Page:The journal of the Royal Geographic Society of London. Volume 34, 1864. (IA s572id13663720).pdf/349

Rh and embroidering cloaks and other garments is really admirable, and their taste judicious; silk, wool, and gold-thread, are the materials principally employed. The merchants of the province carry on a considerable trade with Bahreyn, Persia, and India, especially with the ports of Kurrachee and Bombay. Most of the Arab horses sold at the latter localities are brought thither from Hasa. The principal imports in return are rice and cloth, besides arms, glass-ware, and the like.

The general aspect of the land is sandy; the soil is light, and often intermixed with powdered limestone and mica. Yet it is highly fertile, and the landscape is much greener than in the central provinces. Dwarf-palms, trees of the acacia genus, or the crab-apple-bearing Nabak, spring up everywhere without any assistance of culture, even where water does not find its way to the upper surface. The country is for the most part level, though some sand-hills and limestone-ranges are scattered about it; these latter are low, and fantastically cavernous. The whole plain slopes gradually seawards, but before finding the level of the Persian Gulf it has to take a yet further dip of a hundred feet or more. The coast itself abounds in anchorage, but the water is generally too shallow to admit ships of large burden in the creeks, which serve as harbours for the fishing-smacks of the Arabs.

Inland a long white range of craggy hills bounds the province, and separates it from the sandy waste of the Dahna. A similar, and, so to speak, exceptional, range of bold outline, though of moderate elevation, lies near the sea along Kateef. Northwards the hills dwindle down, and at last disappear, while a barren tract of firmer soil succeeds them, and forms the upper extremity of Hasa towards Koneyt, thus separating the more fertile portions of the province from the neighbourhood of Zobeyr and Basrah.

Southward also the hills disappear for a while, and there the province, if we except a very narrow strip connecting it with Katar and the immediate sea-coast, merges in the Dahna. There is only one pass to Nejed across Djebel Toweyk: it is that by which I came; and it is one too many for the inhabitants.

The inhabited towns and villages are here numerous, and the ruined ones yet more so. Hofhouf covers an extent of ground which might well enclose 40,000 inhabitants; yet it contains at the present day only about 23,000. The same may be said of many other towns still in part remaining; of Djoon, Mebarraz, and Hedeeyyah: Kateef itself is two-thirds in ruins. Everywhere I met with the marks of decayed opulence and prosperity.

The palace of the old Carmathian chiefs at Kateef, in a richly-decorated half-Persian, half-Arab style of architecture, yet standing after more than eight centuries, though in a sadly dilapidated con-