Chapter 23
COASTING ALONG THE RED SEA
In the winter of 1895, though we still wished to continue our investigations in Arabia, we found it impracticable, owing to the warlike state of the tribes there, so we decided to turn our attention to the other side of the Red Sea, and travel once more in Africa.
Parts of Africa have to be discovered and other parts rediscovered. Each little war and each little journey contributes to the accomplishment of both these ends with surprising rapidity, but the geographical millennium is looming in the distance when the traveller will no longer require his sextant and theodolite, but will take his spade and pruning-hook to cultivate the land this generation is so busy in discovering.
That winter we added a few square miles to a blank corner of the map where re-discovery was necessary, and where re-discovery will go on apace and produce most interesting results, when we have finished conquering the barbarous followers of the Khalifa, and restore law and order to that wide portion of Africa known as the Eastern Soudan; for the Soudan, meaning in Arabic 'the country of the blacks,' really extends from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Little did we think when we started to explore the western shores of the Red Sea that the explosion with the Dervishes was so near, otherwise I think we should have turned our steps in another direction.
We had with us Mr. Alfred Cholmley, who took numbers of beautiful photographs, and Lieutenant, now Captain, N. M. Smyth, D.S.O., Queen's Bays, kindly attached to our expedition by Colonel Sir F. Wingate, and to his exertions we owe the map.
My husband had always thought it foolish to engage an interpreter unknown to him, on his own responsibility, and would only have one recommended by the official of our Government. The choice made for us on this occasion was not at all successful. He tried to make out that he was the principal leader of the party, and his impedimenta far exceeded ours. He may or may not have been sent to keep us from going more than ten miles from the coast, but no explorer would wish to remain within the limits set down in the Admiralty Chart. My husband found it necessary to dispense with his services when we were at Mersa Halaib, and we got on far better without him.
Our first task was to choose a ship; it was exciting work rowing about in the harbour of Suez in order to find one that would suit us.
A letter from our interpreter had told us we could have one at 120_l._ a month, a sum which our great experience of sailing-boats told us was quite too large. When we started our search, having refused this, we were only shown wretched boats in which we could hardly sit and certainly not stand. We espied one we thought would do, and said nothing at that time, but afterwards my husband and Matthaios went off by themselves and engaged her for 35_l._ a month, and I do not think that a better ship was to be found in Suez--certainly there was none worth 120_l._
Our boat was an Arab dhow of 80 tons, named the _Taisir_; we at once put her in the hands of a carpenter, who boarded off two cabins for us four whites, in the big, open stern cabin, leaving a sort of verandah in front of them, about 8 feet in depth, where we lived by day. Campbell Bey, who lives at Terre Pleine, pronounced by the English Terry Plain, kindly lent us two water-tanks containing half a ton each.
We embarked late on Christmas night, and by the murky light of lanterns the ship looked most dreary and uninviting; but when we had furnished it, by laying down our tent carpet and beds and hanging sheets of coloured calico over the gaping boards of our walls, and had put up the cabin bags, we were quite snug. We always had to close in our verandah with a sail at night, for when the ship swung round at anchor we were exposed to the north wind.
Our captain, Reis Hamaya, turned out an excellent fellow, as also did the seventeen sailors he had under him; and though at times they would quarrel loudly enough amongst themselves, the only points of discord which arose between them and us always had reference to the length of time they wished to stop in harbour and the length of distance they wished to go in a day. Ill-fed, dirty, unkempt men as our sailors were, we got to like them all, from the elderly dignified Mohammed, who thought he knew more about navigation than the captain, to Ahmet Faraj, the buffoon who played the tom-tom and made everybody laugh; this worthy individual was the recognised leader of all the festivities with which they regaled us from time to time, consisting of very ugly songs and a yet uglier dance, the chief art in which consisted in wagging their elastic tails with an energy which mortals further removed from monkey origin could never hope to approach.
We travelled all the first night, but the second we anchored near Safaia Island, and the third at a place called Sheikh Ganem, in front of the Ashrafi Light, and the fourth day found us at Kosseir, which means 'little castle.' The Government steamer _Abbas_, which had started one day after us and gone straight down 'outside', had only got in two hours before us, and we had been 'inside', through the reefs, and stopped all night, so we thought we had not done badly.
We stayed two nights in the harbour to make our final victualling arrangements. Kosseir, our last really civilised point, is now a wretched place, though twice in its existence it has been of importance, owing to its road connection with Keneh on the Nile. Five miles to the north of the present town are the ruins of the old Ptolemaic one, Myos Hormos (Kosseir Kadim), where the Red Sea fleets in ancient days assembled to start for India; twenty years ago it was a favourite point for the departure of pilgrims for Mecca, and the P. and O. had offices there, which are now turned into camel-stables. Kosseir is waiting for a railway before it can again recoup its fortunes.
There are two mosques of pretty architecture, with courses of dark red stone from Keneh, and white Kosseir limestone; there are also diaper and fretwork patterns; the pillars are similarly decorated and are quaint and picturesque. The tombs of the Ababdeh sheikhs have melon-shaped domes, and there are endless dovecotes, chiefly made of broken old amphoræ built into walls.
