“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.
CHAPTER VII
June 5.—To look down a lane in our village you might suppose that literature was about as likely there as the harpsichord. The narrow pathway (when two of us meet in it we must go sideways) is of wood, and it has white walls and a roof of steel. There are doors all along its length, and it ends at a ladder descending to the afterdeck. The doors are generally open in a friendly way, as though we had no doubt about our neighbors. Some of these doors give on comfortable little sanctuaries in white and mahogany, with blue and orange bunk curtains, electric lamps, and settles on which—should you call on a friend when he is off duty—you may hear enough to keep your own improving knowledge modest and dumb.
There are sections of surprising warmth in that steel passage. You feel no astonishment, therefore, when you come to other doors which do not admit to mahogany and bright curtains, but to the noises and dark business of the pit; you may see, down below, little figures most intent on whatever duties have to be performed about eternal fires and boilers.
Therefore literature? No, nor flower boxes. Besides, this ship and its men are as good as some books, and better than others. In the early days of the voyage I felt no desire to read. Yet one night the initial interest in the novelty of my new home wavered. There was no sound but the creaking of a piece of unseen gear and the monody of the waters. There was nothing to do, and the last word had been said. That was the time when a book would have helped. But I knew it would be useless to look for aid to the kind of books which go to sea. I recalled other voyages and their chance volumes. Easy reading! Yet to take to sea what has the comical name of “light literature,” because that is the stuff to read there, is an insult to one’s circumstances, where ignorance and light-mindedness are ever in jeopardy and may be severely handled. Anyhow, I do know that the sea converts that kind of confectionery into sodden, dismal, and unappetizing stuff.
There was nothing for it but patience. Mine had been rather a hurried departure, and, except a few geographical and other reference works, I had nothing with me but a Malay grammar, and so far the grammar had too easily repulsed my polite and insinuating advances upon it. Our ship is an extensive and busy place, managed in a way which shows an exclusive attention for the job, and so I did not betray my interest in literature till one day I saw a cadet with a likely volume. It turned out to be the Iliad, in Derby’s translation. I was so impressed that I mentioned this curious adventure to the captain.