JABRIN 89

he, for I settled here with Hamad ibn Muradhdhaf and his
Ikhwan for some years and wandered all over the place
seeking new springs on which to plant palms. I gave up that
life when Hamad died and the fever drove his folk out of the
houses they had built. Many of them died and the rest took
to the desert, and no more do they live in the village.

The lightest of easterly breezes sped us on our way over the
mile-wide salt-flat at 8 a.m. next day. The saline mud of the
depression was very rough and dirty with occasional miser-
able patches of Tarfa and dwarf-palms. In half an hour of
rather tiresome marching we came to the palms we had seen
the previous evening—only four tall, weedy stems sur-
mounted by thick tufts of fronds and fed by a single well-
spring of the same depth as that by which we had spent the
night. We had sent the baggage-train on by the direct route
up the depression to a named rendezvous in the Jabrin oasis
itself, in order that we might have all the time we needed to
see what there was to be seen in Jaub al Budu*. Their route
lay westward through the wells and Tarfa scrub of Umm
Ithila,1 while from the palms now reached we struck north-
west across the salt-flat to re-enter the bordering sand-ridges
over which we switchbacked up hill and down dale, getting
good views of our surroundings from each successive crest.

A hare went away from under our feet as we marched
through the copious scrub of Shinan and Ghadha. The salt-
flat came round parallel to our course at no great distance on
the left with occasional inlets protruding far into the sands.
These we crossed or skirted as was most convenient, and in
some of them we found the wreckage of small dead clumps of
palms which had at some time subsisted on the salty water
obviously close up to the surface. In a hollow of the sands
close by we came upon a single palm-stem growing by the
side of a shallow well, about two feet deep, and then we went
by another more extensive bay of the Sabkha with masses of
Haifa grass, from which the well and the wretched palm-
clumps of this neighbourhood derive the name of Bid' al
Haifa.

1 This is the correct name of the locality and not Umm Maithala as shown
on Mr. Thomas' map.