1877.] 
41 
On the Route between Sohar and el-Rereymi in 'Oman, with a note on the 
Zatt, or gipsies in Arabia.—JBy Lieutenant-Colo net S. B. Miles. 
(With a map.) 
Having arrived at Sohar (;he /,£> ) on the 16th November, 1875, and visited 
the Governor Seyyid Bedr-bin-Seif A1 Bu-Sa’idi, I requested him to be good 
enough to arrange for my visit to el-Bereymi, and Sheikh Bashid-bin- 
Hamd, with whom I was personally acquainted, and who is a man of 
considerable influence in el-Dhahireh (SyfclAli), having been at one time 
Governor of el-Bereymi, was selected to accompany me. I could, however, 
only promise myself a hasty visit, as my arrangement with Captain Clayton, 
Her Majesty’s Ship Rifleman, who had kindly given me a passage, was to 
meet again at Sohar on the 22nd. The Sheikh’s preparations as regards 
camels, &c., were not completed until the next morning at 10 a. m., when 
we started with nine matchlocks of the Na’im and Mokabil tribes, and 
reached about thirty miles by nightfall, encamping for the night at 
Sahilah, a village in the Wadi Jezze belonging to 
the el-Kunud. The road, after leaving the belt of palm groves and culti¬ 
vation outside Sohar, ran N. W. for an hour to ’Auhi, a little 
patch of date groves and gardens irrigated by a felej, and then turned west 
over a stony, gradually rising plain, covered with thin acacia jungle and 
underwood towards the hills. The Wadi Jezze, which we came to soon 
after, is here neither broad nor deep, being but a few inches lower than 
the plain, and barely distinguishable from it, showing that no great torrent 
ever rushes down it, but that after rainfall, which in ’Oman is rarely 
heavy, the water that is not absorbed by cultivation is sucked in by the 
porous soil on the way. Another hour brings us to the site of an ancient 
ruined town, attested by heaps of fragments of black rock lying in squares 
and ovals, which mark the foundations of houses, and by parts of ruined 
walls and towers on adjoining hillocks, covering altogether a considerable 
extent of ground. From the appearance of the foundations, the houses 
must have been on a small scale and of rude construction. No vestige of 
any edifice of architectural pretensions remains. At the present day the 
locality is uninhabited, and a place of more dreary and complete desolation 
I have rarely seen. My companions could not tell me the name of the site, 
their only traditional knowledge was that it belonged to the Persians in the 
time of ignorance, and that it was destroyed by God on account of the 
refusal of the inhabitants to embrace the blessed truths of Islam. 
A little further is a dried up felej leading from the hills, called Felej- 
el-Suk, and also ascribed to the Persians. At 2£ P. M., we 
F 
