with clouds, or, like the inside of a Chinese puzzle, a work of unrivaled
art, conceivable but intangible by man.

In this pleasant mingling of fact, visible to his shrewd eye, and fiction
drawn from ancient fancy, Major Harris leads us on. But Aden is not yet
exhausted of wonders--an island in its bay, Seerah, (the fortified black
isle,) is pronounced to have been the refuge of Cain on the murder of Abel;
and its volcanic and barren chaos is no unequal competitor for the honour
with the rocks of the Caucasus.

But England, which changes every thing, is changing all this. Within the
next generation, the railway will run down the romances of Nutrib; a
cotton manufactory will send up its smokes to blot out the celestial blue
by day, and shoot forth its sullen illumination by night, over the
anointed soil; the minstrel will turn policeman, and the sheik be a
justice of peace; political economy will have its itinerant lecturers,
enlightening the Bedouins on the principles of rent and taxes; the city
will have a lord mayor and corporation of the deepest black; the volcano
will be planted with villas; turnpikes will measure out the sands; a hotel
will flourish on the summit of Jebel Shemshan; and Aden will differ from
Liverpool in nothing but being two thousand miles further from the smoke
and multitudes of London.

The Arab is still the prominent person among the native population of this
territory. Major Harris describes him well. The bronzed and sunburnt
visage, surrounded by long matted locks of raven hair; the slender but
wiry and active frame, and the energetic gait and manner, proclaimed the
untamable descendant of Ishmael. He nimbly mounts the crupper of his now
unladen dromedary, and at a trot moves down the bazar. A checked kerchief
round his brows, and a kilt of dark blue calico round his frame, comprise