lofty mountains forming an
impregnable fortification." This entrance is cut through the solid rock.
A strong guard of sepoys is posted there. The passage is so high and
narrow, that "one might almost compare it to the eye in a darning
needle." This is a female comparison, but an expressive one. Issuing
from the pass, the whole valley of Aden lay like a map beneath, bounded
on three sides by precipitous mountains, rising up straight and barren
like a mighty wall, while on the fourth was the sea; but even there the
view was bounded by the island rock of Sera, thus completing the
fortification of this Eastern Gibraltar.

Here the travellers were welcomed by a hospitable garrison surgeon and
his wife, found a dinner, an apartment, great civility, and a romantic
view of the Arab landscape by moonlight. They heard the drums and pipes
of one of the regiments, and were "startled by the loud report of a
cannon, which shook the frail tenement, and resounded with a lengthened
echo through the hills. It was the eight o'clock gun, which stood only a
stone's throw from the house, and on the same rock." The lady, as a
soldier's wife, ought to have been less alarmed; but she was in a land
where every thing was strange. "We were literally sleeping out in the
open air; as there were no doors, windows, or venetians to close, and
every breath of wind agitated the frail walls of bamboo and matting, I
was awoke in the night by the musquitto curtains blowing up; the wind
had risen, and came every now and then with sudden gusts; but its breath
was so soft, warm, and dry, that I, who had never ventured to bear a
night-blast in Ceylon, felt that it was harmless."

Aden, in earlier times, formed one of the thirteen states of Yemen; and
prodigious tales are told of its opulence, its mosques and minarets, its
baths of jasper, and its crescents and colonnades. But Arabia is
proverbially a land of fable, and the glories of Aden exhibit Arabian
imagination in its highest stage. Possibly, while it continued a port
for the Indian trade, it may have shared the wealth which India has
always lavished on commerce. But a spot without a tree, without a mine,
and without a manufacture, could never have possessed solid wealth under
the languid industry and wild rapine of an Arab population. When we
recollect, too, how long the Turks were masters of this corner of
Arabia, we may well be sceptical of the opulence of periods when the
sword was the law. No memoria