190 
ADJUICE. 
of the bay and of the inland country, where^ at a distance, I could 
distinguish the hills inhabited by the Russamo and Belessna, and 
still further off, the high mountains of Senafe. On returning at 
noon to Wursum's dow, a party of the inhabitants attended us for 
the purpose of taking down seven goats, that I had bought for 
six dollars, and several young girls, dressed like those at Madir, 
carried down for us some skins of water. Among the latter, I 
observed one extremely pretty and elegantly formed ; whom, on 
enquiry, I found to be the daughter of the Sheik, who, to my 
great surprise, began to jest concerning her ; and, on our arriving 
at the dow, he frightened the girl not a little by pretending that 
he would sell her to me for a hundred dollars. At noon I joined 
the ship, which I found at anchor to the south-west of Gezirat 
r Adjuice,'* an Arabic appellation, which literally translated, 
signifies '\ Old Woman's Island/* 
As our former researches on the coast had given reason to con- 
jecture, that the Bay of Howakil was the one mentioned in the 
Periplas of the Erythrean Sea, celebrated for producing the 
Opsian stone, I determined to examine it as accurately as possi- 
ble, for the purpose of ascertaining the fact ; and with this view 
the surgeon and myself set out early in the morning of the 28th 
in the dow, to visit Arena, which I understood to lie in an inner 
recess at the very bottom of the bay. We sailed down the track 
marked in the chart, and after surveying all the islands and shoals 
on our w ay, reached in about four hours the anchorage opposite 
the village. Wursum immediately swam on shore to prepare the 
way, and in a short time he returned in a small boat, bringing off 
a tall, fair man, who proved to be his uncle, a vSomauli trader^ 
