CHAPTER V

EPILOGUE

A company come up out of the Empty Quarter, wherein is
drought and famine 1—ZAYID.

THE tale is ended—of the Empty Quarter. An hour's riding
brought us in the early afternoon of March 14th to the palm-
groves of Sulaiyil, where tents had been pitched against our
coming at the corner of one of the hamlets of the oasis—
Al Muhammad. Little had changed here in 14 years—the
same long line of mud houses jutting out into the desert, the
same red-smocked women at the village well, the same hordes
of children with little or nothing to do, the same seemingly
aimless and hopeless existence of the elders. Yet the passage
of years had brought worse rather than better things. The
drought had killed ofi the cattle and reduced the area under
palms. The peace had closed the commercial avenues lead-
ing to the unblockaded Turkish marts of war-time Yaman.
And the collapse of the Persian Gulf pearling industry under
the weight of the world-wide economic depression had thrown
the citizens of the desert oasis out of their strange but normal
employment. Old 'Abdullah ibn Nadir, who had entertained
me so hospitably in the rival hamlet of Al Hanaish, had been
gathered to Ms fathers, and his son, Salim, reigned pros-
perously enough in his stead. Farhan al Ruwaiya still ruled
as Amir in Al Muhammad, a charming man in his old age,
fox-visaged, avaricious, but full of kindness to obliterate
the less favourable impression left by his pardonable attitude
in those days. And another of the great merchants of then
came to crave alms, fallen: from the pedestal of wealth to
beg his bread, with a small boy to lead his blind footsteps to7
the sources of charity. Poverty was now widespread and I
must have distributed the equivalent of farthings and half-

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