WABAR 177

'Uwaifara may, however, be suggested as a possible site for
Wabar itself, which may be no more than a classical or
literary corruption, as Mr. Thomas suggests,1 of Ophir the
land of gold, apes and peacocks ! In its proper Arabic form
the name would be 'Afar, of which 'Uwaifara is but a correctly
formed diminutive. The Greeks would have transcribed it
o<pap, which is Ofar or Ophir in our pronunciation. And
finally in this locality we do certainly get nearer to country
which still produces both gold and apes and jungle-fowl, if
not peacocks—the granite massif of the Hijaz mountains
within the seasonal rain-belt of the Indian monsoon.

If, however, the Yaman be not the scene of 'Ad's magni-
ficence, there is yet another locality which might be probed
with interesting results. Eastern Arabia, less well-known
than the southern provinces, was nevertheless apparently
the scene of an ancient civilisation. The Tumuli of Bahrain
are well-known, and antiquities have been unearthed at the
neighbouring island of Darin (? Darain, the twin palaces),
while there are numerous ruins—ancient springs and irriga-
tion channels and so forth—on the mainland between the
Hasa and Kuwait, to-day a barren wilderness with scattered
desert wells frequented only by grazing Badawin. Two of
these wells indeed have names that startle—Qariya with
Wabra to west of it! Who shall say that they played no part
in the history of the ' Adites ?

Such speculations, however, only dawned upon me slowly
after my disappointment in the RuV al Khali itself. I must
now return to my lump of iron, which with the other material
collected from Wabar was in due course handed over to the
Wahhabi King and by him presented to the British Museum.
Dr. L. J. Spencer, the Keeper of the Mineral Department, had
no difficulty in determining the character of the finds.

The metal is, as I supposed, a fragment of meteoritic iron
and the slag-like material is silica-glass or sand fused by the
heat of the falling meteorite, the greater part of which must
have evaporated at the stupendous temperature generated
by its impact on the earth. Nothing was left of it but a few
odd fragments which cooled rapidly enough to survive as

1 Arabia Fdix, p. 163.