have been bent,
torn, and twisted like the iron girders of a huge building that has been
destroyed by fire and almost covered by the ruin. Bare peak after peak
rises from the mass of debris yet everywhere pierced, scarred, and
seamed by the monsoon floods seeking their way to the ocean bed; they
seldom reach it, however, as a stream and never as a river, because of
the barren, scorched, sandy zone which belts the Red Sea and sucks into
its huge maw everything that the hills send down.

Like his country the Yemen Arab is girded about with an arid zone of
reserve which few Europeans have ever crossed, but when they have
managed to do so, according to the individual they have met, they have
found it may be a man with a heart as hard as a nether millstone.
Marrying one day and divorcing almost the next, only to marry another as
soon as he can scrape together sufficient funds to purchase a wife, this
type of man looks upon woman as an inferior animal formed for man's
gratification, and to be flung aside like a sucked orange when the juice
is gone.

Or on the other hand, they may find men whom real love has saved and
made to give forth warm affection and true domestic joy, just as the
terraced ridges on their mountain slopes retain the God-given moisture
and send forth a luxuriant crop of strengthening cereals, delicious
coffee, and luscious grapes.

I have known young men of twenty-four who have been married and divorced
half a dozen times, and also Arabs whose days are in the sere and yellow
leaf who never had but one wife.

There was a native chief who used to come occasionally to our dispensary
whose children were numbered by three figures, and Khan Bahadur
Numcherjee Rustomjee, C. I. E., who was for many years a magistrate in
Aden, told me he knew a woman who had been legally married more than
fifty times and had actually forgotten the names of the fathers of two
of her children!

One day an Arab brought a fine-looking woman to our dispensary, and as
he was very kind to her and seemed to love her very much I ventured to
tell him that she was suffering from diabetes mellitus, and that in
order to preserve her life he would require to be careful with her diet.
He thanked me most profoundly, promised to do all that he could for her,
took her home and divorced her the same day, casting her off in the
village and leaving her without a copper.

Next morning she came weeping to the dispensary and I tried to get
compens