African and European Addresses | Page 7

Somehow the work demanded a heap of screeching, shouting, and
gesticulation; but somehow also it went forward rapidly. Dozens of
unattached natives lounged about the gunwales with apparently nothing
to do but to look picturesque. Shore boats moved into the narrow circle
of light, drifted to our gangway, and discharged huge crates of
vegetables, sacks of unknown stuffs, and returning passengers. A
vigilant police boat hovered near to settle disputes, generally with the
blade of an oar. For a long time we leaned over the rail watching them,
and the various reflected lights in the water, and the very clear,
unwavering stars. Then, the coaling finished, and the portholes once
more opened, we turned in.

IV.
SUEZ.
Some time during the night we must have started, but so gently had we
slid along it fractional speed that until I raised my head and looked out

I had not realized the fact. I saw a high sandbank. This glided
monotonously by until I grew tired of looking at it and got up.
After breakfast, however, I found that the sandbank had various
attractions all of its own. Three camels laden with stone and in convoy
of white-clad figures shuffled down the slope at a picturesque angle.
Two cowled women in black, veiled to the eyes in gauze heavily sewn
with sequins, barefooted, with massive silver anklets, watched us pass.
Hindu workmen in turban and loin-cloth furnished a picturesque note,
but did not seem to be injuring themselves by over-exertion. Naked
small boys raced us for a short distance. The banks glided by very
slowly and very evenly, the wash sucked after us like water in a slough
after a duck boat, and the sky above the yellow sand looked extremely
blue.
At short and regular intervals, half-way up the miniature sandhills,
heavy piles or snubbing-posts had been planted. For these we at first
could guess no reason. Soon, however, we had to pass another ship;
and then we saw that one of us must tie up to avoid being drawn
irresistibly by suction into collision with the other. The craft sidled by,
separated by only a few feet, so that we could look across to each
other's decks and exchange greetings. As the day grew this interest
grew likewise. Dredgers in the canal; rusty tramps flying unfamiliar
flags of strange tiny countries; big freighters, often with Greek or
Turkish characters on their sterns; small dirty steamers of suspicious
business; passenger ships like our own, returning from the tropics, with
white-clad, languid figures reclining in canvas chairs; gunboats of this
or that nation bound on mysterious affairs; once a P. & O. converted
into a troopship, from whose every available porthole, hatch, deck, and
shroud laughing, brown, English faces shouted chaff at our German
decks--all these either tied up for us, or were tied up for by us. The only
craft that received no consideration on our part were the various
picturesque Arab dhows, with their single masts and the long yards
slanting across them. Since these were very small, our suction dragged
at them cruelly. As a usual thing four vociferous figures clung
desperately to a rope passed around one of the snubbing-posts ashore,
while an old man shrieked syllables at them from the dhow itself. As

they never by any chance thought of mooring her both stem and stern,
the dhow generally changed ends rapidly, shipping considerable water
in the process. It must be very trying to get so excited in a hot climate.
The high sandbanks of the early part of the day soon dropped lower to
afford us a wider view. In its broad, general features the country was,
quite simply, the desert of Arizona over again. There were the same
high, distant, and brittle-looking mountains, fragile and pearly; the
same low, broken half-distances; the same wide sweeps; the same
wonderful changing effects of light, colour, shadow, and mirage; the
same occasional strips of green marking the watercourses and oases. As
to smaller detail, we saw many interesting divergences. In the
foreground constantly recurred the Bedouin brush shelters, each with
its picturesque figure or so in flowing robes, and its grumpy camels.
Twice we saw travelling caravans, exactly like the Bible pictures. At
one place a single burnoused Arab, leaning on his elbows, reclined full
length on the sky-line of a clean-cut sandhill. Glittering in the mirage,
half-guessed, half-seen, we made out distant little white towns with
slender palm trees. At places the water from the canal had overflowed
wide tracts of country. Here, along the shore, we saw thousands of the
water-fowl already familiar to us, as well as such strangers as gaudy
kingfishers, ibises, and rosy flamingoes.
The canal itself seemed to be in a continual state of repair. Dredgers
were everywhere; some of the ordinary shovel