My fascination with flipbooks continues. For an interesting read about Yemen just over a century ago, check out the flipbook version of Walter Harris’s travel account. This has a number of illustrations, as illustrated above.

Among his exploits, Harris obtained an interview with the Sultan of Lahj at the time. Here is his description of the trial of smoking a hubble bubble:

The hubble-bubble was a sore trial. I was gradually, under the guidance of Said, learning to inhale it; but to have constantly to fill my lungs with the strong smoke was by no means a pleasant task to a novice like myself. The inhaling, even through water, of the tobacco used in these pipes is by no means a thing one can easily accustom one’s self to, and for a long time a whiff too many will bring on giddiness. However, so attentive was the Sultan in handing me the amber mouthpiece that I stuck bravely to the task, although by the time I left I felt a sensation of incipient mal de mer in a rocking-chair or the car of a balloon. As much of the smoke seems to go to the brain as does into the lungs. What with the pipe and the hat, and the declining of Arabic irregular verbs in a dialect I scarcely knew, I was not sorry when, after an hour or so of conversation and agony, I was allowed to leave.

Nevertheless, I had enjoyed my visit to the Sultan Ali, whom I found to be a pleasant-spoken kindly old gentleman, extremely fond of showing oflF various treasures he possesses, amongst which is a unique sword of Bagdad work, said to be eight hundred years old. Through the blade is bored a hole, which the Sultan explained to me was the mark that it had taken over a hundred lives.

From the condition of the steel it might have been made yesterday, and would be quite capable of taking a hundred more.

Daniel Martin Varisco