The shrub itself is a picturesque one, with a leaf not unlike an ash, only stiffer; it has a tiny green flower, not red like the Sokotra flowers, and a scaly bark. In all there are three districts in the Gara mountains where the tree still grows; anciently, no doubt, it was found in much larger quantities, but the demand for frankincense is now so very limited that they take no care whatever of the trees. They only tap the most promising ones, and those that grow farther west in the Mahri country, as they produce an inferior quality, are not now tapped at all.
The best is obtained at spots called Hoye and Haski, about four days' journey inland from Merbat, where the Gara mountains slope down into the Nejd desert. The second in quality comes from near Cape Risout, and also a little farther west, at a place called Chisen, near Rakhiout, frankincense of a marketable quality is obtained, but that farther west in the Mahri country is not collected now, being much inferior. The best quality they call _leban lakt_, and the second quality _leban resimi_, and about 9,000 cwt. are exported yearly and sent to Bombay. It is only collected in the hot weather, before the rains begin and when the gum flows freely, in the months of March, April, and May, for during the rains the tracks on the Gara mountains are impassable. The trees belong to the various families of the Gara tribe; each tree is marked and known to its owner, and the product is sold wholesale to Banyan merchants, who come to Dhofar just before the monsoons to take it away.
One must imagine that when this industry was at its height, in the days when frankincense was valued not only for temple ritual but for domestic use, the trade in these mountains must have been very active, and the cunning old Sabæan merchants, who liked to keep the monopoly of this drug, told wonderful stories of the phoenix which guarded the trees, of the insalubrity of the climate and of the deadly vapours which came from them when punctured for the gum. Needless to say, these were all false commercial inventions, which apparently succeeded admirably, for the old classical authors were exceedingly vague as to the localities whence frankincense came. Merchants came in their ships to the port of Moscha, which we shall presently visit, to get cargoes of the drug, but they probably knew as little as we did of the interior of the hills behind, and one of the reasons why Aelius Gallus was sent to Arabia by Augustus on his unsuccessful campaign was 'to discover where Arabian gold and frankincense came from.'