1884.] Geography and Travels. 1129 
Hejr, or Hejra, was an emporium on the old gold and frankin- 
cense road of the Sabaeans. The houses, probably of clay, have 
vanished, and their site is marked only by bits of broken glass 
and pottery ; but the sepulchral chambers, hewn out in the soft 
sandstone cliffs, still remain. The fagades, full of cornices and 
pilasters, show a strange mingling of Egyptian and Greek. On 
the top of each is the stepped ornament so common at Petra. 
The pediments usually have at their sides urn-like ornaments, 
others have griffin-like figures. In some cases the tympanum 
s a man’s head with the braided side-locks now called “ horns” 
by the Arabians. In a gorge near by is a hall (the only excavated 
chamber not a sepulchre) with a number of engraved “tablets, 
The inscriptions are in a Nabathean-like character. 
_ Eleven miles further south, near the village of el-Ally, was the 
site of another old town. Here were a number of other inscrip- 
tions, not Nabathean but Himyaric in character. Baith Naam is 
the name handed down by tradition, and Mr: Doughty suggests 
that it may be the Badanatha of Pliny. 
The “ Harra” of Arabia is the “butte” of our own arid re- 
gions, a platform of sandstone preserved from erosion by a capping 
of basaltic lava. In one of these to the north of Medyin Salih 
the lava attains a depth of more than a hundred fathoms. The 
platform is studded with craters at the summits of cones rising 
from 200 to 600 or 700 feet. The highest, Jebel Anaz, rises 1000 
t or more. 
Teyma is a village on the site of an ancient city of the same 
me e houses are gone, but the old city wall, three miles 
around, still stands, together with the remains of somè columns. 
Inscriptions were found here in a character which Sir H. Rawlin- 
Son thought to be allied to the Phcenician. The next spot ex- 
amined after a vist to Hayil was Khaybar, which was reached by 
traversing another Harra known as the Harrat Khaybar. Near 
the middle of this region the altitude is nearly 6000 feet, and this 
and west in Northern 
+ 
trough, it would be ‘an affluent of the Euphrates. The Wady-el- 
umth was previously unknown to eke 8 e m k 
<e steppes beside Tayif, and its mouth on the 
el-Wejh and el-Haura. Boreyda and Aneysa, the two ng 
— in Nejd, have a population respectively of 5000 
with a caravan 
hty saw, on an 
be his way from Aneysa to Jidda, in company 
ral pasture he 
pen with samma or clarified butter, Mr. Doug 
“tevated steppe on a basis of granite, the best natu 
