. The heart of Arabia, a record of travel and exploration . n the flood-gates of a poets imagination. Isought in vain the blue hills, the ragged sierra ofYemamah in the southern background, and the fertileplains of the same province, thickly dotted with grovesand villages ; I sought in vain the landscape wider andmore varied than that of the approach to Damascus,where the circle of vision embraces vaster plains andbolder mountains; while the mixture of tropical aridity andluxuriant verdure, of crowded population and desert tracts,is one that Arabia alone can present and in comparisonwith which
. The heart of Arabia, a record of travel and exploration . n the flood-gates of a poets imagination. Isought in vain the blue hills, the ragged sierra ofYemamah in the southern background, and the fertileplains of the same province, thickly dotted with grovesand villages ; I sought in vain the landscape wider andmore varied than that of the approach to Damascus,where the circle of vision embraces vaster plains andbolder mountains; while the mixture of tropical aridity andluxuriant verdure, of crowded population and desert tracts,is one that Arabia alone can present and in comparisonwith which Syria seems tame and Italy monotonous. ^ Of tropical aridity and desert tracts there was indeedenough and to spare ; before me lay a shallow pear-shapedbasin in the dip of an upland wilderness, whose far-flungdesolation of wasted naked rock threw out in strong rehefthe narrow streaks of green or black, which constitute theoases of Riyadh and Manfuha, in the hollow. A narrow 1 Vide Vol. II. p. 117. * W. G. P. vol. i. p. 388. W. G. P. vol. i. pp. 390, THE WAHHABI CAPITAL 69 tongue of the arid slope on. which we stood separates thetwo oases, projecting south-westward between them towardsa cleft in the slope beyond, wherein a scattered patch ortwo of palms mark the position of the Batin oasis and thecourse of Wadi Hanifa, where it carves out a passage foritself through the heart of Tuwaiq. The great clay towersof the capital stood out serenely above the palm tops nearthe northern end of the oasis ; elsewhere a tower or houseshowed through the screen of trees ; and the ruined watch-towers on the Manfuha road still told their tale of ancientstrife. Since that day of my first arrival I have looked downupon the same scene from the high ground on every sideof the Riyadh basin ; from every point of view it is thesame—a long dark screen of palms against a desert back-ground—except only from the south, whence, owing to theslope of the basin in that direction, the whole extent of
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