And now we are in the much-dreaded and famous Red Sea. Dreaded it justly is on account of the terrible heat there during the summer months. A captain now on another station told me that when on this line he sometimes lost passengers (most of them invalids, probably) at the rate of one or two every day. Why the heat is so intolerable is not very clear, as the actual temperature by the thermometer is never remarkably high—nothing like so high as in many other places where heat is not much complained of. Fortunately, we are too early in the season to suffer from it, and it is scarcely so hot as before reaching Aden. The strong north-westerly breeze too, which almost always blows down the sea, meets us and refreshes us. How the navigation was ever performed before the days of steam is a marvel. One of the steamers once fell in with a sailing-ship bound from Aden to Suez, and seventy-five days out from the former place, all the crew ill or dead with heat, and only the master and one boy available for duty.
The narrowness of the sea and the dangerous coral reefs which lie on either side, and on which so many fine steamers have been stranded, make all vessels keep to one uniform course straight up the centre of it, out of sight of land on either side. Every day some huge steamer—more often there are two or three—passes with its living freight. For the first time we fully realise what a mighty highway of the world it is. Year by year the long sea-passage by the Cape to India, is less and less followed. Even troops now often take the overland route, and if ever the Suez canal is opened to vessels of large tonnage, the change will be greater still. After centuries of disuse, the old, old road from Europe to India is open again with a hundred times the traffic and importance that it ever had before.
Once only does our vessel pause. A suffering invalid, hoping in vain to reach home alive, has died during the night. In the morning the burial-service is read over the coffin wrapped in a Union-jack, and from a large port on the saloon-deck forward it is lowered gently into the sea; and after scarce five minutes’ interval, the engines throb again, and the screw revolves, and the resting-place, unknown and unmarked, is left behind.
On the sixth day from Aden we are in the gulf of Suez. To the east is a flat coast, and beyond is the range of Sinai, scarcely visible. On the west are sandstone cliffs of brilliant red and yellow contrasting exquisitely with the bright blue sky, and lighting up at sunset with the warmest and most gorgeous colours. But we are in Egypt now, and English painters as well as writers have already made the rest of our journey familiar ground, and in their presence it is becoming to be silent. Not that the sights and interests and pleasures of the homeward journey are by any means exhausted yet, or that what is still to be seen loses by comparison with what we have passed. Those who are not pressed for time may stay a week at Cairo, and taking the Southampton instead of the Marseilles route, may also stay at Malta, and during the few hours spent at Gibraltar, walk over the rock and town; and from the vessel’s deck as she proceeds see the pretty Spanish and Portuguese coasts for much of the way from thence to Cape St. Vincent.
Melbourne, King George’s Sound, Galle, Aden, Suez, the Pyramids, Alexandria, Malta, Gibraltar, Southampton Water. What a list for nine weeks’ luxurious travelling! A fresh country about once a week, a fresh continent, almost, once a fortnight!
Truly a P. & O. steamer is a wonderful institution, worthy to take a high place among the unquestionable successes of the last thirty years. Once, in Tasmania, in a remote little bay of D’Entrecasteaux’ channel, I came across a man getting his living laboriously by hewing timber in the bush. He told me he had worked in the gang which turned the first sod (or nearly the first) of the new docks in which the first P. & O. ships were cradled. One man sows and toils that another may reap. Few reap so richly, so abundantly, in these days, as those whose time and means enable them to travel on freshly made tracks to see the glory of a new world.
XV.
CHANGE OF AIR.
As travelling becomes easier all over the world, an increasing number of people who suffer from English winters are tempted to migrate annually in pursuit of sunshine and a more genial climate. Formerly fewer pleasant places were accessible, and there was comparatively little choice; and as to keep a consumptive person warm through the winter was supposed to be the one thing needful, little attention was paid to other peculiarities of climate. It is only of late years that doctors have become fully alive to the very different effects produced on invalids by much the same temperature in different places. Experience has shown that warmth is by no means the only point to be considered. People who coughed all day and all night at Nice have altogether ceased to cough when they went to Pau, where it was quite as cold. On the other hand, it was found that some people got ill at Pau who were ill nowhere else. Madeira, where it is never cold, is going out of repute as a place for consumptive patients; and to the utter astonishment of everybody, it was found that consumptive people who spent a winter in Canada not only did not die immediately but got better. Climates came to be divided into moist-relaxing, as Madeira, Pisa, and Torquay; dry-relaxing (sedative, I believe, is the correct word), as Pau; exciting, as Cannes and Nice; and so on. Doctors became more discriminating in different cases, as far as their geographical knowledge enabled them. But they have something better to do than to go about sniffing the air and observing thermometers and anemometers and hygrometers in half a dozen South-European or Devonshire watering-places. They are obliged for the most part to judge of them from the reports of the local doctors at each place, each of whom is likely to be a believer in his own particular place, and directly interested in making it popular.
And if doctors are compelled to speak with diffidence in distinguishing between European climates, what must their perplexity be when they recommend to their patients, as they often do now, and as I hope they will do more and more, a voyage to Australia? If Cannes has been confounded with Caen, is it surprising if Tasmania should be dimly believed to be one of the West India Islands? What they do know, because they can see that for themselves, is that in cases of threatening consumption, or weakness following an illness, a marvellous change for the better, and often complete cure, is the effect of a voyage round the world. How much of that is due to the sea-air and sea-life, and how much to the land-air and land-life of the Antipodes, they have seldom any means of judging; and still less can they know of the differences in climate between different places in Australasia. An invalid fellow-passenger of ours was furnished with two medical books on the climate of Melbourne, one all praises and encouragement, the other all depreciation and warning. He used to read them alternately in such proportions as to keep his mind in a just balance between hope and fear. Poor fellow! the laudatory book had to come out by itself for a long time, though I think the other appeared now and then when we had been some time in the tropics.