Fortunately we are too early for the swarm of Indian mothers who, with their tribes of spoilt and sickly children, will be setting homewards next month, before the heat begins; for seventy children is no uncommon number at that season of the year.
Five days slipped by thus pleasantly, and on Thursday morning, the 19th, at 5.30, we were lying off Aden.
I looked out of my port-hole and saw the jagged, smoke-coloured peaks of Little Aden, dull against the rosy-flushed clouds. Presently, when I could get dressed, and escape through the clouds of coal-dust, outside my deck-cabin door, I saw the yet grander and picturesque peaks of the rock mountains of Aden proper. The decks were seatless, and smeared with sand, and everything in a pitiable condition from the coaling operations. On a very dull, cloudy morning, Aden looked more than usually dreary.
C. had gone ashore to find out the latest news on the reopening of Parliament, as upon that depended whether we should continue homewards in the Peshawur, or disembark and await the Messageries' boat for the Cape, viâ Mauritius, at Aden. He returned reassured, and we gladly accepted the kind hospitality tendered to us by General Blair, the Resident.
To the passing traveller, from the deck of the P. and O., Aden presents the appearance of a small station, with some white, low-roofed buildings and military lines—utter sterility, utter desolation, exposed to the baking heat of tropical sun, reflected in tenfold intensity from the rocks around.
Yet the magnificent rough-hewn boulders of rocks piled up into mountains behind Aden have a certain stern beauty and wild grandeur of their own. It is like what one imagines Mount Sinai to be on a near approach, only darker, and more awe-inspiring—less humanly attainable.
Among the deep clefts and along the bold crags of the sky-line, you can trace strange profiles of unknown faces or the outline of an animal, and the longer you look the more distinct and life-like they become. On the sombre purple-blue colours of these mountains are reflected the glowing colours of the sunset, changing them to warm madder, brown, and pink.
There is no sign of vegetation. No green thing will grow, withered by the hot winds that blow across the sandy wastes of Arabia; but what Aden loses by living Nature, she gains from her in artificial means. The glory of the sunset and the sunrise over the Indian Ocean is unparalleled.
Again I say Aden has beauties of her own, which, like others, we had imagined very much absent. The formation of the peninsula is a very puzzling bit of geography, but the cliffs and capes formed of those loosely-bound masses of boulder, jut out strikingly and unexpectedly into the sea. Their blue-grey tints dip into the turquoise-coloured ocean, and with a strip of yellow sand, form the only three colours that can be found at Aden.
It would hardly be believed what natural signal-stations are ready to hand. The mounds, not of earth, but of rocks, seem naturally to taper into the crowning flagstaff. A grand command of the Gates of the Red Sea, the Coast of Arabia, and the Indian Ocean, has the signal-station on the summit of the highest point, 1300 feet sheer up.