nor unimportant. The inhabitants of Zafār, the most easterly city of Yemen, carried on at that period, he observes, a great trade in horses with India, the voyage being performed in a month. The practice he remarked among the same people of feeding their flocks and herds with fish, and which, he says, he nowhere else observed, prevails, however, up to the present day, among the nations of the Coromandel coast, as well as in other parts of the east. At El Ahkāf, the city of the tribe of Aād, there were numerous gardens, producing enormous bananas, with the cocoanut and the betel. Our fanciful traveller discovered a striking resemblance between the cocoanut and a man's head, observing that exteriorly there was something resembling eyes and a mouth, and that when young the pulp within was like brains. To complete the similitude, the hair was represented by the fibre, from which, he remarks, cords for sewing together the planks of their vessels, as also cordage and cables, were manufactured. The nut itself, according to him, was highly nourishing, and, like the betel-leaf, a powerful aphrodisiac.
Still pursuing his journey through Arabia, he crossed the desert of Ammān, and met with a people extraordinary among Mahommedans, whose wives were liberal of their favours, without exciting the jealousy of their husbands, and who, moreover, considered it lawful to feed upon the flesh of the domestic ass. From thence he crossed the Persian Gulf to Hormuz, where, among many other extraordinary things, he saw the head of a fish resembling a hill, the eyes of which were like two doors, so that people could walk in at one eye and out at the other! He now felt himself to be within the sphere of attraction of an object whose power he could never resist. There was, he heard, at Janja-bal, a certain saint, and of course he forthwith formed the resolution to refresh himself with a
