"نجد الجنوبية: رحلة إلى الخرج والأفلاج والسليل ووادي الدواسر في سنة ١٩١٨." [ظ‎‎٢‎٥] (١٠٠/٥٥)

— 42 —
and draining both ways, while to the west lies the main body
of the plateau scored by countless ravines into ridges which
run down rapidly to the point where the Majma valley really
begins. From here a broad storm channel runs down to Sulaiyyil
passing on the way the ruins of a single qasr and well called
Balij a, and west of the channel lie one or two similar groups of
ruins on the courses of minor tributaries.
On May 26 after a halt of three days we resumed our march
fiist across the Majma, then over the Rimdh-covered sand
strip between it and the wadi and finally across the wadi to the
edge of the gentle slope of Southern Tuwaiq which we followed
along a well-warked road now on it and now just off it in the
wadi bed. Thus we proceeded very slightly south of due west
to the oasis of Khuthaiqan consisting of a somewhat extended
line of small palm-groves of comparatively recent planting,
two wretched little hamlets of twenty and ten houses respec
tively, several detached qasrs and two apparently purposeless
and certainly superfluous watch towers—the whole situated
on a low shelf of inferior saline soil sloping down from the edge
of Southern Tuwaiq towards the valley which had now lost
all signs of a storm channel and consisted of a rough patch of
heavy Sahkha extending to the steep escarpment of Northern
Tuwaiq about two miles distant. The population of this oasis
is not more than 100 souls all belonging to the Dhuwaiyan
subsection of Wuddain.
We were now quite close to the gap between Northern and
Southern Tuwaiq marked by the prominent headlands of Khashm
shghar on the north and Khashm al Amur on the south standing
about a mile or rather more apart, while to our left lay the palms
o Tamra up a small bay in the southern plateau, from which
descended a couple of small Shaibs into the Sabkha valley.
Turning south we followed one of the Shaibs up its course
for a mile to the oasis of Tamra itself where we camped for
two days. Tamra consists of a small belt of palm and tamarisks
extending about a half a mile along both banks of the Shaib
with two unwalled hamlets of unequal size, the larger, Al Faris,
containing perhaps some 400 inhabitants and the other, called
Shara, about 100. The population is entirely of the Amur
tribe which migrated here from the wadi a long time ago owing
to the unsuccessful prosecution of a tribal feud ; whether this
tribe is of Dawasir origin or not is a moot point among local