Free Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger

Gallus, prefect of Egypt, to conquer the lands where this priceless gum originated. The army marched southwards for nine hundred miles, but lack of water eventually forced it to retire. This was the only time any European power had ever tried to invade Arabia.
    As I entered the town of Salala I passed a small caravan, two men with four camels tied head to tail, and when I questioned the guard who was with me he said that these camels were carrying
mughur,
or frankincense. Today, however, the trade is small and of little value, hardly more important in the market at Salala than the buying and selling of goats and firewood.
    My attention was caught by the men who led the camels. They were small and wiry, about five feet four inches in height, and were dressed in a length of dark-blue cloth wound round their waists, with an end thrown over one shoulder; the indigo had run out from the cloth and smeared their chests and arms. They were bare-headed, and their hair was long and untidy. Both of them wore daggers and carried rifles. My guard said that they were Bedu from beyond the mountains and that they belonged to the Bait Kathir. In the market-place were more of them, while others waited outside the palace gates. They reminded me of the tribesmen whom I had seen recently at Dhala on the Yemen border, and seemed very different to the Arabs from the great Bedu tribes I had met in Syria and the Najd.
    The palace gates were guarded by armed men dressed in long Arab shirts and head-cloths. Some of them were from Oman and the rest were slaves; none were local tribesmen. One of them took me into the reception hall, where I met the Wali. He was a townsman from Oman, large and portly. He was dressed in a white shirt reaching to the ground, a brown cloak, embroidered with gold, and a Kashmiri shawl which was loosely wrapped round his head. He wore a large curved dagger at the middle of his stomach. I greeted him in Arabic, and before we started our discussion I ate a few dates and drank three cups of bitter black coffee handed to me by one of his retainers.
    The Wali told me that he had been instructed by the Sultan to collect a party of Bedu with camels to take me to Mughshin. He said that he had arranged for forty-five Bedu to go with me and that now he would send messengers into the desert to fetch them. I thanked him, but suggested that forty-five were far more than I needed, and that a dozen would be quiteenough. I knew that the British Consul in Muscat, when he got permission for me to do this journey, had agreed with the Sultan that the size of the party should be fixed by the Wali, and that I was to pay the equivalent of ten shillings a day to each man who went with me. I realized that everyone here regarded my journey as a heaven-sent opportunity to enrich himself, and that they would all try to make my party as large as possible. The Wali now insisted that, as there was a serious risk of my meeting raiders, he could not take the responsibility of allowing me to go to Mughshin with fewer than forty-five men, and that the Bedu themselves would not agree to go with a smaller party. I knew there had been raiding near Mughshin when Bertram Thomas went there in 1929, but as he was the only European who had ever crossed the Qarra mountains, which I had seen that morning six or eight miles beyond the camp, I was completely ignorant of what conditions were now like in the desert beyond. Eventually, after several meetings with the Wali I agreed to take thirty Arabs. The Wali told me they would be from the Bait Kathir tribe, and added that they would be ready to start in a fortnight.
    I arranged to spend this time travelling in the Qarra mountains, which had been explored by Theodore and Mabel Bent in 1895 and by Bertram Thomas in 1929. The Wali said that he would send four of his retainers with me, two Omanis and two slaves, and that we should have to hire camels from the Qarra, who live in the mountains, changing them every time we crossed