The coast of Arabia has no claims to the picturesque: all its charms, like
those of the oyster, lie within the roughest of possible shells. Its first
aspect resembles heaps of the cinders of a glass-house--a building whose
heat seems to be fully realized by the temperature of this fearful place.
England has a resident there, Captain Haynes, named as political agent.
That any human being, who could exist in any other place, would remain in
Aden, is one of the wonders of human nature. An officer, of course, must
go wherever he is sent; but such is the innate love for a post, that if
this gallant and intelligent person were roasted to death, as might happen
in one of the coolest days of the Ethiopian summer, there would be a
thousand applications before a month was over, to the Foreign Office, for
the honour of being carbonaded on the rocks of Aden.

The promontory has all the marks of volcanic eruption, and is actually
recorded, by an Arab historian of the tenth century, to have been thrown
up about that period. "Its sound, like the rumbling of thunder, might then
be heard many miles, and from its entrails vomited forth redhot stones,
with a flood of liquid fire." The crater of the extinguished volcano is
still visible, though shattered and powdered down by the tread under which
Alps and Appennines themselves crumble away--that of Time. The only point
on which we are sceptical is the late origin of the promontory. Nothing
beyond a sandhill or a heap of ashes has been produced on the face of
nature since the memory of man. That a rock, or rather a mountain chain,
with a peak 1800 feet high, should have been produced at any time time
within the last four thousand years, altogether tasks our credulity. The
powers of nature are now otherwise employed than in rough-hewing the
surface of the globe. She has been long since, like the sculptor, employed
in polishing and finishing--the features were hewn out long ago. Her
master-hand has ever since been employed in smoothing them.