Page:A voyage to Abyssinia (Salt).djvu/159

 The ascent of the mountain, which is very steep, proved extremely advantageous to my views, as it gave me a correct notion of the bay and of the inland country, where, at a distance, I could distinguish the hills inhabited by the Russamo and Belessua, and still further off, the high mountains of Senafé. 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 l'Adjuice," an Arabic appellation, which, literally translated, signifies "Old Woman's Island."

As our former researches on the coast had given reason to conjecture, that the Bay of Howakil was the one mentioned in the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, celebrated for producing the Opsian stone, I determined to examine it as accurately as possible, 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 Aréna, 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 way, 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 Somauli trader, who had only the day before arrived from a trading excursion to Massowa, from which place he brought intelligence, that accounted for the dismissal of the Jidda troops. He informed us, that there had been a violent quarrel between them and the Arkeeko Ascari; that the former had conducted themselves in an overbearing manner, and that one of them had actually killed a woman,