tening attentively to what I am telling him; but
when I ask for his answer, he seems all abroad. Sometimes I find the
tears flowing from his eyes: I address him--he neither hears nor
sees me. Last night he was restless in his sleep, and I heard the
word "seltanet--seltanet," (power, power,) frequently escape him. Is
it possible that the love of power can so torment a young heart? No,
no! another passion agitates, troubles the soul of Ammalat. Is it
for me to doubt of the symptoms of love's divine disease? He is in
love--he is passionately in love; but with whom? Oh, I will know!
Friendship is as curious as a woman.

OCCUPATION OF ADEN.

"It is only by a naval power," says Gibbon, "that the reduction of
Yemen can be successfully attempted"--a remark, by the way, which
more than one of the ancients had made before him. All the
comparatively fertile districts in the south of Arabia, in fact, are
even more completely insulated by the deserts and barren mountains of
the interior on one side, than by the sea on the other--inasmuch as
easier access would be gained by an invader, even by the dangerous
and difficult navigation of the Red Sea, than by a march through a
region where the means of subsistence do not exist, and where the
Bedoweens, by choking or concealing the wells, might in a moment cut
off even the scanty supply of water which the country affords. This
mode of passive resistance was well understood and practised by them
as early as the time of AElius Gallus, the first Roman general who
conceived the hope of rifling the virgin treasures popularly
believed to be buried in the inaccessible hoards of the princes of
Arabia, whose realms were long looked upon--perhaps on the principle
of _omne ignotum pro magnifico_--as a sort of indefinite and
mysterious El Dorado. [31]

[Footnote 31: "Intactis opulentior thesauris Arabum."
--_Horat. Od_. iii. 24. Pliny (_Hist. Nat_. vi. 32) more soberly
endeavours to prove the enormous accumulation of wealth which must
have taken place in Arabia, from the constant influx of the precious
metals for the purchase of their spices and other commodities, while
they bought none of the productions of other countries in return.]

These golden dreams speedily vanished as the country became more
extensively known: and though the Arab tribes of the desert between
Syria and the Euphrates acknowledged a nominal subjection to Rome,
the intercourse of the Imperial City with Yemen, or Arabi