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[-continue-]{+Dr. Wallin’s Route in Northern Arabia.
7
continue+} the journey to Suweis (Suwe’is) or to Kali ini (Kaliireli)
by laud. The fishermen inhabiting the port are poor men, of
Bcdooiti origin, who, having lost, their flocks and camels by some
of the various accidents to which the nomadic life exposes them,
have been obliged to give up the desert and resort to the sea for
subsistence. They depend almost exclusively upon fish for their
sustenance ; and their only chances of varying their fare are when
they are rewarded for their trips to Wadi-al-’Aat (Wadi-l-’A t)
with corn or flour by their Muzeine (Muzeinali) kindred, or when
they can exchange their fish with the people of the boats visiting
them, for bread and rice. Their fishing apparatus is the hook
and line. They manufacture their hooks themselves out of a
nail or other scrap of iron they may happen to possess, and
obtain their lines by barter from the passing boatmen; hut the
abundance of fish in the adjacent sea, and their own skill in
catching them, make up in a great measure for their want of
better tackle.
Many of their nomadic brethren of the Sina (Sma) Mountains
and of the Heteim (Heteim)* tribe, some families of which had
this year passed over to the opposite island of Teiran (Teiran),
also possess boats, in which they carry on a small trade between
the peninsula and the coasts of Arabia and Egypt; the latter
shore they know only as the Barr-al-’Agamf (’Again), a name
probably applied by the Arabs to Egypt, from their considering it
;is the land of a people not of Arabian origin, and therefore
barbarous as compared with themselves. From the Egyptian shore
they bring wheat and millet, dhoora f (dhurah), partly for
satisfying the wants of their own families, hut principally for supplying
the small towns and the Bedooins along the Arabian coast as far
down as Al-Wegh (Wejli), beyond which they seldom pass
southwards.
At the season of the Egyptian karawans to and from Mekka
(Mekkah), their trade becomes very active in the places where the
karawan is accustomed to halt for the night, or for a few days;
they then attend at such places with provisions of all kinds, and
take in exchange for them coffee, spices, clothing, weapons, or
whatever else the pilgrims may have to part with. It was with a
view of profiting by this sort of traffic that the Bodooins of the
Peninsula had now gone over in their boats, as I have already
mentioned, to meet the returning karawan at Muwcilah.
Six days had I tarried here in the company of the ten Bedooiu
fishermen—some quite naked, others in rags—forming the whole
* Hetym in Uurckhnrdt. Notes ou the Bedouins, vol. ii. p. 38(i (I I).—A.
f That is, the foreign laud; ’Again has the signification of (lie Latin word
“ barhavus,” and in a collective sense “ foreigners, or whoever are not Arabs.”—A.
1 Sorghum sacchoratuui, or vulgave.—It.
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