Page:The journal of the Royal Geographic Society of London. Volume 34, 1864. (IA s572id13663720).pdf/355

Rh reached by a rope hanging from it, which is afterwards drawn in again by those who have clambered into the interior in case of siege. Beyond these hills extends a little pasture-land, where the Bedouins already mentioned graze their camels, and behind this the immense and hopeless sand-waves of the Dahna as far as Yemen.

The air is dry, and colder than the climate of Bahreyn, though further south. The adjoining sea is very shallow; the people of the coast call it “Bahr-el-Benat,” i.e. “the girls’ sea,” in derision of its calm and pool-like appearance. Indeed the flux and reflux of the tide, here once only in twenty-four hours, while at Bahreyn it is regularly once in every twelve, seems alone to preserve its shallows from utter stagnation. It is foully muddy, and produces abundance of fish, besides the pearl-oysters. Its winters are full of zoophytes, and highly luminous at night; indeed so is the whole extent of the Persian Gulf, even where at its deepest. This phenomenon is ascribed by the Arabs to the glare of hell-fire, situated, as they will have it, immediately under the sea-bed, which in pursuance of this theory must be transparent, probably of glass. But on that point the Arabs (Nejdeans, of course) could not give me any positive information. Innumerable islands (I have heard forty enumerated one after another) stud the bay, but few of them possess springs of fresh water, though some—for instance, the isles of Faroor, Halool, and Aboo-Moosa—are of considerable size and mountainous. On this last I was obliged to pass two days, owing to a storm, and had thus ample time to explore it “from the centre all round to the sea.” It is evidently volcanic, contains a central peak of considerable elevation, and owns a scanty source of brackish water.

Between Katar and the nearest limits of the province of Sharja, namely, the village of Aboo-Debee, the desert comes right down to the sea for a length of near 100 miles. The marauding and assassinating Bedouins of Beni-Yass, formerly pirates too, though now repressed at sea by the British flag, occupy this unfertile spot. The only village here of any consequence—a small town, indeed—is Soor: like the others, it subsists by the pearl-fishery.

From Aboo-Debee, the whole coast, with its inland provinces, on Ras-el-Hadd, and even round it to the south-west as far as Dofar, bears generally the exclusive title of ’Oman: this denomination is, however, rather political than geographical, and denotes that the supreme authority of the Omanite Sultan, Thoweynee Ebn-Sa’eed, is through this extent more immediately and fully exercised than in Bahreyn and Katar; though Khaled Ebn-Sakar, the local chief of Sharja, has of late years established his almost independent and arbitrary rule over the greater part of the Cape