Ḵulays

Khulays was a group of settlements and cultivated ground on the pilgrimage road north of Mecca. Visiting in January 1815, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt described scattered hamlets on a broad plain, with date palms and fields of sorghum, millet and okra. The largest settlement, Es-Souk, contained about fifty low mud houses and a street of shops. Pilgrimage caravans camped near this market, where provisions included dates, grain, rice, onions and spices.

Water gave the settlement its fertility and its vulnerability. A warm spring fed a pool and irrigation channels, but Burckhardt found the pool damaged and heard complaints that drought was harming the plantations. He also recorded an older account attributing the pool and a travellers' shelter to the Egyptian sultan Qaitbay around 1480. Khulays was a centre of the Zubayd branch of Harb, whose cultivators could also spend part of the year under tents with their livestock. Agriculture, pastoral movement and caravan provisioning met in the same small oasis economy.