CHAPTER VI
I was leaning on the rail of the bridge with the master, watching the brown scum, peculiar to the Red Sea, pass alongside with its not really pleasant smell, for it hints that the very deep itself is stagnant and decomposing; and I was foolish enough to tell him that to me the bearings of his excellent book of sailing directions were not only true, but magnetic. He half turned to me sharply, considered this remark and myself for a moment, and then made the noise of impatience in his throat. It was at the hour when we were passing into the Red Sea proper. The Ashrafi Islands were abeam, with Shadwán Island, the greatest of the group, the very picture in little of what this earth will be when its ichor will all have evaporated. Behind the barrier of outer islands is a labyrinth of reefs and coral patches where the signs of danger may be mistaken for the usual mirage, or an innocent and fortuitous shadow may have the obvious face of a genuine reef and thus scare a ship away on a safer course till she runs full upon the real and unannounced rocks. I mentioned to our captain that his book occasionally whispered of a few inexplicable tents to be seen on these uninhabited islands.
“Oh, tents! That’s right. A man I know got aground here,” he said, “and in half an hour his ship was surrounded by little boats. He never saw the coming of them. There they were. A year or two before the war a steamer got aground here one night, and at daybreak she was boarded by a big mob. The crew were stripped of their clothes. The Arabs were in a hurry to get the chief engineer’s ring, so they cut his finger off. Then they tried to shift a copper steam pipe. Steam was still on, and they took an ax to it. The engineer told me it did his finger a lot of good when the Arabs got down to the steam. The pressure was all right.”
Even a deep-water channel of the Red Sea may commit the crime which some think worse than murder—the betrayal and mockery of a confiding trust, of a simple faith in the pledged word, of repose in the moral order of things. A steamer, the Avocet, where the chart, the Admiralty chart, and Mr. Potter’s Pilot allowed her master to rest on the comforting knowledge of deep water, struck a rock. “Naturally the Court of Enquiry,” commented my captain, bitterly, “as much as told that man he was a liar about that rock.” Our own master exhibited the sort of displeasure which good craftsmen reserve for theorists and experts—the learned men who would debate such a subject as the Red Sea in the Law Courts of London. But even then he did not begrudge them a fair word. “But they didn’t suspend his certificate.” They sent a gunboat from Aden to search for the rock. The gunboat cruised and dragged for it for three weeks, but the rock had gone. “Got tired,” suggested my captain, “of waiting for another ship, I suppose. Went down below for a rest. The gunboat said there was no rock. And there you are, sir. That proved the Avocet’s skipper was a liar. Couldn’t be plainer. Ten months later another ship found it, though she wasn’t looking for it. It don’t do for a sailor to say a thing isn’t there because he can’t see it and has never heard of it before. Give it a margin.”
The Red Sea, I suppose, will never be a popular resort. No pleasure, as it is commonly defined, may be found where the shade temperature may rise to 110°, where rain rarely falls, where there is either no wind or a malicious stern wind, where the inclosing shores have no rivers, but only beaches of radiant sand and precipices of glowing metal, and where you are not likely to meet any folk except an occasional tribe with a bad reputation and so poor that it goes fishing on inflated sheepskins. At the lower end of that sea there are a few ports, used mainly by the pilgrims to the holy places Mecca and Medina. And indeed the Pilot does not attempt any attractive testimony. Even of such a choice subject as a small island secluded within an unfrequented gulf it is but terse, even exasperatingly brief. It will merely report of it that it “produces no vegetables, except two or three date palms and a few pumpkins. There are a few jackals, gazelles, and wild asses here. Cephalopods are abundant in the surrounding waters, and sperm whales are common.”
But is not that enough? Could you get that at Monte Carlo? What more could a traveler wish for as he looks overside at such a coast? What more does he deserve in a world which has become patterned with airdromes and oil tanks? These coasts are no more placable and are little better known than they were to the early navigators. There are large and even populous islands which great ships must pass almost every day that are still as they were when the insatiable curiosity of Marco Polo drew him to so many first views of the earth’s entertaining wonders. For there on our starboard beam, immense on a sea which moved in smooth mounds so languidly that the surface of the waters might have been filmed with silk, rose the battlements of Socotra. I think the last we heard from that island was dated 1848. Yet, the Pilot informs us, “it is said to enjoy a remarkably temperate and cool climate.” Its capital, Tamrida, is less frequently visited by Christians than Mecca. It should be worth a visit, if one had the heart for it. The town is “pleasantly situated” and its people are mixed of Arab, Indian, Negro, and Portuguese blood. The natives have an unwritten language peculiar to themselves. But we are kept out of so attractive an island because, for one thing, though it is a British possession, both monsoons appear unfeeling about that important fact concerning a land which has no harbors and no safe holding-ground for ships; in addition there is the “unfavorable character of its natives.” Is it then surprising that the literature made by tourists in these seas is mainly devoted to arabesques of places like Port Said? A day in Socotra would be worth a year with the Pyramids. And, as it happened, the southwest monsoon was waiting for us. When we had cleared the easterly point of the island it caught us, filled our decks, smashed the crockery, and at night set the mast-heads describing arcs amid the stars.