508 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1880- 



pass through the last gate, where a tax is levied on every 

 camel issuing from the town. Just outside the wall is 

 a sort of market-place for the Bedouin camel drivers, a 

 short street of shops and coffee-houses, and an open 

 space under the walls, where the camels lie ruminating 

 or munching wisps of coarse hay while their masters are 

 smoking, gossiping, or chaffering with the hucksters, 

 who sit cross-legged by the wayside, each with a tray 

 or basket of wares, like Alnaschar in the Arabian Nights. 

 To the left is the spacious courtyard in which all Jeddah 

 assembles for prayer on the great annual feast, and beyond 

 this, to the north - east of the town, rises the cupola of 

 our mother Eve, the great holy place from which Jeddah 

 is said to take its name of &quot; The Ancestress.&quot; Winding 

 our way through the turmoil of the bazaar, we emerge 

 on the open desert a long, flat expanse of sand some 

 what lower than the town, which stands on a raised coral 

 reef. To the right and left of our path, in the neighbour 

 hood of the town, are one or two country houses and 

 several wretched hamlets of half-settled Arabs the huts 

 constructed much like those on the opposite coast, of 

 matting and the twigs of desert bushes. The face of the 

 desert is almost absolutely bare of vegetation for the 

 stretch of a full hour between Jeddah and the foot of 

 the hills. There are two trees by the roadside in the 

 whole of this way, and the coarse herbage on which a 

 few miserable sheep are trying to feed is so scanty after 

 the long-continued drought that it hardly gives a tinge 

 of colour to the grey sand. Yet the Tehama, as this 

 plain is named, is not unfertile. Its basis is a coral 

 reef, in which water can always be found by sinking pits, 

 and the sand which covers the coral is mixed with a fine 

 earth forming a very good soil for cultivation. Such a 

 soil is called in old Arabic raghdm, and a coffee-house and 

 police-station at the foot of the hills takes from it the 

 name of Reghdme. From Reghame to Jeddah, after 

 copious rains, the whole plain is planted with water 



