MAQAINAMA 119

My companions had certainly never spoken but soberly of
Maqainama and were in no way responsible for the dis-
appointment of my illusions. Eight years ago the well was
unknown outside the domains of the Murra. Major Cheesman
had then brought back the rumour of its existence from his
sojourn in Jabrin. I had been sceptical of the very name,
which sounded strange for Arabia, but in that I was wrong for
not only was the word correctly reported by Major Chees-
man but I have since discovered another well of the same
name in the Summan north-eastward of the Hasa. Major
Cheesman1 had, however, constructed a legend round this
mysterious watering in the great desert which seemed at least
too good not to be true, and I had pitched high my hopes of
probing it to its foundations. At or near a dry well (possibly
that of Umm al Ramad itself) south of Jawamir he had found
a piece of granite, and from Salih he had heard of the exis-
tence of Maqainama ' six days' march from the south of
Jabrin 5 with tf some very deep wells ' visited by the Murra
6 in years of exceptional rain '. The wells were reported to
have been dug by the Bani Hilal, while for the granite Major
Cheesman found the nearest match as far afield as Assuan.
The two were accordingly linked up by reference to Sumerian
tradition, which produced the name of Magan to suggest a
plausible explanation of Maqainama (or Magainma as he
wrote the name). And Magan was the source of the diorite
used by the Sumerians in making their statues—a good
enough reason in all conscience for supposing that it also
produced granite, of which the piece found by Major Chees-
man might have been a fragment chipped off a block in course
of transportation via Jabrin to Gudea's capital at Lagash.
The weakest point in the chain of the argument was the fact
that Magan (or Maganna as its proper name might have been
—a step nearer to the strange Magainma) was interpreted as
meaning * the place where boats go to '. That shook Major
Cheesman's confidence in its identification with a spot so far
remote in the middle of the desert but, neither he nor Mr.
Thomas having apparently realised the estuary character of
Jabrin and the Jiban, it had fallen to me to discover that at

1 In Unknown Arabia, pp. 266-7, 297, 308, 342, and 345.