Page 151 - Arabiab Studies (IV)

European Accounts of Muscat 141
averages of $40-50. The bazaar was well supplied but
resembled a minor one in India. He saw two unveiled women
with huge nose rings. He went three miles to Sedaub to see
the Imam’s country house but there was little except some
lucerne. He took a canoe back; it was cut from a single tree
but held his party of three, two rowers and a guide.
MIGNAN, Capt. R., A Winter Journey through Russia, the
Caucasian Alps and Georgia, London, 1839, i, 63-7 and ii,
232-71. He put the population at 10,000. The men are well
built with scanty beards and moustaches and shorn heads.
The women often have their hair two feet long, with
ornaments on their ears and noses. There are many
prostitutes. The people were religious but not bigoted and
shared their food with infidels. Sayyid Said is a great warrior
and also lends money to those of his people who are in
difficulties. The local birds are too fishy to be edible.
Swordfish can destroy a boat: often six large boatloads of
sardines are taken in a day. A palm tree is worth $10 and
produces dates worth $1* annually. He was there all of
August, reckoning Muscat the hottest place in the inhabited
world: it was up to 120 degrees during the day and the night
dew was ‘subtle and venomous as the cobra’s sting’. He was
back in April 1821 for the campaign against the Bani Bu Ali,
who showed more determined bravery than the British troops
had ever met. He returned in 1825 when his wife was invited
to visit the Imam’s wife, claiming to have been the first
European lady to be so honoured. The Sayyid met her at the
door, provided her with sherbet and coffee and led her to a
door with a padlock a foot long. They went upstairs to a
trapdoor with two more huge locks and two eunuchs. The
Imam’s wife spoke Hindustani and was very richly dressed
with an emerald bigger than a pigeon’s egg. The room looked
over the sea with windows alternately of pier and coloured
glass from ceiling to floor. There was a bed in the comer and
round the room a divan three inches high, covered with
carpets as fine as Kashmir, with a double row of cushions,
one of kinkobs and the other of white satin embroidered with
gold and with gold fringes and tassels.
1821 FRASER, James Baillie, Narrative of a Journey into
Khorassan, London, 1825, 5-28. He visited in July when the
nights were suffocating without any dew and the day
temperature from 80 to 102 degrees. He put the population at
10-12,000 of whom 1,000 were Indians. The Arab women
were dressed in black shrouds of silk or stuff resembling
camlet. Negro men wore ragged trousers or scanty waistband
and a turban: negresses had a blue shift from head to foot
over their trousers. The Imam’s house is not impressive—a
square with rooms opening into a small court. Everything