538 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1880- 



stone at one of the ancient prophets. The metamorphoses 

 of the Arabs have all to do with prophets, just as their 

 local holy places are all tombs of saints. But the very 

 fact that the prophet in such legends is quite indefinite 

 seems to show that in the one case as in the other the 

 original story belongs to the period of heathenism. By 

 and by Jebel Suman (?) rises on the right, and Mohsin 

 has a story of a great liar who said that he was once 

 driving a flock down a glen here, and one sheep was so 

 large that it stuck between the mountains. His hearer 

 retorted that he had seen seven smiths making a cauldron 

 so large that none of them could hear his neighbour. 

 &quot;For what purpose ? &quot; &quot;To boil your sheep.&quot; The type 

 of this story is familiar, and it seems that an anecdote need 

 not be a solar myth to appear as the common property 

 of remote races. Not far from the top of the pass a rocky 

 slope on our left was all covered with the sickly green 

 stems of a shrub called the dihn. It is, I think, a 

 Euphorbia, and though sheep eat it with impunity, its 

 white milky juice is used as a poison for wolves. I got 

 this fact from the old Sheikh at Wady Fatima, and I 

 have since observed that it is registered by the old lexico 

 graphers. The formation of the ground at the top of the 

 Wady is very curious. The mountains on each side are 

 steep and rocky, and the valley is simply a river of sand. 

 Suddenly the river expands into a lake, the hills sweep 

 round to the right and left, and one enters a great plain 

 of sand dotted with isolated hills or broken masses of 

 granite, and rolling away to the north-east as far as the 

 eye can reach without any considerable mountain range 

 to break it. In this direction, which is the line of the 

 Nejd road leading to Oneize, I am told that the ground 

 rises slightly for less than a day s journey as far as Rohba, 

 after which it again falls slowly. In the direction of the 

 coast the plateau appears walled in by mountains, except 

 where the great Wady, from which we emerged, pierces 

 the barrier. Looking back from the Beheita so the 