Along the whole coast-line from Kosseir to Sawakin one may say that there are no permanent places of residence, if we except the tiny Egyptian military stations, with their fort and huts for the soldiers, at Halaib, Mohammed Gol, and Darour; it is practically desert all the way, and is only visited by the nomad Ababdeh and Bisharin tribes, when, after the rains, they can obtain there a scanty pasturage for their flocks. During the Ptolemaic and early Arab periods the condition of affairs was very different; several considerable towns stood on this coast, now marked only by heaps of sand and a few fallen walls. In spite of its aridity, this coast has a wonderful charm of its own; its lofty, deeply serrated mountains are a perpetual joy to look upon, and the sunset effects were unspeakably glorious, rich in every conceivable colour, and throwing out the sharp outline of the pointed peaks against the crimson sky.
The nature of this coast-line is singularly uniform, and offers tremendous obstacles to navigation, owing to the great belt of coral reefs along it, through which the passage was often barely wide enough for our dhow to pass, and against which on more than one occasion we came in unpleasant contact. The bay of Berenice, for example, was for this reason known in ancient times as akathartos kolpos, and is still known as 'Foul Bay'; it can only be navigated with the greatest care by native pilots accustomed to the various aspects of the water, which in many places only just covers the treacherous reefs. All boats are obliged to anchor during the night either just inside the reefs or in the numerous coves along the coast, which are caused by the percolations of fresh water through the sandbeds of rivers into the sea, and these prevent the coral insect from erecting its continuous wall.
The rapidly succeeding little harbours formed in the coral reef are called _mersa_, or anchorage, by the Arabs, from _mersat_, anchor.
Sometimes when the coral reef rises above the surface low islets have been formed, with sandy surface and a scant marine vegetation. By one of these, named Siyal, we were anchored for a night, and on landing we found it about three miles in length, some 50 feet in width, and never more than 4 feet above the surface of the sea. On its eastern side the shore was strewn with cinders from the numerous steamers which ply the Red Sea, and quantities of straw cases for bottles, out of which the ospreys, which live here in large numbers, have built their nests. Turtles revel in the sand, and corals of lovely colours line the beach, and at one extremity of the islet we found the remains of a holy sheikh's hut, with his grave hard by. Many such holy men dwell on promontories and on remote island rocks along this coast in sanctified seclusion, and they are regularly supported by the Bedouin and pearl-fishers, who bring them food and water, neither of which commodities is to be found in such localities. Our sailors on New Year's Eve took a handsome present of bread and candles, presented to them by us, to a holy man who dwelt on the extreme point of Ras Bernas, and had a long gossip with him concerning what boats had passed that way and the prospects of trade--_i.e._ the slave trade--in these desert regions. They burnt incense before his shrine, and the captain devoutly said his evening prayer, whilst he of the tom-tom, Ahmet Faraj, stood behind and mimicked him, to the great amusement of his fellows--a piece of irreverence I have never seen before in any Mohammedan country. Still I think our sailors were as a whole religious; they observed their fasts and prayers most regularly during Ramazan, and their only idea of time was regulated by the five prayers. 'We shall start to-morrow at "God is great," and anchor at the evening prayer,' and so forth, they used to say.
It is difficult to estimate how far these coral reefs have changed since ancient days; there is a lagoon at Berenice which looks as if it had been the ancient harbour with a fort at its extremity. Now there are scarcely two feet of water over the bar across its mouth; but all ancient accounts bear testimony to a similar difficulty of navigation down this coast. At the same time, it is manifest that this coast-line is just the one to have tempted on the early mariners from point to point, with its rapid succession of tiny harbours and its reefs protecting it from heavy seas. More especially must this have been the case when the boats were propelled by oars, and in one's mind's eye one can picture the fleets of the Egyptian Queen Hatasou and of King Solomon from Eziongeber creeping cautiously along this coast and returning after three years' absence in far distant regions laden with precious freights of gold, frankincense, and spices. In later days Strabo and Pliny tell us how flotillas of 120 ships proceeded from Myos Hormos to Okelis in thirty days on their way to India, going together for fear of the pirates who marauded this coast, and in those days the settlements on the Red Sea must have presented a far livelier aspect than they do now.
On both shores we find a curious instance of the migration and adaptation of an entirely foreign kind of boat. Some Arabs who have lived in Singapore--and Singapore is as favourite a point for Arab emigration as America is for the Irish--introduced 'dug-outs' in their native harbours, and these have been found so useful in sailing over the shallow coral reefs in search of pearls, that they now swarm in every Red Sea port, and steamer-loads of 'dug-outs' are brought from the Malay peninsula. The Arabs call them 'houris'--why, I cannot think--for a more uncomfortable thing to sit in, when half full of water in a rolling surf, I never found elsewhere, except on a South-East African river.
