It Is A Village Of Fifty Or
Sixty Mud-Walled, Flat-Roofed Houses, Defended By The Usual Rampart.
Around It Lie Ample Date-Grounds, And Fields Of Wheat, Barley, And
Maize.
Its bazar at this season of the year is well supplied:
Even
fowls can be procured.
We travelled towards the South-East, and entered a country destitute of
the low ranges of hill, which from Al-Madinah southwards had bounded
the horizon. After
[p.131] a two miles’ march our camels climbed up a precipitous ridge, and
then descended into a broad gravel plain. From ten to eleven A.M. our
course lay southerly over a high table-land, and we afterwards
traversed, for five hours and a half, a plain which bore signs of
standing water. This day’s march was peculiarly Arabia. It was a desert
peopled only with echoes,—a place of death for what little there is to
die in it,—a wilderness where, to use my companion’s phrase, there is
nothing but He.[FN#6] Nature scalped, flayed, discovered all her
skeleton to the gazer’s eye. The horizon was a sea of mirage; gigantic
sand-columns whirled over the plain; and on both sides of our road were
huge piles of bare rock, standing detached upon the surface of sand and
clay. Here they appeared in oval lumps, heaped up with a semblance of
symmetry; there a single boulder stood, with its narrow foundation
based upon a pedestal of low, dome-shapen rock.
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