roads at all. Some parts of the country are very green and fertile and in
other parts there is not enough grass the year around to give one square
meal to a single grasshopper. Arabia has four thousand miles of coast and
yet only six harbours where steamers call. There are better maps of the
North Pole and of Mars and of the moon than of southeastern Arabia. The
reason is that men have spent millions of dollars to find the North Pole
and telescopes are all the time looking at the moon; but no one has ever
spent time or money to explore this part of Arabia. The Greek geographers
had a better knowledge of Arabia than we have to-day.

[Illustration: MAP OF ARABIA.]

There are no lakes in Arabia, but there is a large sea of sand called _Al
Ahkaf_, in which the traveller Von Wrede threw a lead and line and found
no bottom! No one has been there since to see whether his story was true.
At Bahrein, in eastern Arabia, there are salt-water wells on shore and
fresh-water springs in the midst of the salt sea from which water is
brought to shore. Arabia has no postage-stamps and no political capital
and no telegraph system. Different coins from different parts of the world
are used in different provinces. It is a land of contradictions and even
the waters that bound it are misnamed. The Red Sea is blue; the Persian
Gulf has no Persian ships and should be called an English lake; and the
_Straits_ of Hormuz are crooked. This topsy-turvy land has no political
divisions. Some say it has five and some seven provinces; no one knows
what is its population as no census was ever taken. In nearly all
countries the mountain ranges run north and south, but in Arabia they run
nearly east and west. There are desert sands six hundred feet deep and
mountain peaks nine thousand feet high. On the coasts it is fearfully hot
and the climate is often deadly. On the highlands it is often bitterly
cold; and yet the people are all of the same race and speech and custom