The physical conformation of the Yemen is not unlike that of the portion of Africa immediately opposite, where there is as great diversity in climate and soil as there is in the manners and customs of the peoples.
From Aden, the Eastern Gibraltar, right northward there stretches a range of mountains chiefly formed of igneous rocks that have been bent, torn, and twisted like the iron girders of a huge building that has been destroyed by fire and almost covered by the ruin. Bare peak after peak rises from the mass of débris yet everywhere pierced, scarred, and seamed by the monsoon floods seeking their way to the ocean bed; they seldom reach it, however, as a stream and never as a river, because of the barren, scorched, sandy zone which belts the Red Sea and sucks into its huge maw everything that the hills send down.
Like his country the Yemen Arab is girded about with an arid zone of reserve which few Europeans have ever crossed, but when they have managed to do so, according to the individual they have met, they have found it may be a man with a heart as hard as a nether millstone. Marrying one day and divorcing almost the next, only to marry another as soon as he can scrape together sufficient funds to purchase a wife, this type of man looks upon woman as an inferior animal formed for man's gratification, and to be flung aside like a sucked orange when the juice is gone.
Or on the other hand, they may find men whom real love has saved and made to give forth warm affection and true domestic joy, just as the terraced ridges on their mountain slopes retain the God-given moisture and send forth a luxuriant crop of strengthening cereals, delicious coffee, and luscious grapes.
I have known young men of twenty-four who have been married and divorced half a dozen times, and also Arabs whose days are in the sere and yellow leaf who never had but one wife.
There was a native chief who used to come occasionally to our dispensary whose children were numbered by three figures, and Khan Bahadur Numcherjee Rustomjee, C. I. E., who was for many years a magistrate in Aden, told me he knew a woman who had been legally married more than fifty times and had actually forgotten the names of the fathers of two of her children!
One day an Arab brought a fine-looking woman to our dispensary, and as he was very kind to her and seemed to love her very much I ventured to tell him that she was suffering from diabetes mellitus, and that in order to preserve her life he would require to be careful with her diet. He thanked me most profoundly, promised to do all that he could for her, took her home and divorced her the same day, casting her off in the village and leaving her without a copper.
Next morning she came weeping to the dispensary and I tried to get compensation, but the man pleaded poverty, and because I was the cause of her plight I felt in duty bound to support her until she died some months later.
Another man of more than fifty years carried the wife of his youth to our dispensary on his back. She was suffering from Bright's disease and ascites, yet he toiled on and till now has shown no sign of wavering in his allegiance. Warm-hearted, courteous, and kind, I look upon him as one of nature's noblemen whom even Mohammedanism cannot spoil.