From Shaghab to Ziba--ruins of El-Khandaki' and Umm Amil--the
Turquoise Mine-Return to El-Muwaylah.



Leaving Lieutenant Amir to map the principal ruins, we followed
the caravan up the Majra el-Waghir, the long divide rising to the
west-north-west. The thin forest reminded me of the wooded slopes
of the Anti-Libanus about El-Kunaytarah: there, however,
terebinths and holm-oaks take the place of these unlovely and
uncomfortable thorn-trees. They are cruelly beaten--an operation
called El-Rama--by the Bedawi camel-man, part of whose travelling
kit, and the most important part too, here as in Sinai, is the
flail (Murmar or Makhbat) and the mat to receive the leaves:
perhaps Acacias and Mimosas are not so much bettered by "bashing"
as the woman, the whelp, and the walnut-tree of the good old
English proverb. After three miles we passed, on the left, ruins
of long walls and Arab Wasm, with white memorial stones perched
on black. In front rose the tall Jebel Tulayh, buttressing the
right or northern bank of the Damah; and behind it, stained
faint-blue by distance, floated in the flickering mirage the
familiar forms of the Tihamah range, a ridge now broken into half
a dozen blocks. I had ordered the caravan to march upon the
Tuwayl el-Suk; but, after one hour and fifteen minutes, we found
the tents pitched some three miles short of it, on a bleak and
ugly wave of the Waghir. The Shaykhs swore, by all holy things,
that this was the veritable Tuwayl; and a Bedawi, who declared
that he knew where water lay in the neighbourhood, refused to
show it sans the preliminary "bakhshish." Mashallah! It is a