table was spread with excellent provisions, his dress was handsome, and in his court-yard were near sixty of the finest horses I had ever seen. Above all, his conversation was intelligent and his manners friendly, which was so uncommon, I greatly enjo my visit. We retrowed our voyage, and passed by a cluster of uninhabited islands, except one, called bbel Sabeia, where the Arabs of Ras Heli send their wives and children in time of war. Ras Heli is the boundary between Arabia Felix and the province of Mecca. The mountains reach here nearer to the sea, the banks are sand and coral, and the coast better inhabited, chiefly by different tribes of Arabs. Sibt is a miserable place, and the inhabitants almost brutal. Their persons are lean and muscular, and their long, black, bushy hair, resembling wool, is divided on the crown of the head. Both men and women have disagreeable features, and go naked. Married women sometimes have the distinction of a ragirt about their waist: yet these savages are fond of adorning their persons; they bind a fillet of the doom leaf round their heads, like the ancient diadem, and stam their lips, eye-brows, and foreheads with antimony. The manners at Loheia, the next place of importance, are very different: the women take pains to please, and are attentive to the neatness of their persons and dress, though very modest in their behaviour. At home, they wear nothing but a long shift, of fine cotton cloth, and their hair plaited, in long tails, be 1 hind. They dye their hands and feet with henna, for cleanliness as well as for ornament, as it possesses the quality of restraining the profuse perspirations occasioned by the heat of the climate. The town of Loheia lies under a range of mountains it is built on the south-west side of a peninsula, surrounded on all sides, but the east, by the sea. At this place I was affected by a prickling sensation in my legs, which I attributed to the salt effluvia arising from the ground abounding with that mineral. Nothing material occurred between Loheia and Mocha. The latter makes an agreeable appearance from the sea, being backed by a grove of palm trees: the port is formed by two points, each defended by a small fort. The coast of Arabia, from Mocha to the Straits, is a bold shore, showing, in some places, a bare, flat country, bounded by mountains, in others covered with small woods. A new danger assailed us, on a bare, rocky island, where we anchored for a few hours: from the appearance of the wind, we were apprehensive of being detained there, and, as there was no fuel, except the rotten, dry roots of the rue that we pulled from the clifts of the rocks, we found it difficult to subsist in the midst of abundance; for we had rice, butter, honey, and flour, besides plenty of fine fish, and turtles especially: but we could not eat them raw, and were reduced to live upon drammock, which is made of flour and water, mixed with butter and honey, worked into a paste. Happily the wind changed and set us free from this dilemma: we joyfully spread our sails before it and proceeded to the Straits of Babelmandel, which form the communication between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. We landed on a small island, to enjoy a comfortable repast and drink the King of England's health, as sovereign of this sea.— Our first employment was to make several large fires, of the stock of an old acacia tree; one boiled the coffee, another the rice; we killed four turtles, made ready a dolphin, opened our stores of beer, wine, and brandy, and recruited our spirits, after so many days hard fare. Our course was now directed back to Loheia, where I expected a messenger with powerful recommendations, in my favour, to the Naybe of Masuah, and the Ras, or Prime Minister of Abyssinia. In the course of our voyage, from Loheia to Masuah, we passed a number of islands, of which I shall mention only the principal. Foosht abounds in good fish, many of them glowing with the most brilliant colours; but, for eating, those were best that bore the nearest resemblance to the fish of our northern seas. There is a black hill on this island, that, I conjecture, from the hollowness of the ground, to have been formed by a volcano. An opinion rendered more probable, by finding several large shells, of the bisser, sunk into large stones; which shows that the stone was once in a soft state. It is inhabited by poor fishermen, who subsist by exchanging their fish, at Loheia, for corn. They find pearls in several kinds of bivalves, and make shagreen for the handles of knives, and swords of the skin of a flat fish, with a long tail. Near Jibbel Teir, I observed a prodigious number of sharks, of the hammer-headed kind. We entered the harbour of Debelen, in the island of Dahalac, the largest in the Red Sea; the bottom of the whole port is one mass of white coral, intermixed with huge black stones. Here we saw a beautiful species of antelope, very swift, small, shorthaired, with thin, black, ring-marked horns. There are neither hills nor mountains in Dahalac, consequently no springs; but the violent showers, that fall in the winter months, supply an abundant quantity of water for the whole year, and fill three hundred and seventy cisterns, that are hewn out of the solid rock, and are supposed to have been the work of the Persians. The indolence of the people leaves them all open to the different kinds of animals, which not only allay their thirst, but frequently wash in them, and render the water extremely filthy. Goat's milk and fish are the principal food of these islanders. The women are expert fishers. Several of them, entirely naked, swam off to our vessel before we came to an anchor, begging handfuls of wheat, rice or millet. The poverty and wretchedness of these people are extreme, yet their attachment to their native island, though bare, barren, and parched, is equally remarkable, and shows the universality of that strong partiality to home, so finely described, by Montgomery, in the following lines: "There is a land, of every land the pride, In every clime, the magnet of his soul, |