north of Cape Guardafui. Here the climate changes; the monsoon, no longer checked by the African coast, leaves its effect on the coastal hills, which gradually rise above 4000 feet, clothed with tropical vegetation; while the coast plains are narrow and broken. The northern slopes of these mountains (known to our author as Asich, § 33) feed the water-course now known as the Wadi Rekot, about 100 miles long, which empties into the Kuria Muria Bay; beyond which are fertile coast plains as far as Ras el Hadd. These mountains, and the Dhofar and Jenaba districts, facing which lie the Kuria Muria islands, were the oldest and perhaps the most productive of the frankincense districts of Arabia; and it was always the ambition of the various powers of that region to extend their rule so as to include the Dhofar mountains, the Hadramaut valley, and the opposite Somali coast of Africa—thus controlling the production and commanding the price; in short, forming a “ frankincense trust.” The restricted area of the Arabian incense-lands, bordered as they were by the steppe and the desert, made them constantly subject to attack and control by different wandering tribes; while at the same time their local conditions, of intensive cultivation of a controlled product of great and constant value, made for a peculiarly ordered state of society—for a development of caste unusual in Semitic lands, and in which the cultivator, the warrior, and the privileged slave, had their place in the order given.
Of the age-long struggle for control of these sacred lands we know today little more than the Greek writers of two thousand years ago. The modern world takes its little supply of frankincense from the Arab vessels that carry it to Bombay or Aden; its armies are sent to the conquest or defence of lands in other lines of productivity—of a Kimberley, a Witwatersrand, a Manchuria. But to the ancient world the Incense-Land was a true Eldorado, sought by the empires and fought for by every Arab tribe that managed to enrich itself by trading incense for temple-service on the Nile or Euphrates, on Mount Zion, or in Persia, India, or China. The archaeological expedition that shall finally succeed in penetrating these forbidden regions, and recovering the records of their past, cannot fail to add greatly to our store of knowledge of the surrounding civilizations, by showing the complement to such records as those of Hatshepsut in Egypt and Tiglath-Pileser III in Assyria, and by giving the groundwork for the treasured scraps of information preserved by Herodotus, Theophrastus, Eratosthenes, Agatharchides, Strabo, Pliny, and Ptolemy. At present we must be satisfied with such knowledge of the Incense-Land as may be had from these, and from inscriptions found by
