We have now left the region explored by Europeans;
and our line to the south and the south-east will
lie over ground wholly new. In front of us the
land is no longer Arz Madyan: we are entering
South Midian, which will extend to El-Hejaz. As
the march might last longer than had been expected,
I ordered fresh supplies from El-Muwaylah to meet
us in the interior via Ziba. A very small boy
acted dromedary-man; and on the next day he reached
the fort, distant some thirty-five and a half direct
geographical miles eastward with a trifling of northing.
We left the Jayb el-Khuraytah on a delicious morning
(6.15 a.m., February 26th), startling the gazelles
and the hares from their breakfast graze.
The former showed in troops of six; and the latter
were still breeding, as frequent captures of the long-eared
young proved. The track lay down the Wady Dahal
and other influents of the great Wady Sa’luwwah,
a main feeder of the Damah. We made a considerable
detour between south-south-east and south-east to
avoid the rocks and stones discharged by the valleys
of the Shafah range on our left. To the right
rose the Jibal el-Tihamah, over whose nearer brown
heights appeared the pale blue peaks of Jebel Sharr
and its southern neighbour, Jebel Sa’luwwah.
At nine a.m. we turned abruptly eastward up the Wady
el-Sulaysalah, whose head falls sharply from the Shafah
range. The surface is still Hisma ground, red
sand with blocks of ruddy grit, washed down from the
plateau on the left; and, according to Furayj, it
forms the south-western limit of the Harrah. The
valley is honeycombed into man-traps by rats and lizards,
causing many a tumble, and notably developing the
mulish instinct. We then crossed a rough and
rocky divide, Arabice a Majra, or, as the Bedawin
here pronounce it, a “Magrah,"[En#1] which
takes its name from the tormented Ruways ridge on
the right. After a hot, unlively march of four
hours (= eleven miles), on mules worn out by want
of water, we dismounted at a queer isolated lump on
the left of the track. This Jebel el-Murayt’bah
("of the Little Step”) is lumpy grey granite
of the coarsest elements, whose false strata, tilted
up till they have become quasi-vertical, and worn
down to pillars and drums, crown the crest like gigantic
columnar crystallizations. We shall see the same
freak of nature far more grandly developed into the
“Pins” of the Sharr. It has evidently
upraised the trap, of which large and small blocks
are here and there imbedded in it. The granite
is cut in its turn by long horizontal dykes of the
hardest quadrangular basalt, occasionally pudding’d
with banded lumps of red jasper and oxydulated iron:
from afar they look like water-lines, and in places
they form walls, regular as if built. The rounded
forms result from the granites flaking off in curved
