310 DR. HOOKER’S MISSION TO INDIA. 
with the mainland of Spain. Below lay a village close to the 
neck, on a salt plain studded with houses belonging to the Hindoos 
employed in the fortifications, who spotted the plain with their 
white dresses. Around were all sorts of forts, guns, and black 
sepoy soldiers; behind, the towering mural crags of the penin- 
sula full of holes whitened from the number of Vultures which 
are seen wheeling across the cliffs. Looking north, the eye 
detects the long sandy waste of the isthmus, with the sea on either 
hand, succeeded by a belt of green woods along the Arab coast; 
and in the distance a long yellow desert, backed by ranges of high 
mountains said to abound in fertile valleys blooming with the Rose 
of Shiraz, the Apple, Vine, and Apricot, Melon, and all the deli- 
cious flowers and fruits of Persia and Araby the blest. What a 
contrast to our present site! And it is from these distant hills 
that Aden is constantly supplied with vegetables, brought for sale 
by the Arabs. To the right of this position is the great 
black gulph in which Aden is built, a sort of valley of Acheron, 
unblest by water or any verdure, sprinkled with the white hovels 
of the natives, and, scarcely better, the long cantonments of 
the troops. On both sides are valleys, long steep naked gorges 
which run up the flanks of the mountains, mysterious-looking 
rents, leading to a distant black flat, which on this side of the 
island extends along the base of the highest ridge. This highest 
ridge is, as well as the spurs it gives off, in every point of view, 
remarkable, being always a serrated wall or knife-edge of rock, appa- 
rently inaccessible, but crowned here and there with the ruins of 
Turkish castles. To one of them an excellent Turkish road from 
the flat still exists, by which I afterwards ascended to a signal 
station. On various parts of the slopes above the town are tanks, 
cut under the cliffs, or built of fine stone wonderfully cemented, 
and there still exist the remains of an aqueduct, leading from the 
peninsula across the long neck of land to the Arabian shore. 
At the town we went to Capt. Haines’ official house, where he 
is endeavouring to wheedle garden plants into growth, and has 
succeeded with some short-lived annuals, which only want a winter; 
but the rest of those, whose duration is longer, perish with the 
