra, like Arabia, has gone through its several stages of Pagan, Christian, and Mohammedan beliefs.