We were up early, meaning to push the long way to Ammari by sunset. We crossed ridge after carpeted ridge of sunburned flints, grown over with a tiny saffron plant so bright and close that all the view was gold. Safra el Jesha , the Sukhur called it. The valleys were only inches deep, their beds grained like morocco leather, in an intricate curving mesh, by innumerable rills of water after the last rain. The swell of every curve was a grey breast of sand set hard with mud, sometimes glistening with salt-crystals, and sometimes rough with the projecting brush of half-buried twigs which had caused it. These tailings of valleys running into Sirhan were always rich in grazing. When there was water in their hollows the tribes collected, and peopled them with tent-villages. The Beni Sakhr with us had so camped; and, as we crossed the monotonous downs, they pointed first to one indistinctive hollow with hearth and straight gutter-trenches, and then to another, saying, “There was my tent and there lay Hamdan el Saih. Look at the dry stones for my bed-place, and for Tarfa’s next it. God have mercy upon her, she died the year of samh, in the Snainirat, of a puff-adder.”