Surely there can be no doubt that this is the harbour which was anciently used by the merchants who came to this coast for frankincense. It would be absolutely secure at all seasons of the year, and it is just twenty parasangs from the ruins of the ancient capital--exactly where it ought to be, in fact--and probably the Arabs called it Merbat, a name which has been retained in the modern village on the sheltering headland, where we landed when we first reached Dhofar. As for the name Moscha--given in the 'Periplus'--it is like Mocha, a name given to several bays on the Arabian coast, and I think we discovered why Ptolemy called it Abyssapolis, as I will presently explain. We ascended the rock at the entrance, took a photograph of the sheet of water, and felt that we had at last succeeded in reconstructing the geography of this interesting bit of country.
I hear that the Egyptologists are in search of a harbour to which the expedition to the land of Punt was made under the enterprising Queen Hatasou. Some imagine that this coast of Arabia was the destination of this expedition, and I herewith call their attention to this spot, for I know of none other more likely on the barren, harbourless coast between Aden and Maskat. If we take the illustration of this expedition given in the temple of Deir al Bahari, we have, to begin with, the frankincense trees, the long straight line of water running inland, the cattle and the birds; then the huts which the Bedouin build on tall poles, approached by ladders, from which they can inspect the produce of their land and drive off marauders, look exactly like those thereon depicted. All that we want are the apes, which certainly do not now exist in the Gara mountains, but it is just the spot where one would expect to find them; and in a district where the human race has been reduced to the smallest point, there is no reason why the kindred race of apes should not have disappeared altogether. Apes still exist near Aden.
[Illustration: THE ABYSS OF ABYSSAPOLIS, DHOFAR]
We had great difficulty in getting the camels to face the water and carry us to the peninsula, the water being half-way up their sides. On climbing up we saw columns lying about, and there had been a wall all round the summit. It had originally been built in courses with roughly squared stones, as we could see near the doorway, but the present wall is of ordinary broken stones.