70 THE EMPTY QUARTER

tlie water. * There the guide falters, and you cannot blame,'
quoted 3Ali from a poem attributed to the legendary King of
Wabar. Yet as we marched we soon found ourselves in the
midst of unmistakable indications of the propinquity of a
watering—the almost obliterated camel-paths of an almost
forgotten past, meandering apparently aimlessly across the
plain. Suddenly 'Ali's quick eye perceived the strewn dung-
pellets that betrayed the immediate precincts of the well and
in a few moments we had dismounted at the spot we sought.
The well was dead and completely buried, scarcely percep-
tible indeed except as a shallow dip in the surrounding flat-
ness. Long neglected, deserted and forgotten, the site alone
remained as a pathetic memorial to the enterprise £Cnd in-
dustry of its author, Ibn al Adham of the Buhaih Murra
whose name it bears. In the now dim past he had dug out the
shaft to a depth of eight fathoms, and the Murra camels had
been watered here for years until a period of neglect—
doubtless also a period of drought which had kept the
grazing herds away—had done its inevitable work of
destruction. Since then no man has had the energy to
reopen the pit.

As we now breasted up towards the conspicuous brown line
of the Jafura dunes, the plain gradually became more sandy
with long trails lying to south-eastward of the scanty 'Arrad
shrubs. We passed into Jafura at the point where the low
ridge already mentioned plunges into the sands and, as we
stood on the crest of the first wave surveying the scene, it
seemed that at intervals on either side of us the gravel desert
ran into and under the sands in a series of parallel groin-like
dykes. Here and there these ribs lay exposed amid the
sands with a thick covering of pebbles as of some ancient
beach. Elsewhere all was sand, in long monotonous waves or
tumbled dunes or shallow and undulating plains. And it
was all amazingly bare—such vegetation as there was in the
hollows or on exposed patches of gravel or rock at the base
of the dunes being dead or moribund. Animal life was
correspondingly conspicuous by its absence—an occasional
tiny colony of larks, once an eagle poised high above the
desolation in search of game, a single dragonfly and a few