At the present moment the coast below Ras Bernas and above Sawakin is the hot-bed of the slave trade, carried on between the Dervishes of the Nile Valley and Arabia. Regular Egyptian coastguard boats keep matters pretty clear north of Ras Bernas, and we can testify to their activity, for we ourselves were boarded and searched by one; but south of this, before the influence of Sawakin is reached, there is a long stretch of country where the traffic in human flesh can be carried on undisturbed. Troops of slaves are sent down from the Nile valley to the Dervish country at certain seasons of the year, and the petty sheikhs along the coast, owing a doubtful allegiance to the Egyptian Government, connive at this transport; and the pearl-fishing craft which ply their trade amongst the coral reefs are always ready to carry the slaves across to the opposite coast, where the markets of Yembo, Jeddah, and Hodeida are open to them. This will, of course, be the case until the Dervish power is crushed, and the Soudan opened out for more legitimate trade. As we sailed along we passed hundreds of these pearl-fishing boats engaged in this dual trade, and nothing could be more propitious for their pursuits than the absolutely lawless condition of the tribes by the coast. At Berenice, for instance, there are absolutely no government or inhabitants of any sort. Nominally, one of our Nile frontier subsidised sheikhs, Beshir Bey Gabran, of Assouan, has authority over all the country between the Nile and the Red Sea, but the coast has been visited more frequently by Dervish emirs than by Beshir Bey. One Nasrai, a Dervish emir, is said to have resided in the mountains behind Berenice for some time past, and, with a small following, collects tithes of cattle from the nomads and sees to the safe conduct of slave caravans. The collecting of _yusur_, or black coral, as they call it, a fossilised vegetable growth, is a third trade in which these boats are employed. From this pipes are made, and beads, and the black veneer for inlaying tables.
The navigation of an Arab dhow is no easy task, with its clumsy arrangements for sails, when there is a strong north wind behind it and reefs in every direction. Three men are perpetually in the bows on the look out for rocks, and indicate the presence of danger to the steersman by raising their hands. The gear of these boats is exceedingly primitive. They do not understand reefing a sail, hence they are obliged to have no less than five different sizes, which they are constantly changing as occasion requires. They use a clumsy cogwheel for raising and lowering the sails, and do it all by main force, singing silly little distiches and screaming at the top of their voices as they haul the ropes. The arrangement for baling out the bilge water is extremely laborious. A large trough, with channels on either side, is erected in the centre of the boat, into the middle of which the water is baled by skins from below, and the stenches during the process are truly awful, as the water flows out of either channel, according to the roll of the ship. There was always a large surface of wet wood to dry up.
Leaving Kosseir on the last day of 1895, we reached Ras Bernas on the second day of 1896, stopping, of course, each night, always rolling and tossing about, and always keeping a sharp look out for coral reefs, the watchers shouting advice continually to Reis Hamaya.
We were supposed to owe our safety in getting through some dangerous reefs, with not a yard to spare on either side, and escaping our other difficulties, to the lucky fact of Reis Hamaya's having discovered amongst the plants that my husband had collected in our walks ashore one of the order of _Compositæ_, which he pounced on gladly and hung on the bow of the _Taisir_, as a protection to us.
He pointed out another thing, a shrub called _tuldum_, with tiny yellow flowers on green stalks, good to tie round the arm to make one see far.
Ras Bernas is a long, wandering cape composed of rocky hills of ironstone and silicate curiously blended together, with shoals and rocks, and coral reefs, and sandbanks hanging on to it in very shallow water. It is about twenty-five miles long, and ends in a sandy spit.
We encamped at the head of the lagoon, and spent several days amongst the ruins of this old Ptolemaic town of Berenice, and made sundry excavations there. In its centre is an old temple of the date of Tiberius Cæsar, the hieroglyphs in which are rapidly becoming obliterated. All around is a sea of mounds covered with sand, where the houses stood, mostly built of madrepore, and laid out in streets. On the surface are to be found numerous glass beads, Roman coins, bracelets, &c. and a great number of fragments of rough emeralds. From the celebrated emerald-mines in the mountain behind we picked up fully fifty of these, besides a large quantity of olivines or peridots, cornelians, and crystals, testifying to the wealth of these parts in precious stones in ancient days.
A few startled Ababdeh nomads came to visit us; at first they only inspected us at a distance, but gradually gained courage and came to our camp, and we were able to purchase from them two lambs to replenish our larder.
With its emerald-mines, its harbour, and its great road terminus Berenice must have been one of the most important trade centres of the Red Sea; though, judging from the plans of the streets we made out, the town cannot have been a very large one. In digging we turned up immense quantities of textiles in scraps, fine and coarse, nets, knitted work, as well as weaving, plain and in colours, and bits of papyrus in Greek cursive hand. The wretched Ababdeh tribes were constantly at war with one another, and the Dervish Khalifa could make his authority felt about here with a small handful of resolute men judiciously placed. Nasrai had, I believe, done this for some time past with only thirty men.
The nights here were very cold, the thermometer going down to 46° F. There were a few gazelles about, but we saw no other animals.
The Bedouin brought us large shell-fish in those great shells we see polished at home. When boiled the fish comes out. It is in shape like a camel's foot, and they call it ghemel. In taste it is like lobster and oyster combined, but as tough as pin-wire.
We had a great tossing for three days after leaving Berenice, and stopping every night.