78 THE EMPTY QUARTER

camels. The best of the Manasir camels is of the breed called
'Usaifir, light-coloured dromedaries as good as any. But of
all the 'Umaniya breeds the very best come from the Duru'
and Al bu Shamis tribes. And 'Ali's mount, Na'riya the
first of all our beasts, is of the Dara'iya race. The folk of Al
bu Shamis are not of the Muslimin but of the 'Ibadiya sect
and they pray in a strange fashion.

About five miles on from our starting point we came upon
bushes of Hadh,1 one of the most characteristic plants of the
south, which I thus saw again for the first time on these wan-
derings. It is evidently of the Hamdh* family and of salty
flavour but it is the staple food of the sand camels. Every
now and then we passed by or across patches of gravel, some-
times of considerable extent like great lakes in the sands.
But animal life was scarce enough though we did see two
hares. It is different in our country, said Salih, where game
is plentiful—Oryx and gazelles and the wild ass and foxes,
which we of the Manasir eat though the Marri dubs them
unlawful. We have the wild-cat too, which they call Hirra
and we Atfa\ and the badger.3

A light SW. breeze made things pleasant enough in the
early afternoon, but after some six hours continuously in the
saddle the men began to clamour for a halt and I had to
resist their pressure to make sure of reaching the channel of
Wadi Sahba, which lay somewhere ahead of us and where I
was anxious to halt for the night in order to determine its
position by astronomical observations. They only had the
vaguest idea of its distance and I feared that a halt might
baulk me of that important objective. My anxiety however
proved to be as needless as their irritation, for scarcely an
hour had passed when the vegetation suddenly began to show
fresher and, almost without realising it, we found ourselves
midway across the channel. Here it is, said 'Ali, the Sahba!
Look, there is the Birlcan which we always reckon to find in

11 had collected specimens in 1918 which were identified as Salsola sp.
- G. Rohlfs figures it under the name Cornufaca monocantha, Del. See
Appendix.

2 Both are Chenopodiacece.

3 Dharimban apparently ' badger ' or possibly the Ratel.