132 THE EMPTY QUARTER

man comes hither ever. But perhaps the most epigrammatic
of all their utterances on the subject was that of Suwid, which
I have placed at the opening of the chapter on the ' Waterless
Waste '.

That the Badawin of the Great Desert—the Manasir and
Murra between them span the whole breadth of its thousand
miles from the Oman frontier to Najran—know and use the
term c Rub* al Khali' admits of no doubt whatever. Some
of the border tribes mentioned by Mr. Thomas may not use
the term freely as they probably have active cognisance only
of the section to which the term e Al Ramla ' applies, yet I
cannot but doubt their wholesale ignorance of the name and
its special significance. But God knows best, as the Arabs
would say in such case, and I have no hesitation in restoring
to the Great South Desert of Arabia the name by which it has
been known to the Arabs before and since Shahrazad re-
lated to King Shahriyar the tale of the cobbler Ma'ruf, who
was transported by supernatural agency into the midst of
the Rub' al Kharab1 and anticipated my own discovery of
Wabar.

I would state the final result of my researches into the
matter in the following formula. The whole of the Great
South Desert is Rube al Khali in contrast with the inhabited
world. A great part of it, commonly frequented by pastoral
nomads and containing countless wells, is known to them and
their nearer neighbours as Al Ramla or Al Rimal, while a
part of the latter containing only briny wells is again sub-
divided from it under the name of Al K.hiran and another
section with more palatable water is Sanam, another Tuwal
and so forth. What remains after subtraction of the waterful
area is Rub' al Khali par excellence, the waterless desert, the
Empty Quarter—empty even by the reckoning of the Bada-
win. The name ' Ahqaf', common enough in literature, I
have never heard but on the lips of pedants and pedagogues.
It may perhaps be known and used by the Hadhramaut
Arabs, of whom I have no experience.

I have dealt at some length with an important aspect of a
great problem and must return to our marching through the

1 Burton rightly equates this name with, the commoner Bub' al Khali.