The coast of Arabia has no claims to the picturesque:  all its charms, like those of the oyster, lie within the roughest of possible shells.  Its first aspect resembles heaps of the cinders of a glass-house—­a building whose heat seems to be fully realized by the temperature of this fearful place.  England has a resident there, Captain Haynes, named as political agent.  That any human being, who could exist in any other place, would remain in Aden, is one of the wonders of human nature.  An officer, of course, must go wherever he is sent; but such is the innate love for a post, that if this gallant and intelligent person were roasted to death, as might happen in one of the coolest days of the Ethiopian summer, there would be a thousand applications before a month was over, to the Foreign Office, for the honour of being carbonaded on the rocks of Aden.

The promontory has all the marks of volcanic eruption, and is actually recorded, by an Arab historian of the tenth century, to have been thrown up about that period.  “Its sound, like the rumbling of thunder, might then be heard many miles, and from its entrails vomited forth redhot stones, with a flood of liquid fire.”  The crater of the extinguished volcano is still visible, though shattered and powdered down by the tread under which Alps and Appennines themselves crumble away—­that of Time.  The only point on which we are sceptical is the late origin of the promontory.  Nothing beyond a sandhill or a heap of ashes has been produced on the face of nature since the memory of man.  That a rock, or rather a mountain chain, with a peak 1800 feet high, should have been produced at any time time within the last four thousand years, altogether tasks our credulity.  The powers of nature are now otherwise employed than in rough-hewing the surface of the globe.  She has been long since, like the sculptor, employed in polishing and finishing—­the features were hewn out long ago.  Her master-hand has ever since been employed in smoothing them.

Aden’s reputation for barrenness is an old one—­“Aden,” says Ben Batuta of Tangiers, “is situate upon the sea-shore; a large city without either seed, water, or tree.”  This was written five hundred years ago; yet the ruins of fortifications and watch-towers along the rocks, show that even this human oven was the object of cupidity in earlier times; and the British guns, bristling among the precipices, show that the desire is undecayed even in our philosophic age.

Yet the Arab imagination has created its wonders even in this repulsive scene; and the generation of monkeys which tenant the higher portion of the rocks, are declared by Arab tradition to be the remnant of the once powerful tribe of Ad, changed into apes by the displeasure of Heaven, when “the King of the World,” Sheddad, renowned in eastern story, presumptuously dared to form a garden which should rival Paradise.  The prophet Hud remonstrated; but his remonstrances went for nothing, and the indignant