Parties Of Twenty Or Thirty Men, Well Armed, Repair To The Harbour At Night, For This Purpose, And If Detected, Often Resist The Custom-House Officers By Open Force.

The skirts of the town are entirely barren, no trees or verdure are seen, either within or without the walls.

Beyond the salt-ground, next to the sea, the plain is covered with sand, and continues so as far as the mountains. To the N.E. is seen a high mountain, from whence the great chain takes a more western course towards Beder. I believe this to be the mountain of Redoua, which the Arabian geographers often mention. Samhoudy places it at one day's journey from Yembo, and four days from Medina. About one hour to the east of the town is a cluster of wells of sweet water, called Aseylya, which are made to irrigate a few melon- fields. Bedouins sometimes encamp there; at this time a corps of Turkish cavalry had pitched their tents near these wells.

In the town are several wells of brackish water, but no cisterns. The supply of water for drinking is obtained from some large cisterns,

[p.423] at about five minutes' walk from the Medina gate, where the rainwater is collected. Small canals have been dug across the neighbouring plains, to convey the streams of rain-water to these cisterns. They are spacious, well-cased, subterranean reservoirs, and some of them large enough to supply the whole town for several weeks. They are the property of private families, whose ancestors built them, and who sell the water, at certain prices, fixed by the governor, who also exacts a tax from each of them. The water is excellent, much better than that of any other town of the Hedjaz, where the inhabitants are not industrious enough to form similar cisterns. When the winter-rains fail, the inhabitants of Yembo suffer severely, and are obliged to fill their water-skins at the distant wells of Aseylya.

Yembo was formerly annexed to the government of the Sherif of Mekka, who ought to have divided the receipts at the custom-house with the Turkish Pasha of Djidda. Ghaleb appropriated it entirely to his own treasury, and kept here a vizier, or governor, with a guard of about fifty or sixty men. He appears to have had little other authority than that of collecting the customs, while the Arabs of the town were left to the government of their own Sheikhs, and enjoyed much greater liberty than the people of Mekka and Djidda. The powerful tribe of Djeheyne was not to be trifled with by the Sherif; and whenever a man of Yembo was unjustly persecuted, he flew to his relations in the Desert, who retorted the oppression upon some of the Sherif's people or caravans until the matter was compromised.

When Saoud, the Wahaby chief, attacked the northern parts of the Hedjaz, his first endeavours were to reduce the two great Bedouin tribes Beni Harb and Beni Djeheyne to submission; which was greatly facilitated by the hatred and animosity that had always existed between those tribes, who were frequently at war with each other.

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