Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

Leaving the Red Sea at the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, we came to Aden, Arabia, and thence went on down along the coast of the Indian Ocean to Mombasa. The very best of our Mocha coffee is shipped from Aden to the United States. It comes here on camels from the province of Yemen, where it is raised by the natives, each family having a few bushes about its hut and producing only enough for home use and a little for trading.

There are no big plantations and no coffee factories. When ripe the berries are gathered and dried in the sun. After this they are put up in bales, and carried on camelback over the hills to this place. They are then hulled between millstones turned by hand, and winnowed and sorted for shipment. The latter work is done by the women, who look over each grain carefully, taking out the bad ones. Labour is cheap, but the coffee has to go through many hands. It has to pay toll to the chiefs of the tribes who own the country through which it is carried, so it must be sold at high prices. For this reason we have imitations of Mocha coffee from all parts of the world.

For many years this port of Aden has belonged to John Bull, who took possession of it in 1839, and later got hold of the island of Perim in the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb also. That island is about a hundred miles from Aden and the two places practically control the entrance to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. As for Aden, it is the Gibraltar of this part of the world, as well as one of the greatest of the British coaling stations. The harbour is excellent, and the outer entrance is more than three miles wide. The inner waters have been dredged so that steamers of twenty-six feet draft can go everywhere, and there is room enough for all the vessels that pass through the canal to anchor here at one time.

Aden is strongly fortified. The town, which stands on a volcanic isthmus, is guarded by a broad ditch cut out of the solid rock. It has a garrison of several thousand soldiers, guns of the latest pattern, and no one knows how many submarine mines and other defences against attack.

But no matter what its military importance, Aden is the sorriest city I have ever seen. There is nothing like it except Iquique on the nitrate coast of South America, and Iquique is a paradise compared with Aden. Imagine a great harbour of sea-green water, the shores of which rise almost abruptly into ragged mountains of brown rock and white sand. There is not a blade of grass to be seen, there are no trees, and even the cactus and sage brush of our American desert are absent. The town is without vegetation. It is as bare as the bones of the dead camels in the sandy waste behind it, and its tropical sun beats down out of a cloudless African sky. Everything is gray or a dazzling white. The houses on the sides of the hills are white, the rocks throw back the rays of the sun, and the huts upon their sides are of the same gray colour as themselves.

Each year thousands of Moslems from North and East Africa make the pilgrimage to this city of Mecca. They worship at the shrines sacred to Islam, chief among which is the Kaaba, containing the Holy Rock.

Aden is in the land of the camel, and processions of them come into the city every day, bringing coffee and gums. Eighteen miles is a day’s journey for the average freight animal, but those used for riding go much farther.

The city looks thirsty and dry. It is dry. There is only a well or so in the place, and these, I am told, the English bought of their owners for something like one million dollars. Almost all of the water used is condensed from the sea, and fresh water always brings a big price. There are no streams anywhere for miles around. The town is situated in the crater of an extinct volcano, and there is one great depression near by in which some famous stone tanks were made a thousand or so years ago. These tanks are so big that if they were cleaned out they might hold thirty million gallons of water. The water is caught when it rains, and is sometimes auctioned off to the highest bidder. The receipts go to the British Government, to which a good rain may bring in fifteen or twenty thousand dollars or more.