CHAPTER V
We are aware—though we hardly dare to whisper our knowledge—that even our street at home will, at rare times, give us the sensational idea that we really do not know it. Can it exist in a dimension beyond our common experience? We think we glimpse it occasionally on another plane. This sense, luckily, is but fleeting. We could not support a continued apprehension of a state of being so remarkable. We come down to our beans and bacon, and are even glad to answer the bell to that and the coffee. Well, it is more remarkable of the Gulf of Suez that it permits no certain return to common sense. The coast of Africa, and its Asian opposite, remained within a few miles of our ship all day, as pellucid as things in a vacuum, but as unapproachable as what is abstract and unworldly—the memory of a dead land, though as plain as the noonday sun. There can be no shores in other seas anything like the coast of that gulf. The panorama of heights silently opened and went astern, monotonous, brilliant, and fascinating. In all those long miles there was not a tree, not a shrub, not a cloud, not a habitation. The sky was silver, the sea was pewter, and the high bergs were of graven gold or bronze. The chart informed us of Moses’ well, and of Badiat Ettih, or the Wilderness of the Wanderings, and Mount Sinai. “Moses, sir,” said the bo’sun to me, “he had enough rock for his tablets, but that was a hot job he had getting them down.” But since those early days and tribulations the land has been left to mankind but as a reminder of things gone. Nobody to-day ever lands on those beaches, on those arid islands. How could they? That we could see the contortions of the exposed strata, and the dark stains thrown by the sun from yellow bowlders on immaculate sands, was nothing. We see, in the same way, the clear magnification of another planet through a glass, but that is as near as we can get to it. There were numerous small islands between us and the shore. They were always glowing satellites of bare ore, without surf, fixed in a sea of lava, and blanched by the direct and ceaseless blaze in the heavens. Unshielded by air and cloud from that fire, they perished long ago.
Our smoke rose straight over the ship’s funnel, then curled forward, showering grits. If the hand was placed carelessly on a piece of exposed metal work one knew it. Our bo’sun, who has no expression but a disapproving stare, who never sleeps, who has the frame of a gorilla, and whose long hairy arms, bowed inward and pendent as he walks the deck, are clearly made for balance and dreadful prehensility, admitted to me that it was “warm.” Yes. The sprightly fourth engineer appeared from below as I loafed along an alleyway which had the fierce radiation of a nether corridor, and he drooped on the engine-room grating with the air of a fainting girl; he did not call it warm, but that is what he meant.
Night came, and the cabin had to be faced. The hour was made as late as possible, but it came. Reading was not easy. It would not have been easy then for a young novelist to enjoy the press cuttings assuring him of those original features of his work which distinguished it from that of Thomas Hardy. But the cabin made it no easier to do nothing, for how can one lie sleepless in a bunk and merely look at time standing still because the thermometer has frightened it? Beside me was a book the skipper had lent to me, with a hearty commendation of its merits. “Facts,” he had said to me significantly, looking at me very hard. “Facts, my dear sir!”
So it looked. It looked like nothing but facts. Who wants them? What are they for? And the coarse red cover of the book betrayed its assurance in its uncontaminated usefulness. A copy of it will never be found in any boudoir. (This is probably the first reference to it by a critic.) I lifted the weighty thing, took another look at my watch—no hope!—summoned so much of my will as had not melted, and began.
When I awoke the sun was pouring heat again. The decks were being drenched. But my cabin light was burning foolishly and the book was beside me. If already you know something of that special sort of literature which is published exclusively for use in the chart houses of ships, you will understand. And you will know, too, where R. L. Stevenson got much of the actuality which in places lights the ships and islands of The Wrecker and The Ebb Tide into startling distinction. The pilotage directions for the Pacific were volumes into which Stevenson must have often pushed off, like a happy boy in a boat, to lose himself in that bright wilderness. Yes, and if only the writers of other kinds of books but knew their work as well, could keep as close to the matter in hand, and could show their knowledge, or admit their want of it, with the brief candor and unconscious modesty of the compilers of the works published for mariners by a Mr. Potter, of the Minories, London! I hope that some day I may be able to enter Mr. Potter’s shop, where books are published in so unlikely a place as Aldgate, which is Whitechapel way, and press Mr. Potter’s hand in silent gratitude, for I am sure there is no phenomenon in nature, not even an exhibition of human gratitude, which would astonish him, or move him indeed to anything more than a perfectly just comment in words not exceeding two syllables each.
