From the deck Sokotra looked almost too beautiful to leave.
The weather was very rough, the sailors not nearly ready, and it was midday before we started. By this time all the servants were prostrate, and my husband had to get the sailors to help him in setting up our beds, and arranging the baggage in the place between decks astern, which was 3½ feet high, and, as the beds had to be tied to each other, 2 feet apart, as well as to the sides of the ship, we had to bend low and step high when moving about. The two Somali servants managed wonderfully to take it in turns to be well after a bit, but Matthaios was one of the worst, so food was a difficulty and his wrath was great when, Mahmoud having made us tea like ink, he found the tea canister empty. We had rough weather enough, but the wind was favourable. We were always afraid of falling off our seats at meals, for we were perched anywhere, on anything we could get, round our kitchen box as a table. Bruises alone were not the cause of our terror, but the fact is that the sailors were always shaking their raiment and making those searching and successful investigations, accompanied by that unmistakable movement of the elbows and backs of the thumb-nails, which literally 'give one the creeps.'
The captain had a compass, but no other instrument of any kind, and none of the sailors seemed to know the way. They showed us islands, which we knew to be such, as the African coast, and Cape Guardafui where we knew it could not be.
On the third evening we saw the Asiatic coast, and at sunset we saw the jagged Jebel Shemshan very far away, and of course hoped to see it nearer next day. But when we woke in the morning, my husband went out to see the cause of the unusual rocking of the ship and still more unusual silence, and found everyone asleep and the ship lying to out of sight of any land.
The captain said they imagined we had passed Aden in the dark, and thinking they should soon be among rocks or coral-reefs had stopped; a dreadful uproar then arose, and everyone on the ship shouted different directions for steering. My husband desired them to steer north that we might find land, as none of them had any idea of our longitude. At last we saw a steamer, presumably from Aden, and getting north of her and steering west we at length had Africa on our port side again, and reached Aden by the following sunrise, though it took us till two o'clock to get into port.
