[p.223] passed the night; we were short of fresh water, which, combined with other grievances, made us as surly as bears.  Sa’ad the Demon was especially vicious; his eyes gazed fixedly on the ground, his lips protruded till you might have held up his face by them, his mouth was garnished with bad wrinkles, and he never opened it but he grumbled out a wicked word.  He solaced himself that evening by crawling slowly on all-fours over the boy Mohammed, taking scrupulous care to place one knee upon the sleeper’s face.  The youth awoke in a fiery rage:  we all roared with laughter; and the sulky Negro, after savouring the success of his spite, grimly, as but half satisfied, rolled himself, like a hedgehog, into a ball; and, resolving to be offensive even in his forgetfulness, snored violently all night.

We slept upon the sands and arose before dawn (July 17), determined to make the Rais start in time that day.  A slip of land separated us from our haven, but the wind was foul, and by reason of rocks and shoals, we had to make a considerable detour.

It was about noon on the twelfth day after our departure from Suez, when, after slowly beating up the narrow creek leading to Yambu’ harbour, we sprang into a shore-boat and felt new life when bidding an eternal adieu to the vile “Golden Wire.”

I might have escaped much of this hardship and suffering by hiring a vessel to myself.  There would then have been a cabin to retire into at night, and shade from the sun; moreover, the voyage would have lasted five, not twelve, days.  But I wished to witness the scenes on board a pilgrim ship,-scenes so much talked of by the Moslem palmer home-returned.  Moreover, the hire was exorbitant, ranging from L40 to L50, and it would have led to a greater expenditure, as the man who can afford to take a boat must pay in proportion during his lan

[p.224] journey.  In these countries you perforce go on as you begin:  to “break one’s expenditure,” that is to say, to retrench expenses, is considered all but impossible.  We have now left the land of Egypt.

[FN#1] The reader who has travelled in the East will feel that I am not exaggerating.  And to convince those who know it only by description, I will refer them to any account of our early campaigns in Sind, where many a European soldier has been taken up stone dead after sleeping an hour or two in the morning sun. [FN#2] The Zodiacal Light on the Red Sea, and in Bombay, is far brighter than in England.  I suppose this is the “after-glow” described by Miss Martineau and other travellers:  “flashes of light like coruscations of the Aurora Borealis in pyramidal form” would exactly describe the phenomenon.  It varies, however, greatly, and often for some days together is scarcely visible. [FN#3] Niebuhr considers that the stars are brighter in Norway than in the Arabian deserts; I never saw them so bright as on the Neilgherry hills. [FN#4] Written in the days of the vans, which preceded the Railway. [FN#5]