DOWN THE RED SEA
The Red Sea is red hot! I have steamed many miles along the Equator, but
this salt-water corridor leading to the Indian Ocean is much hotter. As
deserts shut in the Red Sea on both sides, there are no fresh streams
to cool it, and the tropical sun beats down upon the waters and sands
from January to December. As a result, the temperature of the water
at the surface is often one hundred degrees above zero, and it steams
the air like a vast hot-water plant. The sun’s rays are bottled up by
the deserts, which then act as enormous radiators. Consequently, the
atmosphere is suffocating, and there seems to be only a trembling sheet
of blue steel between us and the lower regions. Indeed, were it not for
the electric fan in my cabin I should be unable to write. Outside upon
deck we have double roofs of canvas to protect us from the sun, and many
of the passengers sleep up there to escape the heat of the rooms below.
Last night, in addition to the heat, we had to contend with a sandstorm,
which covered our ship with red dust so fine that it got through the
portholes and even into our beds. That storm came from Arabia, and may
have swallowed some of the thousands of Mohammedan pilgrims on their way
to Mecca.
As our ship went through this mighty cauldron we passed Jidda, in Arabia,
where, according to the Mohammedans, Eve lies buried. With the ship’s
glass we could almost see the place where lies the greatest grandmother
of all mankind. She rests outside the city wall in a tomb four hundred
feet long and a mosque rises over her dust. The Mohammedan story has it
that when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden a strong
west wind wafted the fairy form of Eve to Arabia, while Adam, with his
heavier weight, fell down in Ceylon. There is a string of coral keys
running from Ceylon to Hindustan, still known as Adam’s Bridge, over
which he started out on his long hunt for Eve. It took him two hundred
years to find her, and the meeting was somewhere near Mecca. What became
of Adam’s bones the story does not say.
On the map, the Red Sea looks like a slit between Asia and Africa, but
this slit is actually two hundred miles wide in some places and twelve
hundred miles long, or nearly half the distance from Suez to Mombasa, my
destination on the east coast of Africa. Much of it is so deep that if
the Blue Ridge Mountains were set in it only their higher peaks would
show. It is so long that if it began at Ireland and extended westward
across the Atlantic, it would reach halfway to Canada. If it could be
lifted up and laid down upon the United States with Suez at Philadelphia,
Bab-el-Mandeb would be a hundred miles or so beyond Omaha, Nebraska,
and all the way between would be a canal as wide as from New York to
Washington, or wide enough to accommodate all the navies of the world
abreast, and leave a hundred miles or more to spare.
This great waterway narrows almost to a point at each end. At
Bab-el-Mandeb, where it leaves the Indian Ocean, it is no wider than
the English Channel at Dover; at the north it is lost at the Suez Canal.
Starting at Bab-el-Mandeb, the coasts broaden out and then run almost
straight to the upper end, where they fork into two gulfs inclosing the
lower part of the Sinai Peninsula. These two gulfs are those of Suez and
Akabah. The Gulf of Suez is one hundred and seventy miles long, and has
been joined to the Mediterranean by the Suez Canal. The Gulf of Akabah is
one hundred and ten miles long, and for a time there was talk of making a
canal from it to the Mediterranean.
The air on the Red Sea is so salty that one can almost eat eggs without
seasoning. If one hundred pounds of its waters are boiled down, four
pounds of salt will be found in the bottom of the kettle. The evaporation
is so great that were it not for the inflow of the Indian Ocean the sea
would, within less than a century, vanish in the air and leave in its
place one immense block of salt.
I had expected to find the Red Sea coasts more thickly populated. There
are no cities of any size and very few villages. Suez has large docks,
but its trade is small, and it has nothing like the growth which men
thought would come with the use of the canal.
Have you ever heard of the town of Kosseir? It is a Red Sea port on the
west coast some distance south of Suez which at one time had a great
trade. It was formerly the end of a caravan route from the Nile, and the
Children of Israel crossed over that way and took boats for the Sinai
Peninsula to reach the mountains where Moses received the Commandments.
