92 ARABIA INFELIX
him, he will eye you indignantly for half a second and dive into some cleft or cranny. Later in the morning, when the sun has warmed the air, he will take wing like any other bird.
He is the first bird up in the morning, and the only one you will find among the sun-scorched boulders in the middle of the day, when even the sparrows have stopped quarrelling among the coffee and are pretending to sleep.
On Sanaa plain there is another new species, allied somewhat to the chats and wheatears. It is a biggish buff-coloured bird, about the size and shape of our common thrush, with remarkably erect carriage and alert habits. Though fairly common, it is difficult to approach. It frequents open ground, usually perching on an irrigation bank or a clod of loam in a bit of bare fallow, and is a fine judge of distance, so far as the range of a small shot-gun is concerned. It has received the name of oenanthe yemenemis.
But enough of small fry. I do not suppose that anyone has a penchant for vultures, though he cannot but admire the soaring flight of gyps fuhus (the Griffon vulture), as he climbs in easy spirals up the sky. These vast birds, with their eleven-foot wing-spread, patrol the heavens on solitary beats all day, to sink at dusk to some remote ravine. Few human eyes descry them, mere specks, high-hung and widely scattered, in a fervent sky, like a vault of glowing steel, but there each bird cruises tirelessly on its appointed course, searching, with far-seeing, steadfast gaze, ravine and crag and peak. When a sick baboon crawls under a boulder to die on the mountain-side, away from the mischievous herd, or a camel kneels down for the last time on the caravan-route, gyps notes the occurrence, q,nd comes down to invests-