We made a very early start next morning, and gradually got into a thick low wood, but where the Wadi Yeramis widened out there were only tamarisks. Our ascent was rapid, and after about an hour we turned due east, this part being very bare-looking, though there were a good many horrid acacias and also euphorbias with rounded trunks. We soon burst upon a lovely plain all mapped out in fields and abrs. It is six miles to Naab, and we took three hours. We passed through full two miles of this fertility, with three or four villages—Souat, Nogat, Arrawa, and Old Naab, with mosque, minar, and a fine old house all tumbling into ruins. Wadi Yeramis is much opened out here, and the lower part is bounded by the basalt in walls about 200 feet high, sometimes with mounds within them again, and hillocks of the same formation as the high mountains. This cultivated paradise is the property of Sultan Ahmet bin Salem, brother to Sultan Saleh of the coast, and may be said to be the pick of his whole dominions.
Arrawa, or New Naab, has twenty-four shops, and the sultan gets half a real (or Maria Theresa dollar) on all merchandise-camels going up to the Beled Yafei. There were many bales of merchandise in a sort of Custom-house when we arrived at this great centre of inland traffic. We encamped on the opposite side of the wadi from the town of Arrawa, which is perched on a raised plateau of earth banks. When we halted, and had climbed up, there was a line of people waiting to salute us. We and Sultan Salem walked in front, our eleven men with guns walked behind, singing a merghazi, or salutation song, of which I have a copy. We halted again, and they fired ten salutes; then we advanced again, Sultan Salem leading, when twenty of the local sultan's soldiers came forward and kissed his hand and shook ours. Then there was a refreshment of five or six cups of coffee and ginger, very weak, on the floor in a tower. There was milk in the first cups, but it became exhausted. We never saw the sultan all the time we were there, for they said he had a wound in his leg.
The earthen cliffs are about 30 feet high, and we had to go a very roundabout way to get up them by very narrow gullies. My husband went up a hill, Yerad, just behind Naab, with an old Arab fort on it above the Yeramis, which ends here; then begins Wadi Reban, with a clear course north-east for three miles, then north, and then a long stretch east again. There was a lovely view over the Yafei mountains on the north and Goddam range on the south. A Bedou, Abdallah, who went with him told him all the names. Though he could understand when the Bedouin talked to him, he could not understand two talking together. Abdallah said he had been a soldier in the sultan's service, but when my husband asked how long he answered, 'Four, five, six years. I have never had it written down.' The Bedou gave my husband some food called kharou, roast millet seeds put in a mug with boiled milk, not at all bad.
The Sultan Salem bin Saleh's old abandoned castle had some nice decoration about it. They left it because there were so many jinni (i.e. ghosts) in it. Our informant had not seen them, but only heard of them.
March the 12th my husband went up what he thought was the highest mountain of the Goddam range, Minzoko, just behind Naab, and made it 2,000 feet, but considered when he got to the top that its neighbour Haidenaab was 300 or 400 feet higher. The Tarik Minzoko goes between them.
The sultan sent to our camp some bowls of food, soup, and a fowl cut up and cooked in gravy, very rich with oil and onions. It would have been good but for the stuffy, bitter taste of myrrh, which they like so much to put in their food. He also sent us red cakes of millet bread.
A poet of Naab made a merghazi on us during our stay, about our treatment by the Yafei sultan: how he had demanded money of us and how he had bidden us return to Aden. This was thought so excellent by everybody that my husband was forced to take a copy of it from dictation and Sultan Salem took a copy back to Shukra.
Our party was now increased by another 'prince,' Sultan Haidar, son of the sultan of Naab, a person delightful to contemplate. He was got up in Bedou style; his hair, fluffy and long, was tied back by a fillet and stuck out in a bush behind. He had a curious countenance and very weak eyes. He was wrapped in a couple of large blue cotton cloths with very long fringes, half a yard at least. The cotton is plastered with indigo, even beyond the dye, and when calendered, as the clothes are when new, gleam purple and red. The richer you are the bluer you are, and Sultan Haidar was very blue indeed. The curious thing about these blue people is that, as the prominent parts of the face and body are the darkest, there is an odd inside-out effect.
While in Naab we had our usual number of patients, but the one we were most interested in was a woman who had a dreadfully sore foot. The foot was very much swollen, and there was a sore on her instep and ankle in which one could nearly put one's fist. This had never been washed, though it had been going on for some years, and it had a dressing composed of half a pound or so of dates stuffed into it. The poor creature lay on a sort of bedstead or charpai in a tidy little house consisting of one room and lighted only by the door.
My husband set off at once half a mile back to camp to fetch the necessary relief and I waited, sitting on a cloak that someone rolled up on the floor, for there was not even a carpet to sit on. I was afraid of various insects, but I could not rudely stand, and I should have had to stand a good time as my husband had a mile to walk.