Abstract
THE chief feature common to these three books is that they deal with the researches of British naturalists in the belt of country which, from the Arctic Ocean to Equatorial Africa, lies along the boundary between Eurafrica and Asia. (1) Mr. Bury's “Arabia Infelix” describes the eastern wall of the Great Rift Valley in southwestern Arabia. The land lies low for about thirty miles from the Red Sea at Hodeida; it then rises by bold precipices to the height of from eight to ten thousand feet, whence the plateau sinks gradually eastward to the Great Red Desert of Arabia, at the level of from three to four thousand feet. The road inland to Sanaa begins its steep ascent through “The Gate of the Mountains,” where a huge rock has fallen across the ravine and made a natural arch. By scaling cliffs of appalling steepness, up which the Turks have had the temerity to plan a railway, it rises to the height of 9000 ft. It passes through various zones of vegetation. The spurs and ravines are terraced for coffee or clad in thick jungle. The ravines are narrow “that one may almost so steep and touch the tree-tops which grow out of them, and so overgrown that only a green twilight penetrates to their recesses, where the lurid blooms of the snake-onion flame among the fern and the giant cobra drowses in the hush of noon.” So steep are the precipices that “it gives one a crick in the neck to count the coffee-gardens up those outrageous steeps, while wondering if they are garnered with a derrick.”
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G., J. Three Naturalist-Travellers 1 . Nature 95, 209–211 (1915). https://doi.org/10.1038/095209a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/095209a0