We stayed two days while the sails were mended on the shore, and it was hours and hours before the anchor that was in the reef could be got up and fastened to the dry land. We did try to get out to sea again, but the north wind was raging so we could not do it, and, besides, the sailors were very unwilling to start, as a raven was sitting on the bow.
CHAPTER XXVI
MOHAMMED GOL
At Mohammed Gol, to which port our dhow next conducted us, our prospects of getting well into the interior were much brighter, and our ultimate results beyond comparison more satisfactory than they had been at Halaib. Mohammed Gol is distinctly a more lively place than Halaib, possessing more huts, more soldiers, and actually a miniature bazaar where, strange to relate, we were able to buy something we wanted.
The houses at Mohammed Gol are larger than those at Halaib, and one can stand up in some parts of nearly all of them.
The fort is surrounded by a very evil-smelling moat, and the village situated on a damp plain, white with salt. When we made a camp on shore later we went well beyond this plain.
In the summer season, when the waters of the Red Sea are low, traders come to Mohammed Gol for salt. The salterns are situated on the narrow spit of land called Ras Rowaya; consequently, the people about here are more accustomed to the sight of Europeans, and Mohammed Effendi, the governor, or mamour of the little Egyptian garrison, who is young and energetic, seems far more in touch with the world than Ismael of Halaib. He complained much of the dulness of his post, and passed his weary hours in making walking-sticks out of ibex horns, a craft he had learnt from the Bedouin of Mount Erba, who soften the horns in hot water, grease them, pull them out and flatten them with weights and polish them, using them as camel sticks. The governor gave us several of these sticks, and also presented an ibex-horn head-scratcher to me, remarking as he did so, with a polite gesture, that it was a nice thing to have by me when my head itched. He was a little and very dark man, with a pleasant, honest face, and three transverse scars across his cheeks, each about two inches long. His secretary was yet smaller, and decorated in the same way. The chief of the police was a very fat, good-humoured man, with two little perpendicular cuts beside each eye. These are tribal marks.
There was great palavering about our journey into the interior. Though several travellers had visited the Red Sea side of the massive group of Mount Erba on holidays from Sawakin in search of sport, no one had as yet been behind it, and thither we intended to go. The governor had summoned three sheikhs from the mountains, into whose hands he confided us. The day we first landed I thought I never had beheld such scowling, disagreeable faces, but afterwards we became good friends. My husband and I went ashore the second day, and sat in a sort of audience-arbour near the madrepore pier, and many maps were drawn on the ground with camel-sticks, and we were quite proud that my husband was able to settle it all with no interpreter.