I was leaning on the rail of the bridge with the master, watching the
brown scum, peculiar to the Red Sea, pass alongside with its not really
pleasant smell, for it hints that the very deep itself is stagnant and
decomposing; and I was foolish enough to tell him that to me the bearings
of his excellent book of sailing directions were not only true, but
magnetic. He half turned to me sharply, considered this remark and myself
for a moment, and then made the noise of impatience in his throat. It was
at the hour when we were passing into the Red Sea proper. The Ashrafi
Islands were abeam, with Shadwán Island, the greatest of the group, the
very picture in little of what this earth will be when its ichor will all
have evaporated. Behind the barrier of outer islands is a labyrinth of
reefs and coral patches where the signs of danger may be mistaken for the
usual mirage, or an innocent and fortuitous shadow may have the obvious
face of a genuine reef and thus scare a ship away on a safer course till
she runs full upon the real and unannounced rocks. I mentioned to our
captain that his book occasionally whispered of a few inexplicable tents
to be seen on these uninhabited islands.
“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.