I will make no secret of the book which put away the heat for me, and abolished time—for I do not remember looking at the time after 1.30 A.M., when I was still far from sleep, and had been reading steadily for hours. Yet this book no more resembled a best-seller than a chronometer resembles the lovely object out of a prize packet. Its name is The Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Pilot—the seventh edition, we may gladly learn of so respectable an exhibition of prose. Its price, I noticed, proved that the truth—or as near to the truth as one should expect to attain—is no more, is really no more, than the price of more doubtful commodities. And let us remember that it is all very well for wise pilots in other and darker seas to assume they may teach young voyagers the right ways in the deceptive and fog-bound coasts of philosophy. Philosophy? That is easy. We may make our charts, then, according to inspiration or desire. But when it comes to advising a mariner where he may venture with a valuable ship, according to her draught, then it is essential that words should be chosen with care, and the student warned to note with unusual caution every qualitative parenthesis. There can be no casual and friendly agreement to differ about the truth when the question concerned is a coral reef in five fathoms and a ship drawing thirty feet. One must be able to assure a sailor either that his ship can do it, or he must be told that he may not try. Yet with what confidence each of us will venture to pilot others in the more dangerous, the more alluring, and the supremely frustrating elements of morality and æsthetics!
My bed book made no attempt to beguile me. It opened with the simple statement that its purpose was to give “Directions for the navigation of the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez, and the central track for steam vessels through the Red Sea, Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, and the Gulf of Aden; also descriptions of the Gulf of Akaba, the African and Arabian shores of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the southeastern coast of Arabia to Ras-al-Hadd, the coast of Africa from Siyan to Ras Asir, including the Gulf of Tajura, then to Ras Hafun, Abd-al-Kuri, the Brothers, and Socotra Island.”
And Socotra Island! We know the South Pole better than that island, although from prehistoric times every maker of specifics has depended on Socotran aloes. After this simple avowal the book informs its reader that “all its bearings are true, and in degrees measured clockwise from 0° to 360°.” Dare we ever ask for more than that? Here was a book which actually declared that its bearings were true and were not magnetic. No work could be more frank. It relied entirely on its reader being a man of honor, of common sense, of skill in his craft, and of a desire so simple that his only care was the safety of the lives and the property of others. Yet such is the force of habit, which sends us to a book to look, not for the life we know, but for the glory of its falsification, that at first I was inclined to put the captain’s volume aside and trust to boredom and the whirring of the electric fan to send me to sleep. But something prevented that.
Here I was, in these very waters; and their uninhabited islands, beaches, and reefs, which had been passing us all that day, were altogether too insistent. These Arabian and African gulfs have more coral to the square mile than any other seas in the world, so, although their shores, during all a day’s run, may be rainless and dead, the waters are more alive than the most fertile of earth’s fields. Sometimes, when listlessly gazing overside, one was shocked by the sight of a monstrous shape dim in the fathoms. And one evening when the very waves, as though subdued by the heat, moved languidly in hyaline mounds, several black fins began to score their polish. A few dark bodies then partly emerged, gliding and progressing in long, leisurely arcs. As soon as those dolphins saw us they woke up. They began leaping eagerly toward us in the direction of our bows, as though the sight of our ship had overjoyed them. They behaved deliriously, like excited children released from school at that moment. Now, we were used to a small family of these creatures so greeting us. They would amuse themselves for ten minutes by revolving round one another immediately before the ship’s stem, weaving intricate evolutions in the clear water so close to our iron nose that one looked for them to be sheared apart. They were so plain that it was easy to see the crescent-shaped valve of the nose, or blowhole, open whenever a head cleared the water. But the exhibition this evening was phenomenal. Thousands of them—yes, thousands, for I will imitate the Pilot—as though they had had word of us, appeared at once, throwing themselves in parabolas toward us, and when alongside breaching straight up, perhaps because their usual curved leap did not take them high enough, and they intended at all costs to get a view of our amusing deck. The level sun signaled from the varnish of their bodies. One of these little whales moved for some time below me, turning up an eye now and then in the way of a swimmer who converses with his friend in the boat. He rolled over lazily, went down, and dissolved in the mystery under us. When I looked up the sea was vacant. Dolphins might never have been created.
This sea was so plainly the setting for legend and fable. Crusoe and Sinbad both would be at home here. I should guess, however, from what we saw of the coast and the islands, that this was more the world of Sinbad than of any level-headed adventurer. Djinns might be looked for in those desolate gorges into which we had glimpses. It would be wrong to pretend that the Pilot ever mentioned such things by name, but now and then I suspected in the text fair substitutes for such infernal and maleficent powers. The Pilot would check the reader going easily through its pages with an unexpected caution: “The coast from Ras Mingi northwards to Ras Jibeh, a distance of 330 miles, is mainly inhabited by the Jemeba tribe, who generally have a bad character.”
But the faithful Pilot would allow no harsh judgment on the Jemebas. We ourselves might develop a similar bearing toward visitors who appeared to be unduly prosperous if we were as poor as the Jemebas, had no boats, and had to “depend on inflated sheepskins” for our “fishing operations.” Of certain channels we were advised not to attempt them “unless the sun is astern of the ship and a good lookout is kept.” The reefs in this sea do not behave like reefs. They are numberless, but they are rarely marked by so much as a ripple; and that, I can vouch, is true. Their fatal presence may be revealed on a lucky day by a change in the color of the water. For those seamen who are not fortunate when watching for the water to change color the Pilot gives advice on what may happen when boats must be beached and help sought. The beach “was formerly inhabited, and remains of dwellings are still to be seen.”