We ascended the Jebel el-Khuraytah, a trap hillock some 120 feet high, the southern jamb of the Khuraytah gate: the summit, where stands a ruined Burj measuring fourteen metres in diameter, gives a striking and suggestive view. After hard dry living on grisly mountain and unlovely Wady, this fine open plain, slightly concave in the centre, was a delightful change of diet to the eye--the first enjoyable sensation of the kind, since we had gazed lovingly upon the broad bosom of the Wady el-Arabah. The general appearance is that of Eastern Syria, especially the Haurán: at the present season all is a sheet of pinkish red, which in later March will turn to lively green. On this parallel the diameter does not exceed a day's march, but we see it broadening to the north. Looking in that direction over the gloomy-metalled porphyritic slopes upon which we stand, the glance extends to a manner of sea-horizon; while the several planes below it are dotted with hills and hill-ranges, white, red, and black, all dwarfed by distance to the size of thimbles and pincushions. The guides especially pointed out the ridge El-Mukaykam, a red block upon red sands, and a far-famed rendezvous for raid and razzia. Nearer, the dark lumps of El-Khayráni rise from a similar surface; nearer still lie the two white dots, El-Rakhamatayn; and nearest is the ruddy ridge Jebel and Jils el-Rawiyán, containing, they say, ruins and inscriptions of which Wallin did not even hear.
The eastern versant of the Hismá is marked by long chaplets of tree and shrub, disposed along the selvage of the watercourses; and the latter are pitted with wells sunk after the fashion of the Bedawin. In this rhumb the horizon is bounded by El-Harrah, the volcanic region whose black porous lavas and honey-combed basalts, often charged with white zeolite, are still brought down even to the coast to serve as mortars and handmills. The profile is a long straight and regular line, as if formed under water, capped here and there by a tiny head like the Syrian Kulayb Haurán: its peculiar dorsum makes it distinguishable from afar, and we could easily trace it from the upper heights of the Shárr. It is evidently a section of the mighty plutonic outburst which has done so much to change the aspect of the parallel Midian seaboard. Wallin's account of it (p. 307) is confined to the place where he crossed the lava-flood; and he rendered El-Harrah, which in Arabic always applies to a burnt region, by "red-coloured sandstone."