text:  At the present day almost the whole of the south coast of Arabia fronting the Indian Ocean nearly from the head of the Persian Gulf to the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb as well as the eastern coast of Africa from Cape Guardafui to the entrance of the Mozambique Channel a seaboard approaching 4000 miles in length--is more or less subject to the Sultan of Muscat [33] a prince whose power is almost wholly maritime and whose dominions nowhere extend more than thirty or forty miles inland: while our own recent acquisition of Aden a detached point with which our communication can be maintained only by restraining the command of the sea has for the first time given an European power (excepting the Turks whose possessions in Arabia always depended on Egypt) a _locus standi_ on the shores of Yemen