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!