ADEN. 311 
following dry season. The heat of this valley is always 10° above 
that of the * Point,” and the residents are all but roasted alive. 
At the Residency (Capt. Haines’) we were met by the Assistant 
Polit. Agent, Lieut. Cruttenden, I.N., and the Civil Surgeon, Dr. 
Vaughan, successor to Dr. Malcolmson, whose absence I much 
regretted. In Cruttenden I recognized a contributor to the Trans- 
actions of the Royal Geological Society. He is a very agreeable 
and intelligent officer, and an experienced traveller in Nubia, Abys- 
sinia, Hast Africa, and Arabia. 
After breakfast we went to the chapel, a good wattle barn, 
built by subscription, and having Punkahs over the seats. The 
chaplain, an excellent man, startled me by the announcement of 
the following Saturday being Christmas-day ; for I had latterly 
kept no account of the weeks and months, and there was 
little to remind one of it in the atmosphere. In the evening, 
while the Governor-General took some needful repose, I went . 
to the top of the ridge or highest part of the island, ** Shumsun,” 
as it is called, 1700 feet of elevation. I had two **Soumalis ” 
to carry my things, a large umbrella, broad white hat, with a 
round pillow on the crown, and a bolster round the rim out- 
side, which keep the sun’s rays from striking through the hat 
to one’s head. We scrambled up one of the gullies over stony 
barren hills that led to the flat. The latter is about $00 feet 
up, a black waste of volcanic cinders, utterly destitute of vegeta- 
tion or life, and so heated that the atmosphere for some feet above 
it flickered like smoke. Though now mid-winter it was dreadfully 
hot, the soil below the surface being 107° at 2, ».w., which must 
be far below the summer heat. A few valleys occur here and there, 
and these are sprinkled with vegetation, some shrubby milky | 
Euphorbiaceae and Asclepiadee, several gummy Acacias, the Reseda, 
four or five Capparidee, shrubby and herbaceous, one or two wiry 
grasses, and a very common plant belonging probably to Pedalinee. 
About the plains the ridge of rocks runs like a wall, some four 
miles long, curiously jagged at the top, which towered 1,000 feet 
above my head, and appeared inaccessible, except in one place, 
where a steep slope led to a cleft in the ridge, and up whose steep 