To-day Kosseir is a stopping place for Egyptian pilgrims on their way to
Jidda. It used to be much more important in that respect than now. It
had many inns and hotel tents outside, and was well supplied with dancing
girls and the other side-show features of a true pilgrimage centre. Then
the Suez Canal came and killed it. Its big houses fallen to ruins, the
port has become a village of one-story huts. There are emerald mines near
it, however, and the desert about shows evidences of having been once
worked for gold.
I regret that I was not able to stop at Jidda, the port of Mecca, to
which I have already referred. It is one of the most interesting places
on the Red Sea, for one hundred thousand or more pilgrims pass through
it every year. While at Omdurman, in the Sudan, I saw something like
fourteen hundred Mohammedans on their way by railroad across the Nubian
Desert to Port Sudan where they expected to get a ship for Jidda. Some of
them had been ten years on the way, yet their religious enthusiasm had
not waned. They had started out upon camels from the borders of Timbuktu
and had been forced to sell their mounts to buy food. After that they had
walked from oasis to oasis earning enough money to carry them onward.
There were so many in the party that the British government officials had
to divide them up into batches and send on a trainload or so at a time.
In the centuries since the worship of Mohammed began millions of pilgrims
have walked over the sixty-five miles of hot sand from Jidda to Mecca.
Worshippers go thither from all parts of North Africa and from the
eastern coast of the Mediterranean as well as from India and southern
Arabia. Jidda takes her toll from each of them. The people live by
fleecing the devotees. The town, though full of hotels, is noted for its
discomforts. It has a poor water supply and after each big rain there is
an epidemic of fever.
The projected railroad from Jidda to Mecca will probably pay well, for
the travel is enormous. Twenty-five years ago more than sixty thousand
Mohammedans came annually by sea to make their way over the sands to
Mecca and Medina. There are perhaps half again as many more to-day, and
the railroad will so reduce the cost of the trip that the number of
worshippers will be greatly increased. Indeed, the day may come when some
Mohammedan tourist agent will be selling to pilgrims from all parts of
the Moslem world round-trip tickets to the birthplace of the Prophet,
including admission to the Kaaba.
With Mecca accessible by railroad there may be a chance for Christians to
visit the holy city of Islam. All who have been there in the past have
had to go in disguise, and the man who would attempt it to-day takes his
life in his hand. The railroad will be officered by Mohammedans, and it
is doubtful whether they will take Christians as passengers. They will
have to cater to the pilgrims, as it is from them that their traffic must
come.
Meantime, without wishing to act as did the fox who called the grapes
sour, I do not believe there is much to see in Mecca, after all. The town
lies in a hot, arid valley watered for most of the year by a few brackish
wells and some cisterns. The best water, which comes in from Arafat
through a little aqueduct, is sold at high prices by a water trust at the
head of which is the governor of the city.
Mecca, I am told, has only about fifty thousand inhabitants. It fills the
valley and runs up the sides of the hills. The houses are of dark stone,
built in one, two, and three stories overhanging close to the streets.
There are no pavements; it is often dusty, and one would have to feel all
the holiness of the surroundings to make life agreeable for him in such
an unattractive spot.
The most important place in Mecca is the sacred mosque and the most
important thing in the mosque is the Kaaba, a cube-shaped stone building
which stands in its centre. In the southeast corner of this building,
at about five feet from the ground, is the black meteorite that the
Mohammedans say was once a part of the Gates of Paradise. When Adam was
cast out, this stone fell with him, dropping down near Mecca. At that
time, they say, it was a beautiful white colour, but it is now turned to
jet, having been blackened by the kisses of sinners. Every pilgrim who
comes to Mecca presses his lips to it again and again, imagining that as
he does so his sins go out of him into the stone, and his soul becomes
as pure as it was when he was a baby. There are several hundred thousand
pilgrims who perform this act every season, so that the holy stone of the
Kaaba gets its millions of kisses each year. What a load of sin it must
carry!