Suez, which is a small-sized city with several thousand Europeans, is connected by train with Port Said, and also with Cairo and other parts of Egypt. The city is about thirteen hundred miles from Aden, Arabia, and just twenty-nine hundred and nineteen miles from Mombasa, where we are to enter the Colony of Kenya and make our way by rail across country to the Great Lakes.
CHAPTER XXVI
DOWN THE RED SEA
The Red Sea is red hot! I have steamed many miles along the Equator, but this salt-water corridor leading to the Indian Ocean is much hotter. As deserts shut in the Red Sea on both sides, there are no fresh streams to cool it, and the tropical sun beats down upon the waters and sands from January to December. As a result, the temperature of the water at the surface is often one hundred degrees above zero, and it steams the air like a vast hot-water plant. The sun’s rays are bottled up by the deserts, which then act as enormous radiators. Consequently, the atmosphere is suffocating, and there seems to be only a trembling sheet of blue steel between us and the lower regions. Indeed, were it not for the electric fan in my cabin I should be unable to write. Outside upon deck we have double roofs of canvas to protect us from the sun, and many of the passengers sleep up there to escape the heat of the rooms below. Last night, in addition to the heat, we had to contend with a sandstorm, which covered our ship with red dust so fine that it got through the portholes and even into our beds. That storm came from Arabia, and may have swallowed some of the thousands of Mohammedan pilgrims on their way to Mecca.
As our ship went through this mighty cauldron we passed Jidda, in Arabia, where, according to the Mohammedans, Eve lies buried. With the ship’s glass we could almost see the place where lies the greatest grandmother of all mankind. She rests outside the city wall in a tomb four hundred feet long and a mosque rises over her dust. The Mohammedan story has it that when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden a strong west wind wafted the fairy form of Eve to Arabia, while Adam, with his heavier weight, fell down in Ceylon. There is a string of coral keys running from Ceylon to Hindustan, still known as Adam’s Bridge, over which he started out on his long hunt for Eve. It took him two hundred years to find her, and the meeting was somewhere near Mecca. What became of Adam’s bones the story does not say.
On the map, the Red Sea looks like a slit between Asia and Africa, but this slit is actually two hundred miles wide in some places and twelve hundred miles long, or nearly half the distance from Suez to Mombasa, my destination on the east coast of Africa. Much of it is so deep that if the Blue Ridge Mountains were set in it only their higher peaks would show. It is so long that if it began at Ireland and extended westward across the Atlantic, it would reach halfway to Canada. If it could be lifted up and laid down upon the United States with Suez at Philadelphia, Bab-el-Mandeb would be a hundred miles or so beyond Omaha, Nebraska, and all the way between would be a canal as wide as from New York to Washington, or wide enough to accommodate all the navies of the world abreast, and leave a hundred miles or more to spare.
This great waterway narrows almost to a point at each end. At Bab-el-Mandeb, where it leaves the Indian Ocean, it is no wider than the English Channel at Dover; at the north it is lost at the Suez Canal. Starting at Bab-el-Mandeb, the coasts broaden out and then run almost straight to the upper end, where they fork into two gulfs inclosing the lower part of the Sinai Peninsula. These two gulfs are those of Suez and Akabah. The Gulf of Suez is one hundred and seventy miles long, and has been joined to the Mediterranean by the Suez Canal. The Gulf of Akabah is one hundred and ten miles long, and for a time there was talk of making a canal from it to the Mediterranean.
The air on the Red Sea is so salty that one can almost eat eggs without seasoning. If one hundred pounds of its waters are boiled down, four pounds of salt will be found in the bottom of the kettle. The evaporation is so great that were it not for the inflow of the Indian Ocean the sea would, within less than a century, vanish in the air and leave in its place one immense block of salt.
I had expected to find the Red Sea coasts more thickly populated. There are no cities of any size and very few villages. Suez has large docks, but its trade is small, and it has nothing like the growth which men thought would come with the use of the canal.
Have you ever heard of the town of Kosseir? It is a Red Sea port on the west coast some distance south of Suez which at one time had a great trade. It was formerly the end of a caravan route from the Nile, and the Children of Israel crossed over that way and took boats for the Sinai Peninsula to reach the mountains where Moses received the Commandments.