The Land of Uz — Abdullah Mansur | Illustrated English EPUB

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CHAPTER I

THE LITTORAL BELT AND ITS RULERS SOME PALACE YARNS

Allusion has already been made to the oasis of Lahej. Its ruler is by far the wealthiest of our neighbouring chiefs. His people—the Abdali—are more agricultural than warlike, but his wealth enables him to command the military services of the more virile population in the maritime ranges, when engaged in the coercion of his refractory vassals. He exercises suzerainty over certain sections of the Subaihi, who also come under Turkish influence along their north-western border.

The Sultans of Lahej formerly held the peninsula of Aden, but an outrage perpetrated by the Abdali on a shipwrecked crew and the absence of any satisfaction compelled us to bombard and afterwards occupy the town of Aden in 1839. Once a fine commercial port (in the days of Suleiman the Magnificent), it had degenerated to a squalid native township whose chief industry was fishing, although vestiges of its former mercantile prosperity still remained.

During the earlier days of the British occupation the Abdali made several abortive attempts to retake Aden. In one of these they were persuaded by a smooth-tongued mullah that if they put aside all sinful thoughts and adopted white raiment, emblematic of inward purity—

they would carry all before them, and be invulnerable to the unhallowed weapons of the infidel.

In simple faith and spotless white they tried to rush the Barrier Gate of the fortress, armed merely with sticks and staves. The officer in charge of the defensive works which then commanded the gate—having once grasped the serious nature of the attempt—directed on them a fire before which they wavered, broke, and fled precipitately.

On rebuking their spiritual guide he roundly abused them, attributing their disastrous failure to having secretly harboured in their sinful hearts unrighteous thoughts anent the women of the infidel garrison.

The Sultanate has long since abandoned all idea of the reconquest of Aden—in fact receives a yearly subsidy for our occupation of the town of Sheikh-Othman—across the harbour. We also lease a large area of land in the neck of the isthmus which we in turn have let on a long lease to an Italian company who make a good revenue out of an extensive system of salt-pans.

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Explore the Aden hinterland, the Awaliq territories and southern Arabia through Abdullah Mansur’s 1911 travel account. Abdullah Mansur was the pen name of G. Wyman Bury. This edition presents the complete original English text in a readable illustrated EPUB.

Complete in two parts and 18 chapters, with all front matter, poems, both appendices, captions, 39 photographs across 26 plates, and the complete folding colour map. Reflowable EPUB with clickable contents and full-resolution illustration views.

The English text was corrected against the original scans using AI, followed by an independent AI review of the complete aligned English and Arabic text. This is not human specialist certification.

This historical account contains colonial viewpoints and dated language and assumptions. They are preserved as historical evidence, not endorsed as present-day fact or advice. Public-domain provenance is assessed for the United States; territorial rules elsewhere may differ.

Digital EPUB download; no physical book is shipped. The cover features the book’s original photograph of Nisab’s mosque and rooftops.

Original source: Library of Congress